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When one considers the start time, comparative trends and program complexity, Alabama's stimulus weatherization program is already yielding significant benefits and results. After just a few months into the work on a three year contract, local Alabama agencies are performing well above the national curve having already completed over 12% of the program production with as many homes currently in the process of being weatherized.  As many as one third of Alabama weatherization programs are on-track to meet their summer 2010 production benchmarks as early as this month.  The local programs have already created over 200 new jobs, not including the expanded number of livable wage jobs being created and maintained by local businesses that will be contracted to perform the weatherization work itself.

However, the Advertiser is correct in observing that the potential benefits of this critical program have not yet been fully realized as quickly as some expected (“Weatherization Program Also Creates Jobs: Potential Benefits Not Yet Realized”; Montgomery Advertiser, March 3, 2010). After cutting through the significant bureaucratic red tape of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, most Alabama weatherization programs were not able to begin their program work until toward the end of last year. Like all new and expanding businesses, local agencies had to “ramp up” before moving the programs into “high gear.”  Much of the unrealized early expectations may also be the result, in part, of a misunderstanding of the meaning of a “shovel ready” project. The weatherization process is far from simple.  Federal and state guidelines require an extended process of client eligibility determination, assessment, contract bidding, production protocols and inspections before a weatherized home is reported as complete.
 
Nevertheless, with over forty five years of unparalleled results in serving low income communities, Alabama’s weatherization agencies are now primed and ready to more fully realize the recovery and reinvestment results of the federal stimulus program.
 
Lukata Mjumbe serves the Executive Director of the Community Action Association of Alabama whose 22 member agencies deliver a comprehensive network of programs and services to low income communities in all 67 Alabama counties.

Over 46 million people in this country are uninsured. Experts predict that as many as 6 to 7 million people will lose their health insurance as a result of the economic recession. The number one cause of bankruptcy in this country is unpaid medical bills.

Even those that do have health insurance often cannot afford to pay their premiums, they cannot afford their co-pays or they cannot afford the costs for their prescriptions. Health care is a serious political issue and we cannot afford to not pay attention. This year it is estimated that 18,000 people in this country will die because they do not have health insurance.

Beloved, as politically important as this issue is, I submit to you that health care is also a religious issue. If we look to the communities that serve as the setting of the stories from holy scripture, we find a lot of sick people. In both the Old and New Testament, we find people who are racked with infectious and contagious diseases. Men, women and children are crippled and killed by illnesses that go untreated. There was no national, public health care system available to the people then.

In the time of scripture, just like today even when the people had access to doctors they frequently ended up physically debilitated and dying from disease. In the midst of all of this pushing and shoving, screaming and demanding during the Health Care Reform debate, we cannot must remain focused on the fact that there are millions of sick people that need to be healed!

We must remember that we have seniors having to make a choice between buying their medicine and having a decent meal! People with serious illnesses are having to choose between getting a prescription filled or paying a utility bill! We have parents that are not sending their children to the doctor, the dentist or even the emergency room when they need it because they are out of money! There are children at home dying right now! We have uninsured men and women my age that have not been to a doctor in more than twelve years! They are one hospital visit away from disaster and we have a this huge, wasteful, inefficient health care system that needs to be healed!!!

We must work to cut through the all politics, all the talk, all the pushing and shoving, all the denials, and all the claims that we cannot find answers that answer! When we make the most important thing, the most important thing, we remember that God does not want sickness for us, that God wants health!!!

When God created humanity, he did not make us with disease! Adam and Eve were the pictures of health and that is what God still wants for us and has promised for us! God has different plan for us than disease and death. The prophets have spoke of the day, when will truly all be made whole, Isaiah 65:20, "Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed."

God did not give us cancers! God did not give us asthma! God did not give us heart disease and diabetes and obesity! There were not any dangerous chemicals or toxic waste or carcinogens in the garden of Eden! Man invented cigarettes and air pollution and fried everything and junk food!!! We did that! We do that! And it was man that created an inefficient monster of a health care system that we must fix ourselves. It is time for churches to speak truth to power, democratic and republican, so God's will can be done on Earth as it is in heaven!

Nowadays, so many folk like to justify speaking on behalf of poor people simply because they know some poor people or experienced poverty at some point in their yesterdays. Tragically, something always seems to get lost in translation.

We are encouraged by the initiative put forward by State Representative Patricia Todd and House Speaker Seth Hammett to create a House Taskforce on Poverty. Our hope is that the Task Force can help shape the context for the creation of new partnerships which will allow poor people to engage their legislators and effectuate real change in the state's fledgling "war on poverty."

However, a recent editorial in a major daily newspaper seems to suggest that the Task Force may be preparing to step forward with some faulty assumptions. In suggesting that because of the involvement of groups such as Alabama Arise and the Alabama Poverty Project that the Task Force, "already have more data than the task force needs," the Task Force may be making a serious error. I am reminded of a jewel of wisdom shared by State Senator Bobby Denton at a Community Action meeting this summer. He said, ""Politicians always try to ‘out poor' each other, but sometimes we leave poor people out." He was right.

Any effort at eliminating poverty that does not include poor people themselves is doomed to fail. Politicians and middle class think tanks, by themselves, will never fashion real solutions for poverty in our state. What most frequently gets lost within the perennial task forces and the committees is the urgency of the need for real victory --- yesterday.

The elimination of poverty is larger than the recycling of data, the simple passage of a bill or the changing of a policy that may take years to be fully implemented. Even as anti-poverty advocates who may have grown up poor, we must confess that history and experience are not sufficient to enable us to always adequately communicate the perspective, wants and needs of poor people today. When you are merely "historically poor," the promise of incremental change means a lot more to you than it does to a family that has to
remain in poverty while they wait for the so-called "progress" to actually kick-in.

Only the poor can translate poverty data into an agenda which resonates with the greatest sense of clarity. When you are stressed out, right now, about eating well, paying on your utility bill arrangements by Friday or going to court next week without a lawyer--- your priorities may look a little different than the classic "anti-poverty agendas" that are promoted year after year.

Community Action Agencies have been actually fighting poverty through the delivery of programs and initiatives designed to promote self-sufficiency for more than 40 years. Our work is rooted in a fundamental truth --- poor people working in partnership with the public and private sectors are the best equipped to produce results. Every one of the 22 community action agencies fighting poverty in all 67 Alabama counties is governed by a Board of Directors which includes poor people themselves as full partners. When poor people speak for themselves, only then do we have the capacity to "speak truth to power" and ensure that the most legitimate anti-poverty message of transformation does not get lost in translation.

Lukata Mjumbe
Executive Director
Community Action Association of Alabama
lmjumbe@caaalabama.org