Poverty program aims to help poor help themselves

Published 12:01 am Sunday, December 4, 2011

PORT ANGELES — Details of a program to help people help themselves out of poverty — and pay them to learn how to do it — will be presented Tuesday.

Bridges Out of Poverty of the Olympic Peninsula, a new organization, has scheduled both morning and evening presentations by Phil DeVol, author of a course called “Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-By World,” at the Elwha Tribal Heritage Center, 401 E. First St., Port Angeles.

Free presentations

The free presentations will be from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

DeVol’s course outlines 11 resources that people living in poverty lack — and only one is finances, said Rick McDaniel, pastor at Olympic Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Port Angeles, who has organized the North Olympic Peninsula chapter of Bridges Out of Poverty.

The program is “not a faith-based program,” McDaniel said, but rather is based on Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities, which DeVol co-authored with Ruby K. Payne after she wrote A Framework for Understanding Poverty.

DeVol — who lives in Marengo, Ohio — will discuss concrete tools for breaking the cycle of generational poverty, the internal struggles of those in poverty and give an understanding of how poverty affects the entire community.

All are welcome at DeVol’s talks, McDaniel said, but the presentations are geared primarily to people who work with people in poverty.

“We hope we get some people interested enough to serve on a steering committee” who would plan the first edition of the “Getting Ahead” course, McDaniel said.

Course participants will be paid $10 an hour for 15 sessions of 21⁄2 hours each, McDaniel said.

“We’re asking them to come and investigate the causes of poverty in their community and in their individual lives,” he said.

The goal is to offer the first course by February.

The ideal class size would be eight to 12 people, he said.

McDaniel said his interest in the program developed out of a lifelong “sensitivity toward people in poverty.”

“For me, it’s about the children,” he said.

“When I see children growing up in poverty, it breaks my heart, and I want to do something to help that,” he continued.

“By helping a parent, a guardian or a relative improve their lives, you in turn will help a child.”

McDaniel read Payne’s book about two years ago “and started looking into what it would take to get it started in our community,” he said.

Funded by donations

The program is funded largely by donations, which are tax-deductible through the Olympic Vineyard church’s nonprofit status, McDaniel said.

“We won’t own this,” McDaniel said. “Once it gets going, it will have its own identity” and its own nonprofit.

“The church is just being a catalyst to get it going,” McDaniel said.

An anonymous donor gave $6,000 for startup costs in February, while church members raised $3,200 at a Fourth of July fireworks stand, McDaniel said.

DeVol has been training and consulting on poverty issues since 1997.

He works nationwide and internationally with communities that apply Bridges Out of Poverty constructs, including sites in Canada, Australia and Slovakia.

For more information about the program, visit www.bridgesoutofpoverty.com and www.gettingaheadnetwork.com.

To donate or attend a presentation, phone 360-477-5168 or email bridgesop@gmail.com.