Our Ambition for a World Where People in Extreme Poverty Count
This was the first time in the history of the International Movement ATD Fourth World that members from the four corners of the world and with very different life experiences have come together for such a week of meetings and dialogue aimed at forming a common understanding of the direction ATD Fourth World should take in the next four years and the issues we need to focus on at the global level.
For six months they had already been working on a number of burning questions: What is life like for the poorest people in their country and which parts of the population have they yet to reach? What are their ambitions both locally and internationally? What human and material resources do they have to invest in projects? What goals should they set themselves? Then, in March, eighty different groups from thirty-four different countries, comprising almost one thousand people in total, took part in discussions with people from all across the planet via the internet. And then, between 28 April and 4 May, some eighty-one delegates from twenty-six countries where the International Movement ATD Fourth World has local projects on the ground came to France to the international centre.
A wide range of subjects were covered during the session: our knowledge and understanding of extreme poverty; culture; young people; and also the question of money since, like any other organisation, the International Movement ATD Fourth World needs money to function but has its own rules and ethics concerning the way it searches for funding.
The session, in taking as its springboard the 2007 campaign “Ending Extreme Poverty, A Road to Peace”, highlighted time and again that “each and every one of you is a link” and that the International Movement ATD Fourth World is a movement that refuses to accept the persistent injustice of extreme poverty. Alberto, from Peru, declared, “Our societies now seem to spend most of their time trying to protect what they’ve already got. If they continue to build walls around themselves, they simply won’t have a future.”
The International Movement ATD Fourth World is not alone in worrying about inequality and the harmful distribution of the world’s wealth, but in order to take a stand ’against the organisation of exclusion’, ATD Fourth World seeks to create and open those spaces that lead to real dialogue. “We live in a world which is organised in such a way so as not to have contact with the poorest people, while at the same time it wonders why so many of its inhabitants feel excluded. In this world which is always on the lookout for ways to build a greater collective humanity amongst its people, ATD Fourth World is a link that allows people to come together, to think together and to act together. Each and every one of you is a link. Wherever you are, you are the Movement…,” declared Eugen Brand, Director General, in his concluding address.
The challenge is clear: to take action both individually and collectively. The hall in which the session was held demostrated this; it was decorated with multicoloured banners covered with the slogan “Count Me In!”, as well as silhouettes embroidered with the names of those who could not be present physically but were in the hearts and minds of the delegates. They brought to mind the families in Cuyo Grande, Peru, so exhausted by the extreme poverty in which they live that they can no longer find the work to earn just a little money and are reduced to scouring the fields after the harvest to feed themselves, not to mention so many other families from as far and wide as Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Dublin, Marseilles and New Orleans.
