Summer 2025 Newsletter: Building Community to Counter Poverty
Letter from the Chair of ATD Fourth World Board of Directors
When we’re the most challenged, we’re also the most creative, dedicated and productive.
We live in challenging times. Yet when we’re the most challenged, we’re also the most creative, dedicated and productive. I experienced this when, as an ATD Fourth World Ally, I served as a Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. I repeatedly bore witness to public services discriminating against and controlling people trapped in poverty, rather than supporting their efforts to lift themselves up.
In Geneva, in 2003, we were facing a challenge within the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. Based on ATD Fourth World’s experience in over 30 countries across the globe, we were determined to convince governments that persistent poverty is not a lack of economic development. Poverty is both the cause and the consequence of human rights violations – the inability to access essential services such as quality education and health care, as well as ongoing discrimination, subjugation and disempowerment.
Thanks to the creativity and dedication of a coalition of governments and nonprofits, in 2012 a set of guidelines on extreme poverty and human rights was adopted unanimously by the UN Human Rights Council.
Building on this win, ATD Fourth World extensively researched the Multidimensional Aspects of Poverty (MAP) from 2016-2019. The results were published in Pushed to the Bottom: The Experience of Poverty in the USA (atdfourthworld-usa.org/map). The research concluded that there is a lack of economic opportunity, but more important contributors are the inability to access essential services such as quality education, health care, and housing, and especially the multiple forms of discrimination that generate deep-seated feelings of shame and hopelessness.
Founded on the results of this research, as well as our 60 years of experience in the USA, in 2024, ATD Fourth World launched an in-depth and thought-provoking evaluation of its work: the Strategic Renewal Dialogues (SRDs). I was lucky enough to be able to join this rich process, having just moved back to the USA. We are excited to introduce the SRDs and their Desired Outcomes in this newsletter, including our new mission statement.
The challenges remain many – realizing this mission requires becoming even better at building supportive communities, entering into dialogue with local authorities, creating broader partnerships, and using a variety of media so that the voices of those trapped in poverty can be heard more widely.
The SRDs have given us a solid foundation on which to build, but to realize this ambitious mission, ATD Fourth World needs support. As well as funding for programs and advocacy, we need funding to build our members’ leadership skills to meet, with creativity and dedication, the enormous challenges that lie ahead.
Janet Nelson
ATD Fourth World Board of Directors Chair
