Overcoming Poverty: What is Alabama doing to fix the issues?

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) – Alabama has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. People living in poverty lack certain means to reach a standard of living, as we showed you in Part One of our special, multipart series “Raising the Bar: Overcoming Poverty in Alabama.”

“The Black Belt region is a region that’s under-resourced. We have limited financial capability to address poverty, but poverty results in quality of life issues,” explains Lance LeFleur, who serves as the director of Alabama’s Department of Environmental Management, or ADEM.

He says ADEM works to address those issues with state funding, loans, and grant programs with the biggest impact on life coming in the form of water and sewer issues across the economically depressed area.

“The soils in that area don’t perk. You have low population density, which means that the public wastewater systems can’t reach out to individual homes,” LeFleur explained. “And then you have the endemic poverty situation that’s been in place there for generations.”

Over the last two years, Alabama has allocated more than $7 million to install residential septic systems to provide clean sewage management to Black Belt residents, but even then “the cycle of poverty is a very difficult cycle to break,” LeFleur says.

As the state does its part, Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative Founder Bryan Stevenson is doing his. He launched an anti-poverty initiative less than a year ago.

“It’s not just giving people money,” Stevenson said. “It’s also giving them space, to communicate their problems, to talk about their problems, to be seen to be heard.”

EJI’s founder has three goals in mind. His first is to provide hunger relief. The second is to settle fines and fees that people living in poverty have a harder time paying, and to end in adverse consequences if those fines remain unpaid.

“We have a lot of people in the state whose lives are disrupted because they can’t pay fines and fees. They have misdemeanor tickets. They didn’t pay their garbage bill,” Stevenson explained.

Stevenson’s third effort to beat poverty includes providing health care.

“We’re going to provide quality health screenings to people coming out of jails and prisons, primarily, but to other people who are in need,” said Stevenson.

Stevenson’s program is in its infancy but progress is being made across private and public sectors to support Alabamians living in poverty.

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