Great point Kathryn, the way I wrote the piece it seems as though service providers are only capable of being passive recipients of the after-effects of policy decisions, which is not (and should not) be the case. Indeed, service providers have an important role to play in shaping policy, especially representing the voice of a constituency that faces barriers to influencing politics on their own.

Health Leads is a great organization, I had the pleasure of meeting Rebecca at a conference a few years back.

Thanks for the clarification on the law, and pointing out the insidious long run plan with continued restrictions on welfare payments (or at least where one can make a withdrawal). As to the rationality of low-income people, the very rhetoric of this proposal, and ones like it, suggests that a lot of people do doubt the rationality of the poor.

More troubling though are seemingly well intentioned services that impose interventions based on assumptions of general incompetence, like forcing parenting classes for people in homeless shelters, when the need for one intervention does not necessarily imply a need for the other.

Hey Mark, thanks for the comment and kind words. I certainly agree that more input on the "consumer" side is needed, and Invisible People among other efforts does a great job of that.

I would hope, however, that service providers exchanging ideas would also lead to better service for consumers, as service providers would learn from each others' efforts and outcomes. Ideally service providers would track their outcomes and share best practices AND listen to the aggregate voices of consumers.

Your point about Demonstrating Power helped me to clarify my own thoughts on this topic. I think for me the bigger picture is not Demonstrating Power, but channeling it. You cite Occupy Wall Street, which indeed is a great example of online media facilitating a demonstration of power. Of course the question that always follows a demonstration of power is, now what?

I'm not mitigating the importance of demonstrating power by any means, but for me the more interesting question is what to do with it. From my career vantage point, the "power" I focus on is the possibilities of the social sector versus its current output. There is plenty of power here in terms of resources (financial, human capital, good will, expertise, etc.), but I have significant doubts that said power is in anyway maximized, with agencies working toward a collective goal in semi-functional silos.

It seems that our conversation is in some ways parallel, with your focus on larger scale social change and mine more on institutional change of social sector organizations. Of course, the intersecting point is that both our focuses ultimately aim toward the same end, with my focus a subset of your grander vision.

Perhaps a good starting point in amalgomating the inherent sector in sectors nature of our work is to expand the authorship and viewpoints on this site, a process we began with the inclusion of the excellent policy oriented work of Kathryn Baer.

Drop me a line if you'd be interested in featuring some of your work on this site, dhenderson@idealistics.org, and thanks for your comments on this post, you definitely got me thinking, and perhaps more optomistic than when I first sat down to write this piece.

Hey Carey, thanks for the comment and for sharing some of your accomplishments. Indeed you do offer some compelling examples of important victories (personal and for others) achieved via blogging.

I think for me, and to be clear my criticism in this piece is about the efficacy of my own writing, the issue I grapple with is whether or not the blogging medium can bring about larger system level change. In my work, the systems change I focus on is at the level of social sector organizations. If you look at Michael Dahl's comments above, his focus is on the larger level of community empowerment and politics, perhaps more in line with your initiative to combat stereotypes.

There certainly are individual examples of powerful or insightful writing changing both the hearts and minds of people, whether they work directly in the social sector or not. And indeed, there is value there. I think the question then is one of opportunity cost, meaning, is this the best possible medium I can use for the type of change I seek.

I hope it is, and encouraging comments like yours certainly help to push me further toward believing blogging does matter.

Michael, thanks for your thoughtful comment and response on your blog.

Your point about sharing versus communicating is spot on. Page views and re-tweets are far too passive to usher the type of systems change you allude to. As not to dwell too much on commiserating, as you warn against, how do we move away from siloed mini-megaphones to serious discussion and engagement?

As the editor of this blog and my site, Full Contact Philanthropy, I tend to prefer to measure (I know, there I go measuring again) the strength of posts by the discussions started rather than views and shares. Of course, this is an imperfect metric as those posts might simply be commiseration instead of the greater advancement you and I both hope to move toward through writing.

The Internet era was supposed to usher in the democratization of ideas, at least for those with means and access to the net (I'll leave the digital divide arguments for another day). This is indeed a grand vision, but one clearly not realized in our sector, if at all. I'm very open to any and all ideas...

Kathryn, you are quite correct to call me out on my myopic vision for blogging. Indeed there is value in educating those outside of our field.

My view here, likely because of the line of work I am in, is more "inside baseball." My critique here is only confined to posts intended for an insular audience of social sector professionals. I should have made that point explicit.

Indeed affordability is relative, although wage differentials at the low end are negligible across the country due to minimum wage laws. Regardless, there's not much room for wage suppression at the low end of the scale anyway. So the more notable fluctuations in regional wage differences is at non-poverty paying rates. Therefore, I'd argue it is definitely more affordable to be poor here than in more populated metro areas.

That said, if the issue is the chronically homeless, then affordability is not the issue. But for the cyclically homeless, my unsubstantiated but logical seaming guess is that people are less likely to fall into homelessness here than in a place like Los Angeles.

My work in Pittsburgh has focused on community development, so I don't know much about the state of homelessness here. There are clearly less visibly homeless persons here than in Los Angeles, but it's not non-existent.

The bigger issue in Pittsburgh is job creation, beautification, and driving out slum-landlords. There are quite a few dilapidated and vacant buildings. You can buy a house for under 20k in some parts. While that's very affordable housing, I assure you it's not desirable.

I certainly agree with you on some levels Kathryn. I welcome the new poverty measures, they are a more accurate representation of what poverty means and a much needed update to an antiquated measure.

To me the most significant benefit of this poverty reassessment is not in the total number of people who are estimated to be poor, as bother measures are more or less equivalent, but in the mix of who is poor. As you pointed out in your post, senior poverty is under-represented as is poverty for whites and Latinos in the current methods we use. These findings should have both advocacy and planning implications.

While I'm less convinced that poverty measures are a tool of government subversion, I do agree with Joel that the overall change in the number of people estimated to be poor is not terribly useful from a planning perspective.