Poverty 'expert' tells how Circles program helped

The second annual Poverty to Prosperity Summit opened Tuesday, March 17, at the Martin Community Center with remarks from two speakers who became "poverty experts" the hard way.

Leann Clemons, a Sedalia resident, told her story of what happened after she and her husband separated, leaving her with three children and no job.

After she applied for food stamps and found herself a job, which took several months, she suddenly found her allotment of food stamps drastically reduced from $400 each month to $100 each month because she now had additional income, what she referred to as the "cliff effect."

"I was against talking to 'those people,'" said Clemons. "No one could help me."

But she talked to "those people" anyway, and because of a program called Circles of Pettis County, she now is standing firmly on her own.

The idea behind the Poverty to Prosperity Summit is to bring together people from different communities to talk about the problems faced by their communities and the solutions those communities have formed, said Pam LaFrenz, executive director of Missouri Valley Community Action Agency.

"Sometimes," she said, "that's something people really don't want to think about, so we wanted to be intentional and really think about 'What is poverty in their community, and what do they think they need to do to eliminate it?'"

She continued, "Hopefully, the rest of the teams will get excited and inspired, and say, 'Okay, let's go home and do something like that back home, too.' So, it's just trying to bring the community together to eliminate poverty."

One breakout session about economic development featured panelists Pati Carter, executive director of the Workforce Development Board in Sedalia; Irv Jensen, a partner at Smart Solutions group; Donna Brown, economic development director for the city of Higginsville; Roy Hunter, executive director for the Marshall-Saline Development Corporation; and Bill Jackson, general manager of AgriServices in Brunswick.

"Collaborative efforts are needed to access stimulus dollars," said Carter. "Every partner that has stimulus dollars will be wanting to use those immediately. We have a federal mandate to try and spend the primary portion of that money within the first year, and we are already in the first year. We don't even have that money yet and the clock is ticking. ... We're looking at within the next six months, ... we'll be really putting funds out into the communities, and we want to do that as a community effort. ... Collaboration and working together as partners is extremely important. Take down the walls of who we are and what we're trying to do. Look at the community as a whole, try to see how stimulus dollars can help stimulate our economy."

Hunter warned attendees of the dangers of scams aimed at taking money given by the stimulus package.

"There are already companies out there, or individuals out there trying to take advantage of the fact that there's money available. Just be very careful in who you engage in doing business with. ... (If you have) any questions, you can go on the governor's Web site, he lays it out there. You can go to recovery.com, but don't get hooked in with some of these folks who are going to scam you out of some up-front money to leave you stranded. Be careful. Work with people you know," he said.

Carter agreed, and said, "Already, I'm getting e-mails telling me how I'm going to be able to access stimulus dollars. Just click off of those, delete them, they have no more information than you have at this current point. The state of Missouri doesn't even know how many dollars they're getting. These people are not positioned, they are just trying to get in there and get the dollars."

She recommended missourinet.com as a good source for a variety of information, including information related to the stimulus package.

Brown echoed Carter's earlier statements, saying, "It truthfully is the time of partnering. If you don't partner in everything you do, you're going to be left behind, because there's a lot of resources out there that not one person or organization can take advantage of."

Jensen added, "It does start by having a plan. The community projects that are first in line for the plan are already putting their plan together; they're not just starting that process."

The floor was then opened to attendees with questions.

"You said most of this stimulus is two- to three-year programs. What happens at the end? ... Will the state have to continue those programs on their own?" asked one attendee.

"What we do to continue those programs, I think, will be up to us, locally. It's hard to say what the economy is going to be in three years, it's hard to say what the president's focus is going to be. ... What we're going to be doing is very short-lived, but it's very similar to what we're currently doing, it's just going to be better programs and more of them," said Carter.

Another attendee asked the panel in generalities how long progress in economic development takes.

"Because I think that people think this happens in, like, two or three years," she finished.

Jensen responded, "You're talking about something that takes years, because in many cases, you're talking about changing the culture, you're changing the environment. It is a slower process. I would think that you could have small victories in a community. It's amazing to me how much of a difference signage can make if nothing else changes, or a new sidewalk if nothing else changes. Things start to build on themselves, momentum gains, but in a typical community, it's going to take a while. It's not going to happen overnight."

Contact Geoff Rands at marshallreporter@socket.net