International Day For The Eradication Of Poverty 19 Oct

The UN And Poverty In 1992, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided that October 17th should be called The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and it has been observed every year since The day is aimed at getting people across the world to do something about getting rid of poverty in every country, and especially in developing countries.

Consider The Views Of Those In Poverty In the fight against poverty, the contribution of the poor people themselves is often ignored, or even seen as getting in the way of the efforts to help them. Obviously, it’s fantastic that the richer countries of the world - like the UK -want to help, but all too often we do it in a way that seems right to us, instead of asking the people we are trying to help for advice. We seem to think we know better than the people who are actually living in poverty and dealing with it every day. We should be respect and learn from the people we want to help. We should be working with them, not doing things to them.

Who Is Our Neighbour? Show the film Who is Your Neighbour? The film was made by young people in Greenwich which is home to some of the richest people in Britain, but they live right beside some of the poorest.

Why should we care for people we don’t know? As we think about International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, one of the questions that we all need to think about is: why should we care for people we don’t know? You might have heard the phrase, “charity begins at home”, but should we only care for the people we live with? What about friends and family who live down the street? What about family or friends who live in another part of the same town? Or in another town? Or even in another country?

Millennium Development Goals Show the film Poverty: A Time for Change In the year 2000 there was a special meeting of the world’s leaders called the Millennium Summit. The presidents and prime ministers of the richest countries in the world decided that something had to be done to help the poorest people in the world. They promised to work together to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by Someone is living in “extreme poverty” if they are surviving on less than one US dollar and 25 cents a day. That’s people who only have about 75p a day for their food, shelter and clothes. For everything. The good news is that the goal was reached in The bad news is that there are still over 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty. That’s one in eight people.

Poverty in Britain We are lucky to live in a rich country, and although cases of extreme poverty are rare in Britain in the 21st Century, there are still many people who have very little. Some people work very hard to provide for the poor and homeless, but many others seem reluctant to help. Show the film Opposite Ends e-ends

At the end of the film the young woman asks, “How is a sandwich going to make a difference?” and some people here might agree with her, so to finish, listen to this short story - originally by Loren Eiseley - and think about its message for each one of us. Read the story The Starfish