11

Powerful and Powerless

By Maria Shriver
|ov|s
More than 100 million of us live on or over the brink of poverty
or churn in and out of itand nearly 70 percent of this group
are women and the children who depend on them.
STUNNI NG FACT !
L
et me state the obvious: I have never lived on the brink. I have never been
in foreclosure, never applied for food stamps, never had to choose between
feeding my children or paying the rent. I have never feared Id lose my pay-
check when I had to take time o to care for my sick child or parent. Im not thrown
into crisis mode if I have to pay a parking ticket or if the rent or utility bill goes up.
If my car breaks down, my life isnt thrown into chaos. I am one of the lucky ones
in this country, because I am not stressed about my nancial security.
But the fact is, one in three Americans do live with this kind of stress, struggle,
and anxiety every day. More than 100 million of us live on or over the brink of
poverty or churn in and out of itand nearly 70 percent of this group are women
and the children who depend on them. Thats almost 42 million women and more
than 28 million kids living on the brink.
1

Shriver.indb 11 1/14/14 7:00 AM
A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink

12

These are not women who are wondering if they can have it all. These are
women who are already doing it allworking hard, providing, parenting, and care-
giving. Theyre doing it all, yet they and their families cant prosper, and thats
weighing the U.S. economy down. Finding out why that is and what we as a nation
can do about it is the mission of this report. This is a national reality check.
The fact that more than 70 million women and kids live on the brink today in our
nation, the most powerful country in the world, is the kind of stark fact that drove
my parents into action.
You see, I am the child of two social innovators, two architects of changea man
and a woman who imagined a beter America, a more conscious, caring, compas-
sionate America, and then went out and tried to make it a reality. Neither one of
them held elective oce, but each felt a profound spiritual calling to right what
they saw as social injustice.
Fify years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned the Great Society and
called for a War on Poverty, naming my father, Sargent Shriver, the architect of that
endeavor. My dad and his team at the Oce of Economic Opportunity conceived,
asas s||s
Shriver.indb 12 1/14/14 7:00 AM
A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink
13

created, and implemented a suite of powerful
public programs such as Head Start, VISTA,
Job Corps, Legal Services to the Poor, and Foster
Grandparentsall still operating today.
Back then, the phrase poverty in America
came with images of poor children in Appa-
lachian shacks and inner-city alleys. It was
them and us. But President Johnsons War
on Poverty shocked Americans into awareness
and then national outrage that said: Not here!
Not in America. We cant have this kind of pov-
erty in the greatest country on earth! And the
War on Poverty, alongside strong and shared economic growth, cut the ocial pov-
erty rate a striking 42 percent over the next decadefrom 19.5 percent down to 11.1
percent
2
despite the fact that the nations atention and resources were eventually
diverted to another war, the one in Vietnam.
My mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, fought a dierent war. Although she came
from one of the most powerful families in America, she made it her lifes work to
help the powerless.
In the 1960s, she decided that people with intellectual disabilities like her sister
Rosemary, who were treated so unfairly and unjustly, deserved to have full lives.
She believed they didnt belong in institutions and could live at home, go to school,
and have fun competing on playing elds. To prove her point, she started a sum-
mer day camp in our backyard, which eventually grew into the global Special
Olympics movementpermanently changing the world for the millions of people
with intellectual disabilities and transforming the way the world saw them.
My mother took her campaign to the top, where the power was: from every state
capital to every world capital, from the halls of Congress to her brother in the
White House. She pushed for the creation of the rst Presidents Council on Men-
tal Retardation. She pressed the National Institutes of Health to create an Insti-
tute on Child Health and Human Development, which now bears her name. She
changed the world for people with intellectual disabilities and their families with
her passion, her drive, her relentless energyand her understanding of where
power resided and how to use it.
^s t|c +:c||tcct o| t|c v+: on |ovc:ty. :+:gcnt
:|:|vc: |c|,co cut t|c oc|+| ,ovc:ty :+tc 4.
,c:ccnt |n ,ust onc occ+oc ||s ,+ss|on |o: cco-
nom|c ,:os,c:|ty |+o + ,owc:|u|. |+st|ng |m,+ct
on t|c Un|tco :t+tcs {|u| con|||n. ||o+o cous+|s
vvvssc|n+s|s|v|sosc}
Shriver.indb 13 1/14/14 7:00 AM