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Community Corner

Gathering Pieces to Poverty's Puzzle

From Scardsale to the plains of South Dakota and the alleys of Bangladesh, college student and Scarsdale resident Margaret Dunne has worked to alleviate poverty and improve global living conditions for others around the world.

Shake things up. Take the path less traveled. Make a difference.

Too often, these are just slogans that people slap on their bumper stickers — not deeply felt modus operandi.

But for every 100 truisms, there is one person — we hope — who takes up the mantle of the cause and dedicates his or her life to saving the whales, the rainforests and the giant silky anteater.

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Margaret Dunne, a rising junior at Colgate University and a Scarsdale resident, has dedicated much of her young life to helping the Oglala Lakota Sioux.

How does a privileged Westchester high school girl discover, as Dunne did, that there was “such extreme poverty in America?" In 2007, when she was a sophomore in high school, Dunne went to the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Lakota in South Dakota, with the Scarsdale Congregational Church Youth Action Committee. While Dunne had mentally prepared herself for a starkly different life than the one she lived at home, the unmitigated harshness of the contrast startled her.

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The sheer coarseness of the resources available to the Lakota Indians on a daily basis was bad enough, but the ominous future their present foretold, something that would leave most people frozen in hopelessness, instead inspired a flurry of activism on her part.

“Some call Reservations ‘prisoner of war camps,’ which sounds like an extreme description, but on Pine Ridge, roads can be closed for weeks due to mud or snow and power lines can be down for weeks," Dunne said. 

Additionally, Dunne shared with Scarsdale Patch that there is limited mass transportation, no sanitation department, no shopping centers, no animal control, limited access to water and limited access to Internet. Mail is not delivered to residences, medical clinics struggle without essential services and supplies, schools operate on shoestring budgets and according to some reorts, unemployment hovers around 80 percent.

“The majority of the federally provided housing consists of old trailers, unsuitable for the extreme weather of the Plains,” Dunne said. “Outhouses are a luxury in some communities.”

One thing was clear to Dunne right away: the lives of children needed to be altered — and fast.

“I focused my efforts on the children because they are the future tribal leaders and as they work to build the future of their nation, it is important for them to know that people outside their community care about their welfare,” Dunne said. With high school graduation rates hovering as low as 33 percent in some reservation schools, she had her work cut out for her.

After speaking to mentors and doing copious research, including reading the United Nations’ report “Rethinking Poverty,” Census reports and countless textbooks and articles on the subject of general poverty and the Lakota tribe, she settled on a plan.

When she returned home from her first trip to South Dakota, Dunne began to look into founding an assistance program. Her idea evolved into the Lakota Pine Ridge Children’s Enrichment Project, a corporation that seeks to educate and mobilize avenues of assistance.

Through her fundraising and supply drive efforts, Scarsdale alone has sent 5,000 pounds of books, coats, shoes and other school and day to day supplies to children in Pine Ridge.

“The total impact is much larger, however, as we send items directly by mail order and Facebook Fans from all over the world send items directly to our distributors,” Dunne said. “After launching LPRCEP on Facebook last year, we provided coats and boots to children in four different communities. We have also provided direct support to five families who are facing exceptional challenges.”

One such challenge involved William Sutton, a Lakota teenager desperately in need of chemotherapy. Through car washes, a Corporate Angel network and other fundraising efforts, LPRCEP managed to fly Sutton and his family back and forth to treatment in Minnesota. While his battle with osteosarcoma put an end to his dream of being a professional basketball player, Dunne said that Sutton now aspires to be a pediatric oncologist.

Sometimes, it takes a fresh (and very young) perspective to shed a new light on an old problem. Dunne’s analysis of the situation on the ground in South Dakota is astute — our tried and true methods of battling poverty simply won’t work in a rural environment.

“The poverty on many reservations today is closer to Third World poverty than the urban poverty that most American programs are equipped to address,” Dunne said. “For example: what good is a soup kitchen if the population served cannot get to the meal because there is no mass transportation and the roads are closed?”  

Dunne's ever-broadening analysis of the roots and eradication of poverty led her, perhaps inevitably, to a study of the broader world in general. While still in high school, Dunne read Mohammed Yunus’s book “Banker to the Poor,” which examines rural poverty and microloans in Bangladesh.

With her trademark dauntlessness, Dunne applied for a summer internship at the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. She was accepted, and four days after graduating from Scarsdale High School, she flew off to Bangladesh. 

“I spent my free time visiting slums and speaking directly with people about rural and urban issues,” Dunne said. “I had the opportunity to talk with people on both sides of the poverty equation: those consumed by it and those working to help overcome it.”

Determined to study the global issue of poverty, Dunne eventually decided to learn Bengali and has continued to work in the country during her summer “breaks” on jaunts funded by the U.S. State Department.

“I will return again for about a month from December to January to study the impact of NGOs in Bangladesh and abroad on an extended study program run by Colgate University in partnership with BRAC University,” Dunne said.

While Dunne thinks non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can “combat poverty at the grassroots level,” she’s quick to point out that they’re not a one-size-fits-all solution.

“A modified microfinance model, Lakota Funds, is on the reservation now and has had some successes,” Dunne explained. “Due to their lending restrictions (they require collateral and/or co-signers), the loans often are not as readily available as they are under the original Grameen Bank model. Personally, I do not think that microfinance is the complete answer for Pine Ridge, but it certainly is one avenue for potential help that could be utilized to a greater extent.”

Looking to help? Scarsdale residents and business owners can assist with the Fourth Annual Children’s Coat and Book Drive for the Lakota People. Donations will collected in September and shipped in October.

The path less traveled? Not everyone’s cut out for it, but most of us could spare a few tax-deductible dimes to help Dunne in her quest to save ... the humans. It's a big job, but someone's gotta do it.

Email Dunne at lakotakids@gmail.com for more information on how you can assist in her efforts to help the Lakota people .

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