Convocation: Margaret Simms '67

"Confronting Katrina: How Should We Respond?," a day of education, discussion, and reflection in response to the devastation experienced along the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina, begins with this convocation by Margaret Simms '67. An economist and nationally recognized expert on minority business development, Simms is Vice President for Governance and Economic Analysis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington D.C. Founded in 1970 by black intellectuals and professionals to provide training and technical assistance to newly elected black officials, the Joint Center is recognized today as one of the nation's premier think tanks on a broad range of public policy issues of concern to African Americans and other communities of color. Forty years after beginning the war on poverty, we have been confronted by pictures of people in horrible conditions because they lacked the resources to escape a natural disaster of epic proportions. What happened, or more precisely, what didn't happen? Were the programs flawed in their structure? Did we fail to put enough resources in them? Did we lack the public will to sustain them long enough? Was the problem with the people themselves, lacking the will to pull themselves up by the public bootstraps they were offered? Simms traces the development of policy during the past four decades as a way of highlighting the persistence of poverty in her presentation titled "Discovering Poverty While in College."