How to break the cycle of poverty. It only takes one interruption to break a circle.

As I sit here in a Native reservation coffee shop in faraway Atlantic Canada sipping coffee, I get an email from a friend in Portland, Oregon. There is going to be a meeting on how to address the cycle of poverty there in the coming weeks and he wanted me to know about it. It got me to thinking about why this is a perennial subject to address for non-profits.

Where are the answers? It's one thing to talk about statistics and issues. It's another thing entirely to consider fully what one can really do. I don't have the answer any more than the average person does. I do know that there are some maps for what we can do. Here's one...

Oxfam Canada has some pretty impressive thoughts on human rights that any conversation should include:

Oxfam believes the following five human rights are central to true and sustainable development:

The right to a sustainable livelihood –
We support people to achieve food and income security, decent working conditions and increased protection of the natural resources on which they depend.

The right to basic services –
We support people to gain access to basic health care, clean water and education for all.

The right to life and security –
We support people caught in the middle of war, violence, natural disasters and the displacement they cause to live safe from abuse, harm, suffering, illness and death. Where necessary we advocate for international intervention.

The right to be heard –
We support people to achieve their civil and political rights, have their voices heard and influence decisions that affect their lives.

The right to an identity –
We support people who are marginalized because of their gender, religion, ethnicity or cultural identity to live free from discrimination and enjoy equal rights and status with others.

Poverty is always going to be around because some people can't or won't work. It's not the "cycle of poverty" that we need to confront, it's a social contract that consistently believes a hand out followed by a slap down is better than a hand up. For some, we MUST give a hand out. The elderly grandparents raising their grandchildren, for example. A single mother who needs to feed her children, is another. America should absolutely have universal conscription like Israel, by the way. But, you should have a choice of whether to go into the military or a non-profit job. That's another matter.

Minimum wage jobs are important to any economy. But, they must not be the only labor opportunity for the poor. Canada certainly has many problems with its poor and homeless. I saw some terrible sites this winter in Montreal. People sleeping on grates in the subzero cold was pretty sobering. But, what is at the root of that? At the root is a society that wants everything cheap, fast and easy - a society that does not believe in the basic human right of a sustainable livelihood. The cycle of poverty, in other words, is nothing but the uglier twin to the cycle of narcissism.

And I'm not talking about the kind of narcissism one sees on Wall Street or in Hollywood. No, I'm talking about the cycle the cycle that everyday American's indulge in. Example: A parent who insists on buying cheap Chinese-made, flashy, clothing from Target so her kid can look dazzling at elementary school. Anyone who buys anything on sale at WalMart. Or, business owners who can afford to pay benefits, but do just the minimum allowed by law so they can make a payment on their timeshare. Someone has to pay the price for cheap goods and it's ultimately all of us in terms of joblessness, crime rates and hopelessness.

We are a society literally clawing, scratching and biting over each other to get to some imaginary "top." And while aspiration is what makes America powerful, it also is the source of its greatest ills. A cycle needs to be broken in only one spot to stop itself. That spot needs to start with basic healthcare for everyone, in my view. Some basic human rights- codified since ancient times -- include those listed above. If we simply start with a firm belief in any one of them, though, we could literally break the circle and begin a new circle of tapping real human potential for good.

I have more to consider on this, clearly. Perhaps that's best for another post.