Our fates are tied together.

Dear friends,

For the past couple of months, we’ve all been experiencing an unprecedented global situation. Our time is uncertain, unsettling and frustrating. The pandemic has deeply impacted our lives. Some of us are grieving. Some of us feel a sense of failure: so much is asked from us as parents, educators, neighbors, family and community members, and so much needs to be done. And for those among us who struggle against poverty, life is even more dire and stressful than before. But even so, we have all hung in there, finding our own way to go through this collective journey.

As a community, ATD Fourth World is mobilized in many ways to respond to the disproportionate impact of this crisis on the underserved areas we are involved in. When the pandemic started in the US, we also felt the need to get together nationally to support and learn from one another. Weekly community calls open to all our members and friends across the country began more than two months ago as a place to dialogue and share. Hearing from others around the country, what they do, their hopes and concerns, their fear and frustrations, has been a humbling and inspiring experience for a lot of us.

One thing that those calls make clear to me is that ‘’we can’t throw in the towel.’’ Despite the fact that we might regress ten years, as poverty increases so dramatically, erasing so much of the effort that people have made to free themselves from it, we need to keep going – we are in this for the long haul.

And we don’t do it for ourselves, but for the next generation, and especially for the children who might be left behind by our education system and its current choices. They remain and should be, now more than ever, our driving force.

Ultimately, those calls made me realize that ‘’our fates are tied together.’’ Solutions to poverty are not about charity. They’re about mutuality. It is not about other people’s problems. It is about us.

These learnings are clearly not the direct solutions to our current difficulties. But if they drive our energy and efforts, I believe they will lead us to the response our time needs.

We will go through that together.

In solidarity,

Guillaume Charvon

National Director

Photo by  Nicole Baster on Unsplash