Mourning the Choices
That Might Have Been

Harlem — I founded Connecting to Advantages to help increase the number of low-income New Yorkers eligible for public and private assistance who actually receive that financial help. I work with poor clients, and I work with volunteers – most often peers of the low-income clients – who become community leaders by dint of their service. Although I’ve assisted these populations for years through jobs with other social service agencies, my involvement with them of late has made me angry. It seems clearer that the powers that be are not truly driven to alleviate poverty (or they would have done so already), and so much human potential goes unused because of it. A connection between the local scene and the national stage demonstrates my point.

Sonia Sotomayor is now one of our Supreme Court justices. We have learned that she grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx and was raised by her mother, who had emigrated from Puerto Rico and was widowed when Sonia was little. The family was not well-to-do. Articles have described her mother, an energetic individual concerned with the welfare of her two children, arranging for private high school, saving to purchase an encyclopedia, and enabling Sonia to do well in this private high school. Then came a full scholarship to Princeton University, Yale Law School, several lofty legal positions, and the rest is history.

Without this singularly energetic mother, Jackie Sotomayor is a volunteer for Connecting to Advantages (CtA). She was raised on the Lower East Side by low-income parents, one of whom had emigrated from Puerto Rico. Jackie lived a more typical life for less-affluent residents of New York City. She attended her neighborhood public schools, leaving after eighth grade. She is less than perfectly literate. She compensates for her lack of skill at reading by memorizing client forms that we do repetitively, such as the Verizon Lifeline application for residential phone discounts. Jackie attends each CtA volunteer training session twice, so as to better learn the material, and keeps at home her own personal resource book, containing the information sheets we give to clients, so she can better learn about the variety of benefits and excel as a community leader. Jackie loves her work with CtA. She is responsible and caring, empathetic in her community outreach. She, too, is a “wise Latina” – who never had the slightest chance of holding professional jobs like Sonia.

How do we facilitate more Sotomayors – and Kandahars and Browns and Diazes – to become high-powered professionals, if they so choose? This is, in essence, the goal of CtA. Our activities – composing information sheets on various kinds of government and private-sector aid and subsidies, then spreading the information to low-income NYC residents who may be eligible – are designed to make financial and quality-of-life benefits accessible. We describe paths to receiving more food, money and health care, free tutoring, free summer camp, voter registration, ways to influence legislators, and more. We want our clients and our volunteers, who are peers of the low-income public assistance, food stamp, Supplemental Security Income recipients whom they serve, to have opportunities like Sonia Sotomayor had.

So, we steer people to $200 per person in food stamps every month, reduction of their monthly Verizon phone bill from $30 to $2, and help with their Con Edison bill in the form of a HEAP benefit of $50 or more each winter. These are bits of comfort for which we pat ourselves on the back.