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The Dartmouth
July 22, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Speakers discuss gender

Byllye Avery, founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, said education and welfare reforms, an emphasis on self-reliance and raised social awareness are the best ways to combat poverty in her keynote address Friday at this weekend's Gender and Poverty Conference.

"Things are hard, but not impossible," she told approximately 75 people in 105 Dartmouth Hall. Avery said the problems of inner-city residents are great but solutions exist.

Avery cautioned the audience not to ignore America's fundamental problem of failing to give every citizen his basic needs.

She said America's most impoverished people may be its best resources in combating poverty since they know most about problems with welfare and education.

Avery discussed details of the life she said many poor women, especially black women, lead. She said their stories will have the most profound impact on public consciousness.

Many poor women have grown up in violent, neglectful or abusive homes, which can lead to an "erosion of self-concept," she said.

When drugs or dysfunctional families are the only role models, options for breaking the cycle of poverty and abuse are limited, Avery said.

Avery said many schools are not equipped to handle the real issues affecting young people. Society pays professional athletes more than teachers, she said, but leaves teachers with the difficult task of educating children to become productive in the real world.

She said more effective education and job training programs are necessary to break the cycle of urban poverty.

Welfare reform is also in dire need of re-evaluation, she said. Avery became visibly emotional when she spoke about the distress and disempowerment many on welfare feel.

Avery emphasized self-reliance for women who wish to get off welfare.

"If it is to be, it's up to me," she said.

But Avery said the public must also work to solve social problems that cause poverty.

Some welfare programs do not give recipients enough time to reach financial autonomy, she said.

After some programs start working, she said, money is cut off, and a single woman working two or three jobs in order to get herself off welfare is found back at square one.

Avery recommended "welfare mentoring program" in which women who are former welfare recipients help current ones get off by helping them eliminate welfare from their lives.

Avery began her address by asking the audience "who's poor?"

Most people have stereotypes of poor people as single women, usually black, with two or more children living in an inner city, she said.

Avery said more than half of America's 35 million poor are white, and many live in rural areas. But, she said, 37 percent of poor families are single-parent households, mostly headed by women. Half of those families are black.

She warned against letting poverty become a secondary issue obscured by race, class, and gender.

While Avery stressed there is a specific population most affected by poverty, she said it is necessary to disentangle myth from reality and poverty from race in order to address the issue in an unbiased way.

Avery has been a women's health activist for more than 25 years and has received numerous awards and citations for her work. She began the National Black Women's Health Project in 1982, a group of community-based self help programs that include education, lobbying and the Walk for Wellness walk-a-thon.

The Project now has more than 100 self-help groups and 17 chapters nationwide.