Who Owns Poverty?

by Martin Burt

Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D. Profiles in Catholicism

Recently, I participated in a retreat at our Seminary that focused on poverty. It gave me various variables to consider as I thought about spiritual poverty, physical poverty as we age, mental poverty, economic poverty, social poverty, psychological poverty, and artistic/musical poverty It was a fruitful retreat as I transformed some of my thinking to a place more conducive to God’s presence. This book did not disappoint me but drove me to an even deeper appreciating of poverty.

The starting point for this book is the recognition of our collective failure to adequately translate decades of good intentions and earnest effort into complex and lasting global poverty elimination. For all our intellectual advances, for all our technological innovations, foreign aid budgets, impact assessment studies, tools, methodologies, data, surveys, campaigns and benefit rock concerts: half the world’s population lives in poverty, and up to a quarter of these live in extreme poverty To point out this collective failure is not, a controversial thing to do. The poor are still with us, and on our current trajectory, they always will be.

The question of this book is who owns poverty? It’s certainly not an idea we’ve ever articulated before. The reader knows we’ve had very strong opinions on the subject all along. Global poverty discourse has, to date, concerned itself with the question: what is poverty? This seems reasonable given that good poverty solutions depend on good poverty definitions. Yet there is also something subtle at work here, when you consider that owning a thing starts with naming it. Adam named the beasts in the field and the fowl in the air. Conquistadors renamed the lands they ‘discovered’ on behalf of their sovereigns. We name stars, disease and serial trends in order to bring them into our sphere of influence. We name, we claim.

Author Burt wrote this book for people who are frustrated with current global and national anti-poverty efforts and are searching for a new approach to eliminating poverty. People who believe all human beings, no matter how poor, can lift themselves out of poverty in this generation through self-help, encouragement, mentoring and compassionate support. People who believe in self-reliance as a liberating experience for everyone involved. People who know we are all poor in some ways and rich in others, and that this common vulnerability allows us to dispense with unhelpful turns of phrase, such as ‘the haves and have nots It is no longer a question of ‘us versus them’. Winning the war against global poverty requires us to discover our oneness. This book has more than three decades of experience in working with and for the poor in many parts of the world. The author began this work in Paraguay and overtime forced a house in countries across the world, including Twain, England, the U.S., Tanzania, Argentine, Nigeria, Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia, and many others. His journey in trying to improve social justice has not been without disappointment and excitement as he learned about his limitations and grew with his successes and failures. This book celebrates the power of audacious questions and considers what happens when we put poverty back into the hands of the real experts: families living in poverty. Read the book, it will transform your thoughts about poverty.

Interview with Martín Burt, PhD

By The Gordon Nary (completed posthumously by Profiles in Catholicism)

20 November 2025