At Jesuit Social Services, we see the face of poverty in the facts of many of the vulnerable young people with whom we work. Through accompanying young people, we help them to find possibilities, reflects ANDY HAMILTON SJ.

Anti-Poverty Week touches on the people and the causes that lie at the heart of Jesuit Social Services. We see the face of poverty in the faces of many of the vulnerable young people with whom we work. The number of children living in poverty is appalling. In 2022 they were estimated to be over 760,000, and we may fear that the number has grown over the last two years. Poverty has also marked the lives of their families.

If we struggle to exist, we scrimp on health care; we move from place to place with the result that our children find it hard to learn and to make friends; we find it difficult to find and keep work, we lose friends and have only temporary acquaintances. We lose our public face and our nation loses its true wealth in strong and self-reliant children.

Through accompanying young people we help them to find possibilities. Many have also been encouraged by people who stopped to talk, showed interest in their lives, put them in touch with kind and generous people and with agencies they may not have known about, and who cared for them as persons. Interest and affection are so often the first step to finding new possibilities and to make new connections.

Poverty, of course, also has a political face. Societies in which many people live in poverty while the wealth of the few grows massively have neglected their charge to care for the good of all their people, especially the most vulnerable. Such neglect is a sign that Governments have neglected their responsibility to serve the good of all people in society, and especially the most deprived. Their failure leads to lack of respect for them and to alienation from political life.

Poverty and social discontent arise out of selfishness in society. Their remedy lies in courage and solidarity.