I am a long time supporter of Community Bridges, a Santa Cruz County-based nonprofit organization that provides a wide variety of human service programs in the three-county area that includes Santa Cruz County, Monterey County, and San Benito County. You, too, can be a Community Bridges supporter. Click right here to contribute!
Community Bridges recently sent me its 2015 Annual Report, which you can read online. On Pages 4 and 5, I learned that Community Bridges provided help to tens of thousands of people last last year, and that over 87% of the people it helped live below 200% of the federal poverty level (less than $31,860 for a family of two).
I am glad that my contributions to Community Bridges are helping families and individuals who are having a difficult time, economically. That's great, and there are pages and pages of names in the Annual Report (all in very small print), of many hundreds of other people who are doing the same.
However.....
While individual giving is good (and let me remind you about that link in the first paragraph of this posting that will let you join the crowd), there is no reason that we shouldn't structure our society so that the community itself provides the kind of basic human services that are now being provided by way of individual contributions to Community Bridges and other nonprofit organizations.
In the richest nation in the world, the richest nation, in fact, in the history of the world, we could, thorough our collective action, provide every family and every individual in this country with a basic education, meaningful work, child care, health care, and housing.
You know we could do it. The money is out there, and the purpose of politics is to decide, collectively, how we should raise money and spend it, on the things we decide just must be done, for the good of us all.
So, keep those individual contributions flowing, but...
Let's make sure that the United States Congress and the next President of the United States does something to ensure that there's a strong and solid economic floor for every family, and every person in this country.
That's not a bridge too far!
Image Credit:
http://www.communitybridges.org/
I agree, up to a point.
ReplyDeleteGovernment can "provide every family and every individual in this country with a basic education, meaningful work, child care, health care, and housing" as long as every family and every individual stop increasing in number. There are hard physical limits to just how many families and individuals this planet can sustain.