Recent Developments
On December 10 2010 the Association's board updated its social positions with respect to Financial Security. The major position adopted was the need for a Guaranteed Annial Income. While recognizing that significant progress had been made by the adoption of the Registered Disability savings Plan, parents and families wree not availing themselves of the plan and hence consumers and survivors were being left as vulnerable as ever in their old age.
Social Justice
The goal of social justice is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social justice includes a vision of society in which the distribution of resources is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure. We envision a society in which individuals are both self-determining (able to develop their full capacities and interdependent (capable of interacting democratically with others). Social justice involves social actors who have a sense of their own agency as well as a sense of social responsibility toward and with others, their society, and the broader world in which we live. These are conditions we wish not only for our own society but also for every society in our interdependent global community. (Adams, Bell, Griffin, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice
The Dimensions of Poverty
The human good is too diverse to try to capture either its richness or its poverty in a single dimension. For instance, we can identify five forms of impoverishment:
- Material impoverishment, meaning inadequacies of goods and services such that the individual experiences (or is exposed to) disease, hunger ,starvation. This could be caused by inadequacies of monetary income, inadequacies of public investment, inadequacies of human support systems, or even simply bad luck.
- Intellectual impoverishment, meaning an inadequacy of education and/or absence of interaction with others so that the individual does not partake in a life of the mind. This can be brought about through lack of schooling leading to illiteracy, or more commonly a culture of intellectual isolation.
- Spiritual impoverishment, meaning the absence of any transcendent meaning in the experiences or activities of the individual. This might include, but certainly should not be limited to or defined in terms of, religious experience.
- Aesthetic impoverishment, meaning the absence of beauty within the person's life, whether it be the beauty of material possessions, the natural environment, the urban world, or the absence of ceremony.
- Social impoverishment, meaning an absence of central relationships, of friends and loved ones. (Jerome M. Segal 1999)
This elaboration roughly corresponds to 5 dimensions of growth, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional and social.
