Fighting the War on Poverty in Appalachia (1964)

restocking the adjacent land areas where the wildlife is been diminished because of what exists here. We need money to build a regional highway system. We need money to reclaim the land. We need money to improve management of the region's natural resources. We need money to make the region fit for industry and its jobs to move in. But we need more than money. We need the means and the organization, the know how and the patience necessary to adapt a great many people to modern society and its social and economic value systems. ...middle-class values mean is the attempt to better yourself materially in a, in what we would call the American way of life. Looking for upward mobility by better occupation, by better education, by better housing. Most of these people, most people in low income areas, don't share these beliefs. The problems are deep, the problems are related to the economics of the situation and related to the family structure.

Let's take a case example of a child that's entering the first grade. Our whole school system in the past has been motivated by middle-class values. We ask kids to adhere to things that they don't understand. We give an IQ test and in the test we see a child with one shoe on and one shoe off and in middle-class neighborhood they ask what's wrong with a child and they say, "look he's missing a shoe." But in a low income area, this is a normal pattern, there's nothing wrong with that picture. You see a picture of a broken window in IQ test and they ask, "what's wrong with the house," and the child says "well there's a broken window," well in a low income area, this isn't true, most of the windows are broken. This is a pattern that this community knows. They ask about a symphony orchestra, well these kids have never heard about a symphony orchestra. So the whole school system is built out of the cultural context of the neighborhood. New welfare concepts: too many times family and emotional problems have stagnated low income people. They didn't know how to get help and the traditional helping services have been removed: they've been downtown, they've been psychiatrically oriented.

Most low income people cannot talk, verbalize their problems. They can't move out, out of their neighborhood to some institution in a cubby hole downtown. We're trying to reorient that welfare system to move out to the community, to use neighborhood people to have better points of contact so that the services can be where the people are. What we need in a depressed area is a program of community action, a program that's based in the local neighborhood, a program that is developed through local initiative and local flexibility using federal financing, state financing and local financing, a program that's comprehensive in scope, program that ties together needs of housing, welfare, education, employment and pulls them together into an integrated package. We think that this kind of program would be provided by the President's Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, entitled to that act we have a mechanism, a mechanism in the community action program that allows the development of this integrated, comprehensive, cohesive program that we think will have a beginning impact in solving the problems of a deprived neighborhood. - The increasing number of dropouts throughout the region demand more immediate, more short-