Poverty in America is a U.S. based documentary exploring the nature of poverty in the United States, one of the richest countries in the world. Although poverty has always been part of the fabric of American life, little is known about it in the outside world. Capitalism has created a wide gap between the rich and the poor in the country. Social injustices perpetrated over the years have also created socioeconomic classes leaving a huge section of the population without access to the country’s resources. The documentary highlights some of the major concerns in the society such as homelessness. It portrays the real situation in places like Virginia where citizens have to sleep in their vehicles after being served with eviction letters. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to address the issue of poverty in the U.S. population. Although his achievements were limited, they can be used as the foundation to analyze the role of a transformational leader when facing a serious problem such as poverty in the society.
Between 1970 and 2007, the official poverty rate in the United States averaged between eleven and fifteen per cent (Sandoval et al., 2009). The portrayal of poverty in the film is, therefore, accurate. However, it is not right assigning the blame to any of the recent presidents. Poverty in the United States is as a result of accumulated social injustice carried over the years. Transformational leadership is needed to alleviate poverty in the U.S. population. Transformational leadership is pragmatic since it is concerned with the actual circumstances affecting a given population. In America, poverty has not been addressed fully since the leaders in place do not dedicate themselves to the important course. Transformational leaders can only work with other transformational leaders to achieve a given goal. For instance, when addressing poverty, transformational leaders should liaise with other leaders at all levels to identify the causes of poverty and develop policies to address the problem.
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United States is a highly bureaucratic society. Capitalism and rigid government institutions ensure that social injustices such as poverty can hardly be addressed. Funny enough, poverty is not evenly distributed in the society. Some groups, such as African Americans report higher levels of poverty as compared to the rest of the society. a transformational leader should dissect the root cause of poverty in such populations. Some of the revelations would be linked to the historical injustices meted towards the groups after independence. When the rest of the country took a forward trajectory towards economic emancipation, African Americans were struggling with slavery and other barriers instituted by the White-dominated leadership.
Transformational leaders advocate for equity and equality. Therefore, they have to establish how resources are distributed in the society to establish whether there are ways some groups can be assigned more resources to fight poverty. Equal access to education, health and other facilities may be among the policies put in place to ensure that every citizen has equal chances to the opportunities in the country. President Barack Obama rolled out the ambitious ObamaCare health insurance plan as one of the measures to address the disparities in health care access and outcomes. President Donald Trump also tried coming up with a more comprehensive plan before his ouster. However, the two did not achieve much in that line, maybe because they were not using the right approach to address the issue of poverty which has created all the disparities in the society at the moment. Transformational leader is needed to address the problems presented in the film Poverty in America.
Reference
Sandoval, D. A., Rank, M. R., & Hirschl, T. A. (2009). The increasing risk of poverty across the American life course. Demography , 46 (4), 717–737. https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.0.0082
