Listening, growing, and changing together

Dear Friends,

Phrases like Merging of Knowledge and being informed by those with first-hand experience are common ways we describe ATD Fourth World Movement’s approach to overcoming poverty. Merging knowledge gained from different experiences, always centering the expertise of lived experience, enriches our understanding about poverty and how to overcome it.

What about how we acquire knowledge on politics, health, our neighborhood, etc.? Who are the experts we trust? In our diverse society, how do we merge our faiths in various information sources to enrich our understanding? 

Recently, members of ATD Fourth World’s national Board of Directors asked people in our lives these questions. We’d like to share what we learned:

People we know get information from a variety of sources and trust them for different reasons. Some people trust news sources their parents or school say are reliable. Some go to a variety of sources to purposely see different sides. History, research, and critical thinking also inform which information to trust. Further, we trust people we know personally about the fields they work in. For example knowledge about “homelessness” can be trusted when it comes from a person who works with people without shelter.

One person we talked to challenged us to trust our own instinct and knowledge while also seeking out different viewpoints with curiosity: trust our first-minds but be open to being wrong. Merging of Knowledge is designed to meet exactly this challenge. It asks us to combine many different people's experiences and knowledge (including our own) into a more complete perspective. This changes the question from “who is right?” to “what can we learn from each other?”

Merging of Knowledge is a vital tool to eliminate poverty and can help us broaden our understanding of all aspects of our society. It encourages us to listen to everyone and to value all forms of knowledge and experience and to open ourselves to being changed by them. 

Thank you for listening to each other and growing and changing together. This work gives me great faith in the future. 

Peggy Simmons, Vice President
for the ATD Fourth World USA Board of Directors