At our recent national meeting in Portland, Oregon I outlined our bold plan for reducing poverty in America tomorrow. During that speech, I told the audience of about 400 colleagues from Catholic Charities across the country what I believe and what I think we ought to do.
Now, it's your turn.
We created the online forum to continue the discussion we started in Portland. This forum is a place where our goal is simple -- Think Big. We started this discussion with a few questions that you can find in the Big Idea section of our site.
Let us know what you think. What best practices can you share? What are the Big Ideas that will make poverty disappear in our lifetimes. I look forward to collaborating.
Thank you for everything you do.
-- Rev. Larry Snyder
Welcome to Your Forum
Thanks very much for joining our forum. Over the next two weeks, we want this space to be an incubator for new, big ideas and perspectives that will help us end poverty in America.
To Get Started:
Click on the "Big Ideas" tab and search through the topics that are of most interest to you. Click on a new "Big Idea" already proposed and comment directly. Also add your own "Big Idea" to one of the three main areas of discussion:
From September 24 to October 12, 2009 we will solicit Big Ideas to solve poverty in America. We want to hear best practices from your communities -- and also collaborate to develop new approaches for the future.
On October 12, we will select a Poverty Solutions Task Force from registered members within our forum. This task force will be asked to summarize the Big Ideas submitted to date, developing a report that highlights the best, most promising solutions.
Finally, the Task Force will be provided an opportunity to present these ideas to Catholic Charities leadership and our community generally.
We hope that you check back with us on a regular basis and keep the ideas and conversations flowing -- and thanks for everything you are doing to end poverty in America.
Big Ideas
Fr. Larry Snyder has asked us to challenge our fellow Americans, business leaders, and elected officials to address the suffering caused by poverty that exists around them as we rebuild America.
To overcome the challenges we face with poverty in the 21st century we need new 21st century solutions and Big Ideas. Let’s get that conversation started. Let us know your thoughts by clicking on the questions below.
Welcome (or welcome back) to our forum on the journey to end poverty. My name is Tiziana Dearing. I am President of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston, and I have the pleasure of moderating this conversation.
And what a conversation it has been! In the last ten days, our number of participants has nearly doubled to 240. People have posted more than 90 Big Ideas to the site, and have received about 100 comments in response. This is a real discussion, and it’s a pleasure to be a part of it.
It is time now, though, to wind down this part of our conversation and move on to next steps. As we told you at the beginning, we’ll be pulling together a small panel of our most active and creative participants to produce a summary document of what we have discussed here. Once that is done, we will post it for all to review, and use it as part of Catholic Charities USA’s journey to end poverty during the 2010 Centennial Year.
If you have anything else you would like to add to this discussion, I encourage you to do it now. We do not want to miss anyone’s best or most creative thinking.
