Local hero enlists 'hood in war against poverty

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 19, 1995 | by Sally Johnson

His reputation precedes him in Addison County, a rural area on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. He's the one Vermonters call when they need help.

Sick but no health insurance? Community Health on Wheels, an old school bus converted to a mobile medical clinic, will show up at your door. Need legal advice? The Community Law Center, born in response to cutbacks in legal-aid services, will help.

Tom Plumb, 42, whose motto might be "think locally, act locally," has been waging a crusade against poverty for more than two decades, ever since he ran summer camps as an undergraduate at Middlebury College. Since 1981, he has served as director of the Addison County Community Action Group, or ACCAG, a nonprofit organization that raises funds through private and public sources to provide local social services.

Plumb's notion of cost-effective services: Address specific problems at hand by leveraging available resources. That's how ACCAG served 1,522 households last year on an operating budget of $750,006.

Over the years, for example, ACCAG has developed a comprehensive network of services to address the issues that keep people from getting jobs. In addition to the health and legal clinics, the group-offers a food shelf, an emergency shelter, 83 units of low-income housing and a community garden. Last year, ACCAG started Retroworks, a program that teaches clients to repair and resell appliances. "Retroworks was created to address the sexy issues of the day," Plumb says. "It involves recycling used appliances; it provides a place for on-the-job training for meaningful work; and it provides low-cost appliances."

Plumb's help comes at a price. "I get criticized by other advocates for expecting people to take responsibility for their actions," he says. "If people keep coming back to the emergency food shelf every month but I find out they're spending $150 a month on pay-per-view TV, I expect that behavior to change. If they're getting a monthly check for $700 and they're spending $600 on rent, they need to work with us to find a cheaper place to live."

For Plumb, local control is the key to successful antipoverty programs. Without community ownership, social services become a breeding ground for waste and inefficiency. "If the community feels a sense of ownership," he says, "it will take pride in the outcome. Community members will participate as volunteers, as donors, and that's what makes services cost-effective. If it's just some federally paid bureaucrats doing a job, they could disappear tomorrow and no one would be the wiser."

Take the case of Glenda and Dennis Jimmo, who spent years living in a trailer on a back road in the mountains, hauling water from the neighbor's house because their well-water supply was polluted by the landfill next door. Their septic system had all but failed.

Last fall, Plumb and ACCAG replaced the trailer with a used mobile home, donated by the community. Then, with a $5,000 grant from the Farmers Home Administration, ACCAG upgraded their septic system and drilled them a well. "It's all relative," he says. "This is the best thing Glenda and Dennis have had going for them since ... well, since forever."

And when Leo Devoid was walking to his janitorial job 10 miles each way, Plumb found a benefactor who donated a used car. Eventually, Devoid and his family found affordable housing in a low-income trailer park run by ACCAG. "Tom's a great guy," attests Devoid. "I don't know what would have happened to us without him."

Plumb's penchant for local control has put him at odds with the state bureaucracy, involving ACCAG in an ongoing dispute with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, or CVOEO, the state-sanctioned antipoverty organization for the county. The two groups once functioned hand-in-glove, but a bureaucratic restructuring in the mid-eighties caused Plumb to go his own way.

Robert Kiss, regional director of CVOEO, argues that Plumb's organization follows the model "of public charity rather than social services. By being regional, we can offer depth, consistency and equality of services, which is something a local group cannot do." But Plumb believes regional bureaucracies are part of the problem, not the solution. "CVOEO is noncompetitive," he complains. "No one can compete for that money. I wouldn't mind fighting it out with them competitively. Because the federal and state governments are tied into an old system of regional bureaucracies, what they're doing is inefficient while our services are being starved.

"I find myself sounding more and more Republican," says Plumb, "but the truth is that much of the system perpetuates dependency Social services have become patronizing and paternalistic. There is a notion out there that we know better than our clients what is good for them. I give people more credit than that."