Poverty is silent, but I can’t be: Jennifer Garner

Actor urges US congress to combat child poverty

Jennifer Garner was in Washington this week to comment on, and raise awareness on child poverty at a hearing for the House Appropriations Labour, Health and Human Services and Education Subcommittee on behalf of the charity Save the Children. Garner, who is a trustee of the charity, appeared before the committee on the same day President Donald Trump released his budget proposal, which would significantly cut the Education Department funding and does not prioritise early childhood education.

“Mothers come up to me and say, ‘Can you help get my child into these programmes? Can you just nudge us up in the wait-list? Is there anything you can do?’” Vogue magazine quoted Garner as saying. “The thought that I would have to go back to these mothers and say, ‘Well, no, there is nothing that I can do.’ These families know what it is to have this intervention, and they know what they’re losing when it’s gone, and I'll have to answer to it.”



The Miracles from Heaven actor, in turn, called for a significant investment in high-quality childhood education. “It’s easy to escape responsibility for disgrace like that by blaming the parents,” Garner said, while making reference to her own childhood in West Virginia, where she grew up around children in poverty.

She continued, “Who doesn’t talk to a child? Who doesn’t sing to their child? I’ll tell you who: Parents who have lived their whole lives with the stresses that come with food scarcity, with lack of adequate shelter, with drug addiction and abuse. Poverty dulls the senses, it saps hope, and it destroys the will. Poverty is silent, but I can’t be.”

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