Last week, I finished reading Fiona Hill’s book, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” for the League of Women Voters’ book club. Hill, a self-described “non-partisan foreign policy expert,” is best known by the general public for her testimony in the first impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump.
Hill’s book has a double purpose. It is a memoir that explains her rise from a lower-middle-class upbringing in the “blighted world” of industrial England to earning a doctorate from Harvard University and emerging as one of America’s most eminent experts on President Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Hill also uses her background and her understanding of communities left behind by the policies implemented during the Reagan and Thatcher years to express her worries that those in the lower classes in both countries have experienced a loss of opportunity. She explains how this loss has resulted in the appeal of dangerous populism that led to Brexit in her native country and Trump’s election in her adopted country.
She uses the end of her book to list what individuals can do in their communities to create “the infrastructure of opportunity” necessary to offer hope to our dispossessed. This section made me reflect on the meaningful ways that so many in our own privileged community are doing exactly what Hill argues must be done throughout the country.
Just as I finished Hill’s book, I went over to meet with Areli and Quetzalli, two juniors who are in Los Altos High School’s Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program. Keren Dawson-Bowen, their AVID teacher, described them as especially motivated and asked me to give them feedback on early drafts of their college application essays.
AVID students are low-income, usually minority, who are motivated to succeed in college and break the cycle of poverty that has entrapped their parents, just as it limited so many in Hill’s working-class community. Through the AVID program, students are assigned one teacher who stays with them through every year of high school, helping them navigate their studies and the college application process and encouraging them to apply for scholarships that will ease the financial challenge of attending college.
Like Areli and Quetzi, who have both been accepted to summer biology internships at Stanford University, AVID students are encouraged to apply for internships and taken on trips to visit various colleges – all things that affluent, well-educated parents typically do for their own children. Thus, they receive the same kind of help and encouragement that Hill attributes to her own remarkable success.
Other community organizations also provide the kind of financial and academic support that Hill deems so essential to breaking the cycle of poverty. Through MVLA Community Scholars, volunteer tutors serve as one-on-one mentors helping senior AVID students through the college application process. Mentor Tutor Connection trains, supports and places volunteer tutors and mentors in local elementary, middle and high schools.
Our local police also play a role in motivating low-income students to stay out of trouble and aspire to succeed in college. Many AVID students have described to me how participation in various youth programs sponsored by the Mountain View Police Department has been instrumental to their success.
In this era of a rapidly expanding income divide, much remains to be done to create more opportunity and hope for those trapped in poverty: We need to offer affordable child care, affordable housing, a debt-free college education and better-paying jobs for low-wage earners.
The kind of work that’s being done by dedicated professionals and volunteers in communities throughout the Bay Area also must be replicated in the more forgotten and isolated parts of our country.
But, like Hill, I am optimistic that involved and caring communities can improve America’s infrastructure of opportunity so that students from low-income families can break through the cycle of poverty. By doing so, we can also ensure the health of our democracy, which, as Hill reminds us, is now gravely threatened by the forces of populism that will prevail if we do nothing.
Nancy Ginsburg Gill is a Los Altos resident.
