Marking Year One: BPI’s Visiting Fellow in Urban Poverty Exploration

After nearly 45 years of striving to advance social justice, it’s fair to say that the single overriding issue BPI constantly confronts is concentrated urban poverty. After all this time, it’s easy to fall into the “complacency trap.” That’s why it’s so important that BPI continually challenge its own experiences and be creative in our search for new solutions.

This is precisely why we decided to use part of the grant we received as a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions to take BPI on a rigorous, and hopefully, rewarding journey—a two year examination of the causes and effects of deep and persistent poverty in the U.S. To partner with us in this “intellectual refueling,” we have engaged the services of the Loyola Center on Urban Research and Learning (CURL) as our Visiting Fellow in Urban Poverty.

June marks the one-year anniversary of this journey’s launch, and we’ve been deeply immersed in the effort. Each month, BPI staff and a number of our directors meet with our CURL colleagues for a half-day “Knowledge Exchange,” designed to tackle a different aspect of the poverty challenge by digging into the latest research information available. Needless to say, this means a lot of homework for the entire BPI team, and we invite you to visit our Visiting Fellow resources page to see what we’ve been learning.

At each Knowledge Exchange, we invite one of the leading experts in the field to join us as we mutually explore the various dimensions of urban poverty—always with the goal of challenging ourselves to answer the questions: “How is this issue relevant to BPI?” “Do we have the resources and capabilities to do something meaningful about it?”

To date, we’ve dug into issues such as the dynamics of inter-generational poverty, the growing suburbanization of poverty, the impact of stress and trauma on children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the learning gap between poor students of color and their wealthier counterparts, and the astonishing importance of early learning and its lifelong benefits—especially for children growing up in poverty.

These are complex, challenging topics, and each has stimulated a provocative conversation during our half-day sessions. In a fundamental way, we know these exchanges are vital to shaping the future of BPI. It’s too early to draw any conclusions about how this will affect our program agenda and policy efforts down the road, but it’s fair to say that the deeper our exploration takes us, the more apparent it becomes that addressing the impact of concentrated urban poverty through a child-centered lens will be increasingly important to BPI.

One thing we do know for sure: our exploration is vital to keeping BPI the learning, searching organization it’s always been, one recognized for its independence, integrity, and effectiveness. We hope you’ll continue to follow our progress during year two.

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