At our meeting of November 13, 2019, Bob Moran introduced Angel Ackerman as this morning’s speaker. Angel is the Director of Development for ProJeCt of Easton. She was here this morning to talk about the program that our Club donated $1,500 to. Angel began her talk by focusing on her family as she was being brought up with parents who dropped out of high school but gained the skill necessary to work in a job that supported a family. As a college graduate, she feels that she would not have her current position is it was not for parents that provided for her. What she sees today is there are may families under the same circumstances who are not as fortunate as her family. She feels that intergenerational poverty continues in this area because of the lack of life and family skills to succeed and get out of the cycle of poverty. ProJeCt works had through education to helping people help themselves. These services include adult education, family literacy, school-based programming, and emergency support that has an impact on more than 5,000 people per year. These services are provided by a staff that helps families to climb out of poverty but it requires determination on the part of the family members and through education, they get the skills to manage this climb.
One of these services is education whose goal is to have their clients who dropped out of high school get their GED. The donation that the Club made supports programs that work with children in kindergarten through 5th grade with their reading skills. The second program focuses on middle school students where they are taught life skills so these children can make good life decisions which they may not get from their family unit.
As I was listening to Angel this morning I thought of the proverb “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” To me, ProJeCt is “teaching a man to fish” through education to get families out of the poverty cycle. However, they also “give a man to fish” to, on a short term basis, help them through emergencies. Society needs to continue to support organizations like ProJeCt to “teach more people how to fish”.