Letter from the Strategic Facilitation Director
Peggy at the Street Library in Harlem in 1993. Ruth Messenger, who at the time was the Borough President of Manhattan, was visiting.
Dear Friends,
When I was 16, I had the good fortune to be an exchange student in New Zealand for one year. I went to a small school in an isolated part of the country, coming from a large suburban high school in California. The biggest lesson I learned, amongst many, was that there are infinite ways to lead a good life and my choices for my own life were much broader than I had thought. That experience began a life-long quest to learn about who I could become as well as what humanity could become. For this quest, I have repeatedly put myself into situations where I would learn from people different from me.
This life quest brought me to ATD Fourth World over thirty years ago and has kept me involved in various ways. With the international youth branch, I gained skills for bringing very different people together to learn from each other. Understanding how people, including myself, can walk away changed after meeting someone different from themselves is one of the most fascinating parts of my life. And this is what ATD Fourth World offers. Yes, the ultimate goal of ATD Fourth World is to eradicate poverty. Yes, the lives of people with experience of poverty can be changed by being involved with this movement. But trying to “help poor people” will not eradicate poverty. Poverty will only be eradicated by transforming society into a place where poverty can’t exist. The social activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs said, “We must transform ourselves to transform the world.” We can make bits of progress by doing research and changing policies, especially when that research and that policy-making involve people with experience of poverty as reachers and policy makers. But those policies will not transform society.
ATD Fourth World offers ways of transforming ourselves, and thereby society, by learning from people with different experiences. As an example, when I was working in the ATD Fourth World Youth Movement, a student at the famous Sorbonne University changed their course of study to become a public defender after befriending, at one of our youth events, a teen with experience of poverty who helped run her local ATD Fourth World Street Library (like our Story Gardens). We have examples of academic researchers participating in research projects using the Merging of Knowledge methodology who joined to give their expertise and were enlightened by how much they learned from their fellow researchers with experience of poverty. Our Fourth World People’s University purposefully and carefully brings experts on different issues together, including those with first hand experience of those issues, so that they can all learn from each other to improve their work. You can read more about these projects in this newsletter and on our website. In this newsletter, we also ask for your support in the current transformation of ATD Fourth World USA and ask you how you transform yourself. We look forward to hearing from you.
In gratitude and transformation,
Peggy Simmons
Strategic Facilitation Director
Adjunct to the National Executive Team
“We need great humility to live among people experiencing profound human misery, so as not to impose our own views and not to believe that we are always right. Also we need to learn how to listen. ”