Kate Walz
Kate Walz is Vice President of Advocacy: Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, which brings together lawyers, community leaders and allies from across the country to advocate for people living in poverty.
She is the co-coordinator of the Safe Homes Initiative, a project aimed at ensuring that survivors of domestic and sexual violence have access to safe, decent, and affordable housing.
“‘We will motivate people out of poverty.’
The myth being that it is something people strive to be in … so we just need to motivate them with these highly punitive measures, so that they somehow completely on their own escape poverty.
And we do that by pulling all of their stability away from them.””
Kate Walz talks to Project Twist-It about the systemic underpinnings of the dominant poverty narrative in America.
Drawing on her wealth of experience in anti-poverty advocacy she explains how the narrative marginalises poorer people and impedes their capacity to progress.