International Movement ATD Fourth World

The International Movement ATD Fourth World is a nonprofit organization which aims towards the eradication of chronic poverty through a human-rights based approach. It works in partnership with communities across the world to end the exclusion and injustice of persistent poverty, and focuses on learning from and supporting families living in poverty, through grass-roots presence and involvement in disadvantaged communities. Although founded by a priest, Fr. Joseph Wresinski, ATD (All Together for Dignity) Fourth World is an organization with no religious or political affiliations. It runs projects in 32 countries on five continents, and is in touch with individuals and small non-profits in 146 countries through the Forum for Overcoming Extreme Poverty (www.overcomingpoverty.org).

ATD Fourth World was founded in 1957 by Joseph Wresinski in a shanty-town of Noisy-le-Grand, near Paris, France.

Joseph Wresinski was born to immigrant parents in 1917, in a detainment camp for nationalities considered suspicious during World War I. He grew up living in great poverty and social exclusion. He was ordained as a priest in 1946 and in 1956 he was assigned to be a chaplain to 250 families placed in an emergency housing camp in Noisy-le-Grand, near Paris, France. The families lived in quonset huts erected in a muddy field with just four public spigots providing water for all of them. Joseph Wresinski was opposed to the soup kitchen there, and closed it, stating that "it is not so much food or clothes that these people are in need of, but dignity, and to not have to depend on other people's goodwill". With the parents, he created a kindergarten, a library, then a chapel, a laundry, a workshop, and a beauty parlour. He and the adults created an association that would become ATD Fourth World. The term "fourth world" echoes the "fourth order" of the French Revolution: those who were considered too poor and uneducated to vote towards a new Constitution. Joseph Wresinski used this term as one that evoked the aspirations of creating a new world order, and that held promise and hope for families living in extreme poverty. He wished "to get [people living in poverty] to appear in public, in the places where future is shaped". He stated that he would get "[his] people to climb the steps of the UN, the Elysée and the Vatican".

Joseph Wresinski’s firm purpose was to unite all sections of society around people living in chronic poverty. With this aim he met leaders of state, religious groups and international bodies from all over the world. He believed that every man or woman he met represented an opportunity in fighting poverty and he was determined that ATD Fourth World would remain open to people of all cultures, faiths and races. His appointment to France’s Economic and Social Council in 1979 was a significant step in his quest for official representation of people in extreme poverty. With France's publication of the Wresinski Report in 1987, he succeeded in gaining recognition of people in poverty as partners in society, and further, on gaining acknowledgment that poverty is a violation of human rights. It paved the way for the creation of the RMI (revenu minimum d'insertion, a French type of social welfare aimed at people of working age who have not worked sufficient hours to enjoy contributions-based unemployment benefits), and for a law designing a framework for fighting social exclusion that was adopted by France in July 1998.

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