The purpose of our series is to take what has been largely invisible and insist that people see it.
Exposing the poverty of Buffalo’s children
Published Oct. 28, 2007
How much do we care about 3-year-old Kae’Sean Fields?
That, in essence, is the question we asked the day after new Census numbers showed that Buffalo had the second-highest poverty rate in the United States, and — shockingly — nearly half of all children in the city live in poverty.
On that day, Aug. 30, The News published a photo of Kae’Sean, who lives with his mother and two siblings on Buffalo’s East Side, to illustrate the startling facts. Kae’Sean, a beautiful boy with large expressive eyes and an impish charm, is one of the 25,955 poor children in Buffalo identified by the 2006 Census count.
Moved by the implications of those numbers, a group of reporters and editors gathered to talk about what our response should be. We planned a series of stories, photographs and a multimedia presentation, and the first results appear on today’s front page and at buffalonews. com/poverty.
Afterward, a reporter who had attended the brainstorming session told me he was glad The News was planning to take on this topic.
“Are we just going to give up on that kid?” he asked.
No, we’re not.
This series is squarely on task with the mission that this newsroom has developed: enterprise journalism that makes a difference in its community. Issues involving economic justice and children are of particular interest.
Last year, we pursued this mission with a major series called “The High Cost of Being Poor.” (We are proud that the series has won many awards and garnered national attention, but we won’t be satisfied until government and business make the reforms that the series clearly calls for.) And just two weeks ago, our “child porn pipeline” continued the focus.
Reporter Mark Sommer, who spent many hours with Kae’Sean’s family for a fascinating, in-depth profile that will appear in Monday’s paper, said he believes the odds are stacked against such children.
Is success — breaking out of the cycle of poverty — possible for Kae’Sean and others like him?
“I don’t want to call it a long shot, but I think I would have to,” Sommer said.
“As one of my sources pointed out, it takes a village — and we don’t have one in Buffalo when it comes to the poor,” Sommer said. He notes that because of Buffalo’s segregated housing, most Western New Yorkers never see the poverty. What has resulted is a paradox.
“Poverty in Buffalo is both widespread and invisible,” Sommer says.
The major purpose of our series, then, is to take what has been largely invisible and insist that people see it and understand its crippling effects on a community that may not even know it exists.
How can we make life better for Kae’Sean and others like him?
Certainly government has a role, and Monday’s eye-opening story by Dan Herbeck will point out how government has failed to fulfill its promises here.
But charitable organizations, schools, community groups and individuals — including those who live in poverty — play an important part, too. As always, we believe that what a newspaper can do best is to be the spotlight on the problem, not an actor on the stage.
Whatever our roles, all of us need to remember Kae’Sean and give him — and so many other kids — a better shot at beating the odds.
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