An ambitious campaign to balance the economic playing field guides the leadership of End Poverty in California (EPIC), a nonprofit aiming to motivate elected officials to implement policies and programs to eliminate poverty in the state.
According to EPIC President Devon Gray, his organization is uniquely positioned to lead this effort because the group already has close relationships with lawmakers, community organizers and people with lived experience.
“Because of EPIC’s access, we have a deeper understanding of the ways that poverty is tied to policy decisions and a lack of economic opportunity, and the feasible solutions that can improve the day-to-day lives of Californians,” explained Gray.
Related Links:
https://lasentinel.net/l-a-county-fed-summit-tackles-poverty-and-homelessness.html
https://lasentinel.net/inequality-last-year-grew-but-child-poverty-dropped.html
During a recent interview with the L.A. Sentinel, Gray elaborated on the inspiration and potential outcomes behind the EPIC initiative.
L.A. Sentinel: What factors influenced your organization to launch this campaign?
Devon Gray: At EPIC, we believe that in order for us to effectively address poverty, we must center the voices of people in poverty in all of the work that we do. We need to hear the problem directly from the source. Too often, the policy conversation about poverty takes place without the involvement of directly-impacted people. As a result, policies and programs designed to reduce poverty often end up not being as effective and responsive to people’s needs as they should be.
To solve this, we embarked on a multi-county ‘poverty listening tour’ to sit down with folks from different backgrounds and situations to get to the heart of what people in poverty are experiencing in California right now.
Earlier this year, we debuted a documentary called “Poverty & Power” that features some of these listening sessions and illuminates the life and relentless advocacy of everyday Californians as they battle broken systems, provide for their families, and help their communities, which have been traditionally underserved and under-resourced by the government and private institutions.
We are grateful to be able to hear from community members, grassroots organizers, fast food workers, entrepreneurs, formerly incarcerated people, youth, and others about the challenges they face in their everyday lives.
LAS: Ideally, what are the outcomes you expect with this initiative?
DG: Between our listening tour and the film screenings, we’re hoping to achieve a few things. First, we view these events as critical for both improving our own understanding of what people are experiencing and, by extension, being able to demonstrate the urgency of the moment. We know California has the highest poverty rate of any state when taking into account cost of living, but putting a face and name to those statistics is important for galvanizing action.
Second, we want these events and the stories that come from them to help chip away at the harmful narratives that often impede policy change. Too many of us are wed to outdated ideas about people in poverty and the causes of poverty — namely this idea that poverty is fundamentally an individual failing, and that people are poor because of their own faults, rather than systemic forces and policy choices that make it hard to succeed.
And last, the stories we hear and lessons we learn on the road directly inform our policy advocacy work, and we think we’re more effective advocates because of this. So, when we’re putting together our legislative agenda for a given year, we expect that the policies we’re pushing for are more responsive to what people are needing than they would be otherwise.
LAS: Who are your partners in this effort and what is their role?
DG: We definitely try to be a connective force between advocates, elected officials, the private sector, grassroots organizers, and communities experiencing poverty. Nothing we do could be done alone.
So, when we’re trying to organize a listening session, we typically partner with a local community organization — both because they’ll have a greater sense of what community needs actually are and because they’ve developed trust with the folks we’re talking to. These conversations are often challenging, and I don’t think we’d be received as warmly without partners on the ground who’ve earned community trust. But the partners we work with are quite diverse.
They include faith-based organizations like PICO California, or Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) like AmPac Business Capital, or labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Fight for $15 activists, and countless others.
LAS: How can the community assist in EPIC’s effort?
We’d love to find additional partners for screening our film and hosting a discussion around it. But more broadly, one thing everyone can do is to continue to identify and push back against the harmful narratives about people in poverty that too often hold us back from making progress. We also need to embrace the idea that poverty isn’t an inevitability or something we have to accept in a state as wealthy as ours.
Visit our website at endpoveryinca.org to learn more about our work.
