During his appeals to the Waco City Council last week, longtime civic leader Kenneth Moerbe, the co-chairman of a city-charged poverty solution group, recalled a sign that someone — quite possibly then-Caritas of Waco executive director Eugene Jud — erected at the food bank years ago. It read: “Poverty costs everyone.” That old adage remains true today and, to their credit, our city leaders are realizing it more and more.

On Tuesday, the city council took the key step of embracing the idea of a 10-year plan to fight our city’s chronic scourge of poverty, a problem that has infected Waco even when the rest of our nation has boomed. In doing so, it acknowledges a problem that shouldn’t be confused with homelessness, which is far more quantifiable.

With poverty, we’re not talking about people with no place to live, nothing to eat. We’re talking about what U.S. Census Bureau figures say is 28 percent of our friends, neighbors and fellow residents here in Waco, folks who may well hold jobs, however menial, and have roofs over their heads, however ramshackle, yet make so little because of wages and a wide variety of circumstances that they’re one paycheck away from disaster. Other measures of our city suggest this poverty figure is closer to a third of our population. It depends on what dismal criteria you use.

Real commitment

Moerbe, former director of Caritas and still deeply involved in efforts to battle homelessness and hunger in this county, together with Mission Waco executive director Jimmy Dorrell, expressed gratitude for the council’s formal declaration of support for a 10-year master plan similar to the successful decade-long plan to combat homelessness. Yet we believe that city leaders must also step up in terms of financial commitment and lasting civic resolve to address a problem that experts say is unique to us among mid-sized Texas cities.

Presumably, council support leaves the door open to the Waco Poverty Solution Group’s other goal: securing that financial support over the coming year, possibly to hire a part-time staff person to help collect data on poverty (including wages), interpret this information, then share it with other groups working on major problems that could help improve the overall economic situation. These range from Mayor Virginia DuPuy’s Greater Waco Education Alliance, which has already been extremely supportive, to the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce. Dorrell made it clear that, with forward-minded nonprofits such as Talitha Koum to Mission Waco working to address the problem, the Waco Poverty Solution Group isn’t seeking some outpost of bureaucracy at City Hall: “We don’t want to become another agency in town. We got enough of those.”

Joining forces

The education alliance has already highlighted how Waco poverty plays a discouraging role in poor test scores, dropouts and an ill-prepared workforce hardly capable of moving into the high-tech, high-paying jobs that city and chamber leaders are committed to seeking out.

Moerbe knows that education alliance efforts will be instrumental in solving our poverty problems. One reason members of both groups seek to change the home environment in poor neighborhoods is because studies show improvement in that area alone can determine success or failure for children — and, in the long run, invigorate their passion to excel and, consequently, help them evolve into the kind of smart, well-paid workers that our city’s broader economic hopes rely heavily upon.

If the forces seeking to address education and poverty are not working in concert with those seeking to attract business and bolster those already here, each will fail to realize its own set of goals and we all will suffer to some degree, if only in civic shame.

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