As the year comes to an end

Message from the National Director

Dear friends,

As the year comes to an end, we often look back to remember what it entailed. This year may be an exception though. We might just want to turn the page and open a new chapter; avoid being confronted again with challenges this year brought each of us. Looking back or not is up to each of us, but either way it might be useful to ask ourselves what it is we will bring, as individuals and as a community, into 2021.

I will bring some words from Stacy, an activist in New York: “Before I came to ATD Fourth World I was a turtle in a shell. … Now I have a voice, now I say something. ... I stand up for my community. Being with ATD has shown me that I don’t have to know my neighbors personally to stand up for them. … Now it’s up to me to speak out in my community and other communities when I see something wrong or hear something wrong or not going right.”

I could hear pride in her words - the pride of having found her own voice, the pride of belonging to the ATD Fourth World community, the pride of acting for justice. I will step into the new year inspired by this pride. Yes, despite everything life throws with so much violence at some of us, we are this movement together.

You could ask why, among the many possible emotions, I would choose pride to face the challenges of 2021. Because pride is a concrete and positive answer to the humiliation of poverty. As many of us know, poverty is a double punishment. First, because the situations people live in are the most underserved. And second, because the same people are blamed for their own poverty and then locked in it. Pride is the key to overcome the latter, and to open the way to concrete, material change. As Patrick, an activist, told me: “Poverty is a question of keys. If you have the right keys, then you can open the doors.” Pride is one of those right keys, it unlocks one’s inner strength.

Stacy reminds me that affirming one's self-worth makes us and the people around us, proud - and that’s the first step to overcome poverty.

As an ATD Fourth World community we go through a lot together, and it’s difficult to always feel this pride and self worth when life is hard. Together we take pride in the achievements but also in the efforts and personal resistance, even when they go unrecognized. A father in Burkina Faso once told me, “I have efforts in my heart that nobody sees, not even my children, but they are here and that’s what keeps me going.”

As a community, we do our best to recognize those efforts and to support them so we can all keep going. When one of us is too tired or disheartened, we will take their hand to keep moving together.

Thanks to many of you, these are the sources of pride I will bring with me to face 2021. They will keep me going. And you, what will you bring into this new year?

Always in solidarity,

Guillaume Charvon

National Director

Read 2020 Year in Review

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash