{"id":2117,"date":"2021-04-23T15:54:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T15:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/crcc\/shaily-gupta-barnes-an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds-new-meaning-in-hindu-texts\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T20:10:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T20:10:44","slug":"an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds-new-meaning-in-hindu-texts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/crcc\/an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds-new-meaning-in-hindu-texts\/","title":{"rendered":"Shailly Gupta Barnes: An Anti-Poverty Policymaker Finds New Meaning in Hindu Texts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--article-hero \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--article-hero\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n<div class=\"inner-wrapper\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--image\">\n\n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n              \n      <img\n                            data-src=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/crcc\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2021\/04\/ShaillyGuptaBarnes-768x432.jpeg\"\n          data-srcset=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/crcc\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2021\/04\/ShaillyGuptaBarnes-768x432.jpeg 768w\"          data-sizes=\"(min-width:1200px) 75vw, (min-width:768px) 83vw, 100vw\"          class=\"lazyload\"\n        \n                  alt=\"Shailly Gupta Barnes speaks in front of podium\"\n        \n        \n                                      \/>\n\n    \n    \n  \n  \n\n<\/div>\n  \n  \n  <div class=\"text-wrapper\">\n    \n              \n<div class=\"f--field f--page-title\">\n\n    \n  <h1>Shailly Gupta Barnes: An Anti-Poverty Policymaker Finds New Meaning in Hindu Texts<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n    \n    \n          <strong class=\"author-field\"><span >By<\/span>Jess Engebretson<\/strong>\n    \n          <span class=\"post-date-field\">April 23, 2021<\/span>\n      <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n\n  \n    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target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Spiritual Edge<\/a>, with the support of CRCC\u2019s global project on\u00a0<a href=\"\/topic\/engaged-spirituality\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">engaged spirituality<\/a>. Listen to it on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/spiritualedge.org\/s1-sacred-steps\/an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds-inspiration-in-hindu-texts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Spiritual Edge\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"width: 100%;max-width: 660px;overflow: hidden;background: transparent\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/sacred-steps-an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds\/id1565909025?i=1000529218177\" height=\"175\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>To hear this and other profiles, subscribe to The Spiritual Edge podcast in your favorite podcasting app, including <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/the-spiritual-edge-promo\/id1565909025?i=1000520076383\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/1WZVzWzzPwm7zmecZ5dy1t\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Spotify<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/feed\/aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVzcGlyaXR1YWxlZGdlLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google Podcasts<\/a>. Find out more on <a href=\"https:\/\/spiritualedge.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Spiritual Edge website.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a Friday night at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama. As the wooden pews fill up, latecomers tuck coats and handbags onto the floor beside them. Up front, an organizer adjusts microphones and introduces the next speaker, Shailly Gupta Barnes. The crowd is here for a 2018 panel discussion sponsored by the Poor People\u2019s Campaign, a national anti-poverty organization. Forty-three-year-old Shailly rises to the pulpit, dressed simply in a long black tunic and loose white pants. Her silver earrings clink as she greets the crowd.<\/p>\n<p>Shailly reminds listeners of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which began when the city\u2019s unelected emergency manager switched its water source \u2014 without adequate testing or treatment. The corrosive water leached lead from aging pipes and delivered it to every tap and faucet. As a result, Shailly says, an entire city was poisoned. Applause and shouts of agreement echo through the church.<\/p>\n<p>Shailly is the campaign\u2019s resident policy wonk. Her work \u2014 distilling data on present-day poverty \u2014 begins at gatherings in church basements, temples and classrooms, listening to poor people. Then she combs through transcripts from these meetings, looking for common threads.<\/p>\n<p>She explains that water was an issue in Alabama, where people lacked sanitation. It was an issue in Michigan, where people&#8217;s water was shut off. It was an issue in Standing Rock, where indigenous communities were fighting to protect their water against pipelines. It was coming up in California. \u201cWhat,\u201d she asks, \u201cis happening around water in this country?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Once she\u2019s identified a key issue, she digs deeper: reading economic reports and consulting with experts. These elements \u2014 personal testimony and academic research \u2014 shape the policy agenda of the Poor People\u2019s Campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Its larger goal is to change how we in the land of the American Dream think and talk about poverty. Whether we mean to or not, most of us internalize the idea that being poor means you screwed up. Shailly says that there\u2019s a strong cultural narrative that frames poor people as \u201cpeople who aren&#8217;t working hard enough, people who have the wrong values, people who don&#8217;t know how to save, they&#8217;re not educated, they&#8217;re lazy, they&#8217;re crazy\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These narratives, Shailly says, don\u2019t just divide poor people from wealthy people. They divide poor people from one another. Even if you are poor, she argues, \u201cyou&#8217;re still going to say, \u2018but I work hard, so I just have to work harder. I&#8217;m not actually poor. You know, I have student debt, credit card debt. I&#8217;m not sure if I&#8217;m going to make my rent this month \u2014 but I&#8217;m not poor because I know what I should be doing, I\u2019m just not doing it well enough.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In fact, a lot of Americans are poor. Over 140 million are either poor or low income, according to the federal Supplemental Poverty Measure. That\u2019s almost 44% of the US population. Shailly says the campaign focuses on \u201cbreaking the isolation of people who think that this is just them, it&#8217;s just their fault, it&#8217;s just my problem \u2014 moving from that position of self-blame to actually making a social claim on our government and on society to make what we need possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To grow the movement, today\u2019s Poor People\u2019s Campaign builds on a history that many Americans have forgotten \u2014 or never learned. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists launched an earlier Poor People\u2019s Campaign, an organizing effort that connected civil rights to economic justice. They urged the federal government to guarantee the right to a meaningful job at a living wage. To build support, Dr. King barnstormed the South, promoting what he called an economic bill of rights. He called on supporters to come to Washington, \u201ceven if you have to bring your whole family.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Thousands answered that call. They arrived by bus, by car, by mule. To demonstrate their commitment to stay until the government met that demand, campaigners built 3,000 wooden huts on the National Mall. They named the encampment \u201cResurrection City.\u201d By night, the inhabitants connected with their new neighbors. Mexican-American organizers mixed it up with tenant farmers from Mississippi and teenagers from Appalachia. By day, they lobbied policy makers throughout DC. One participant from Louisiana described plans to lobby Senator Russell Long, noting that \u201che may not want to hear us, as he keeps hollering \u2018law and order.\u2019 \u201cBut,\u201d she continued, \u201cwhen the hell is justice?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Events beyond its control clouded the vision of the Poor People\u2019s Campaign. An assassin killed King in April 1968 and another took down presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy two months later. The escalating war in Vietnam drained political will and money from the federal War on Poverty. By summer, police in riot gear demolished Resurrection City.<\/p>\n<p>Shailly emphasizes that she did not know \u201canything\u201d about the Poor People&#8217;s Campaign until she was in her 30s. She grew up with the textbook I-have-a-dream MLK: the reformer, not the revolutionary. \u201cFor most of my childhood and early adult years,\u201d she acknowledges, \u201cmy life was pretty apolitical. I just kind of moved through these hoops.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She grew up in a tight-knight Indian immigrant community in the Chicago suburbs, and spent her childhood playing in friends\u2019 backyards and tearing around the neighborhood with her sister. A constant was the local Hindu temple her parents helped establish. Shailly spent time there soaking up the aromas of lemon and tamarind rice.<\/p>\n<p>In religious education classes, she studied Hindu texts like the Bhagavad Gita. Her parents and religious teachers emphasized two ideas: dedication and detachment. Dedication is digging in. Shailly says dedication means recognizing that \u201cinjustice exists in the world\u201d and that \u201cwe have a responsibility to engage with it and try to do something about it.\u201d Detachment is letting go, acknowledging that \u201cthere are limits to what we can do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These were not abstract ideas in the Gupta household. Shailly remembers stressing about a biology exam in high school. Her dad counseled detachment. \u201cHe actually offered a lesson from the Gita,\u201d Shailly explains. \u201cAnd what he said was, you&#8217;ve been working hard, and studying for this exam. You&#8217;ve done that work. And now, now you just have to take it and \u2014 what he said was \u2018be detached from the results.\u2019 Whatever happens, you&#8217;ve done your share, and now things are a little bit out of your hands.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All this made sense to Shailly. Do what you can do, and let go of the rest. She kept leaping through those hoops: An economics degree from the University of Chicago, law school at UCLA, then a job at a top-shelf firm in southern California. A couple years in, she worked with one of the partners on a big entertainment law case. They won a major victory. Shailly recalls, \u201cHe turned to me \u2014 I was a young lawyer, I was 25 years old \u2014 and he goes \u201cI love it when the wheels of justice turn the wrong way.\u201d And he was talking about a victory we had! And all of a sudden I had to stop and think: what was I doing?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Her partner, Adam Barnes, was asking similar questions. After months and many conversations, they decided to try a different path. With a laugh, Adam recalls that Shailly \u201cwalked into her boss&#8217;s office and told her that she was quitting her job and joining the Peace Corps.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Shailly and Adam were posted to Niger, the largest country in West Africa. They arrived in the capital in 2004, in their mid-twenties and newly married. After a month of training, a colleague dropped them off in their new home, the rural farming village of Kokitamu. Their job was to rehabilitate the village\u2019s exhausted soil, digging holes to catch rainwater that would nourish crops. To their new neighbors, it seemed like a fool\u2019s errand. Adam thought often of what a Peace Corps colleague had told him. \u201cIt&#8217;s like coming into a place,\u201d he mused, \u201cstanding on a corner with a sandwich board, naked, saying \u2018I&#8217;m here to help.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In their first year, Shailly and Adam muddled through conversation in Zarma, the local language. By year two, they had gotten to know the local Sufi Muslim leader, the region\u2019s sheikh. After a good harvest, farmers brought their excess crops to his granary. In a lean season, hungry families asked him for food. Every time, he said yes. \u201cGrains do not last past a certain time,\u201d Shailly explains. \u201cSo they were not meant to be hoarded. They were meant to be redistributed to anyone who needed them, whenever they were required.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That system made an impression on Shailly and Adam. It seemed to require the community\u2019s leaders to redirect wealth toward those who most needed it. \u201cThey described it as their baraka or their blessing,\u201d Shailly says. \u201cIt&#8217;s almost what I would in Hinduism compare it to dharma, or duty. Because they were in that leadership position, their duty was to improve the conditions of the people. And I remember asking, you know, well, what if you don&#8217;t? And the response from the religious leadership was, then the community will remove us. The community will see that we are not the leaders that they need.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As their Peace Corps contracts wound down, the sheikh\u2019s granaries stayed with them. Was there a way to bring that commitment back home to the US?<\/p>\n<p>For Adam, studying religion was the next step. In 2006, when the couple returned to the US, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. As Adam learned more about the progressive Protesant tradition, Shailly revisited her own Hinduism. Shailly remembers, \u201cThat&#8217;s when I returned to some of the things I had grown up with and started to wonder, how does detachment work when you&#8217;re in constant struggle? How do you make sense of that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After Niger, \u201cdetachment\u201d seemed&#8230;fatalistic. Like a call to accept injustice and suffering. Yet returning to the texts she\u2019d studied as a kid yielded a revelation. \u201cThe biggest lesson that I came out with by revisiting those texts,\u201d Shailly says, \u201cwas that God takes a position against injustice. God is not neutral.\u201d Then she noticed another detail in what her father had told her when she was in high school. He had emphasized \u201crecognizing that you alone cannot change everything.\u201d It\u2019s not that you can\u2019t build a better world, Shailly thought. It\u2019s that you can\u2019t do it all by yourself. Shailly says the notion of detachment \u201casks us to keep that egotism in check and put ourselves in relationship with other forces and other people.\u201d In other words, the flip side of detachment might just be solidarity.<\/p>\n<p>In 2009, anti-poverty organizers at Shailly\u2019s husband\u2019s seminary launched a new Leadership School. Over a hundred leaders, mostly poor people, would gather to share ideas and strategize in the West Virginia woods. The organizers asked Shailly if she\u2019d come along, too. It was just a year into the Great Recession. \u201cA lot of people were still reeling from that crisis,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe massive housing insecurity and the job loss and all of that was still kind of spiraling out \u2014 and I had no, no idea how bad things were.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite her brush with poverty in Niger, Shailly felt insulated. She came from an upper-middle class family. She was a lawyer with two graduate degrees. She realized she had plenty still to learn. \u201cI had never been in a space like that before,\u201d she says. \u201cOur discussion of economics, our discussion of history, our discussion of how poverty was legal: all of their insights just broke through my understanding of the world at that time, made me revisit everything I thought I knew. And once that happened, I really couldn\u2019t turn back.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At first, she worried that her own background might position her as an outsider. With time, that fear faded. \u201cIt is an ongoing conversation I have with myself sometimes,\u201d Shailly explains. \u201cAnd in the past few years, I\u2019ve stopped having it \u2014 in part because I&#8217;ve reconciled to myself that this is my life commitment. And so for whatever reason, karma, dharma, whatever it is, this is the position I find myself in. All of my life&#8217;s experiences have brought me to this point.\u201d Before long, Shailly started working full-time for the group that had organized the West Virginia gathering. Today, it\u2019s called the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. It\u2019s a core member of the Poor People\u2019s Campaign.<\/p>\n<p>A few years ago, the Kairos Center decided to do an \u201caudit\u201d of poverty in the US. Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the present-day Poor People\u2019s Campaign, explains: \u201cWe asked Shailly to head up that process, looking over the past fifty years: where things had been when Dr. King and the welfare rights leaders and others had called for a Poor People&#8217;s Campaign in \u201867 and \u201868 \u2014 and where they were in 2017, 2018, fifty years later.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Shailly pulled together a hundred and twenty page report called \u2018The Souls of Poor Folk.\u2019 \u201cOver those 50 years,\u201d she says, \u201call of the injustices that King was calling out \u2014 whether it was around voting rights, the racial wealth gap, job insecurity, housing security \u2014 all of these things have worsened.\u201d To change this trajectory, the Campaign developed a set of policy demands tailored to 2018. Leaders worked to build support through mass meetings, marches, and music. Then the pandemic arrived, changing the shape and sound of solidarity. No more packed meeting rooms, no more singing in poorly-ventilated church basements.<\/p>\n<p>The Campaign had planned a March on Washington for June 2020. That March moved online due to Covid. Two and a half million people watched via livestream. Participants testified on a webcam, forming a montage of faces in squares. A Wisconsin woman in a multicolored sweater introduced herself: \u201cI\u2019m Natalia Farjado and four weeks ago I was okay. Until this pandemic hit. All of a sudden the chocolate factory I work for closed, so I\u2019m out of work\u2026\u201d An older couple in Florida leaned toward the camera, photos of their son blurry on the wall behind them. \u201cWe have been on a complete roller coaster ever since Anthony has been incarcerated,\u201d the woman explains. \u201cAnthony is a paraplegic, forty-year old Black man who was shot in the back at age 20.\u201d A young man in a dress shirt and red tie recalls his childhood: \u201cI grew up around mountaintop removal sites, natural gas, hydraulic fracturing. The water that ran into our house that we bathed in, we couldn\u2019t drink.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the end of the virtual March, three hundred thousand participants had sent letters to their elected representatives, pressing for Campaign priorities like rent relief and a $15 federal minimum wage. Co-Chair Rev. Liz Theoharis says the pandemic has pushed more Americans to recognize what its organizers have talked about for years. \u201cIf somebody doesn&#8217;t have health care,\u201d she emphasizes, \u201cit means that everybody&#8217;s health is in jeopardy. If somebody doesn&#8217;t have a place to stay and is homeless, then then staying in place and social distancing isn&#8217;t really possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Through the summer of 2020, Shailly kept busy writing a stinging report on the federal CARES Act. That pandemic relief measure, she wrote, provides wealthy Americans with a \u201ccomprehensive welfare program,\u201d while offering the poor only \u201cpiecemeal and haphazard relief.\u201d Her analysis draws on Martin Luther King Jr\u2019s thinking, who wrote that the prescription for the cure rests on an accurate diagnosis of the disease. \u201cThere was never an accurate diagnosis of either the pandemic or the economic impacts of the pandemic,\u201d Shailly says. \u201cWho was most affected, in what ways and then how to deal with that. And so, months out from it now, we&#8217;ve seen billionaires increase their wealth by over a trillion dollars.\u201d At the same time, the pandemic has slammed low income families. They\u2019re more likely than middle class families to have lost jobs and to struggle to pay for food, rent, and medical bills.<\/p>\n<p>To change that, she wants bold action. She has a long list of ideas: \u201cDebt relief, not just saying \u2018you&#8217;re not going to be evicted, if you don&#8217;t pay your rent,\u2019 but actually just canceling that rent. Expansion of social welfare programs in terms of food security, housing security, income security. Offering regular guaranteed payments to people in a regular way \u2014 not just a one-time stimulus but recurring payments. We would need a massive expansion of good jobs, expanding public health, addressing the climate crisis. All of these things are possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wishing won\u2019t make all this happen, she says. That\u2019s where the broader work of the Poor People\u2019s Campaign comes in \u2014 getting people from different regions, ethnic backgrounds, education levels to talk and strategize. To realize they\u2019re fighting the same fight. Shailly notes, \u201cThere are 140 million people who are poor or one emergency away from being poor. And of those 140 million, 66 million are white and 74 million are people of color. Unless these people actually come together, we&#8217;re not going to be able to fight for these really big solutions. We&#8217;re going to get these piecemeal band-aids that will save some of us for a little bit \u2014 but they&#8217;re not the solutions that are going to fundamentally change the direction of where we&#8217;re heading.\u201d That means pressuring elected officials, from the city council member to the president to the Democratic majority in the Senate. It\u2019s the next phase of a long fight.<\/p>\n<p>Shailly recalls the Bhagavad Gita, the story her dad emphasized when he tried to explain detachment. In the midst of a battle, its central figure, Arjun, is a warrior who\u2019s not so sure he wants to keep fighting. Most of the Gita consists of Arjun\u2019s conversations with the god Krishna, who counsels him. In no uncertain terms, Krishna tells Arjun: keep fighting. \u201cThat&#8217;s what I think gets lost in a reading of the Gita that doesn&#8217;t actually put it in the context of a war,\u201d she says. \u201cKrishna is making all of these arguments, not so Arjun, you know, retreats to his home and pulls himself out of the world. But Krishna offers him this advice to get Arjun to pick up his bow again, and to go back into battle.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yes, in the end, whatever happens&#8230;happens. In the meantime, Shailly says, she\u2019ll keep fighting.<\/p>\n<h4><a href=\"https:\/\/spiritualedge.org\/s1-sacred-steps\/an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds-inspiration-in-hindu-texts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Click here to listen to the radio documentary on SpiritualEdge.org.<\/a><\/h4>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shailly Gupta Barnes is the Poor People&#8217;s Campaign&#8217;s resident policy wonk. Her work \u2014 distilling data on present-day poverty \u2014 begins at gatherings in church basements, temples and classrooms, listening to poor people. Then she combs through transcripts from these meetings, looking for common threads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":813,"featured_media":2120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[40,80,15,81],"class_list":["post-2117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-audio","tag-economic-justice","tag-engaged-spirituality","tag-hinduism","tag-spiritual-exemplars"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Shailly Gupta Barnes: An Anti-Poverty Policymaker Finds New Meaning in Hindu Texts<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/crcc\/an-anti-poverty-policymaker-finds-new-meaning-in-hindu-texts\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Shailly Gupta Barnes: An Anti-Poverty Policymaker Finds New Meaning in Hindu Texts - Center for Religion and Civic Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Shailly Gupta Barnes is the Poor People&#039;s Campaign&#039;s resident policy wonk. 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