Asking for help isn’t always easy, but often it is key to learning, understanding and, yes, making dreams come true. My call for assistance and guidance was heard. When I asked for help in driving transformational social change, Dr. Ruby K. Payne and her team at aha! Process responded.
The recent publication of Diagnosis: Poverty—A new approach to understanding and treating an epidemic would not have been possible without the help, guidance and investment from Dr. Payne and aha! Process. So too this blog … their help, guidance and support have brought national exposure for the book and for Transition To Success,® a system of care to treat poverty.
Transition To Success is a new way to understand and respond to poverty as an environmentally based medical condition and not a character flaw. Statistically speaking, the research is clear:
- Exposure to environmental conditions like lack of food, housing, transportation, living-wage jobs, poor-performing schools, and violence leads to the condition of poverty.
- Exposure to poverty is directly related to poorer health, compromised brain development in children, and increased rates of substance abuse, mental-health disorders, infant and maternal mortality, domestic violence, abuse, neglect, violent crime, and incarceration.
As a treatable medical condition, poverty requires defined treatment driven by industry standards of care. In this treatment system, science and data—not just good intentions—drive practice.
This is the work of Transition To Success, a standard of care to treat the condition of poverty.
I now travel across the United States, sharing the message of Diagnosis: Poverty, always with the vision it will lead to opportunities to integrate the Transition To Success system of care into health, human services, government, education and faith-based services.
I will continue telling the story, pursuing the goal of eradicating poverty and the stigma too often associated with it. I hope to inspire many others to get involved because the best way to get help … is to ask for it.
Thank you, aha! Process, for helping make my dream a reality—a dream that the millions of people facing poverty will have the opportunity to also turn their dreams into reality.
Marcella Wilson, Ph.D., is author of the 2017 book Diagnosis: Poverty. She has more than 30 years of experience in healthcare administration, not-for-profit management, behavioral health, criminal justice, and public-sector programming. Her multiple degrees include a doctorate in Health and Higher Education. Most recently, as president of Matrix Human Services in Detroit, Dr. Wilson focused on developing a standard of care to treat the condition of poverty. She is now leading a national social-change movement—Transition to Success®—with a new standard of care.
