This Thursday, members of the Eastern and Charleston community will convene for a lecture on poverty in America, with the focus primarily centering on implementing strategies to curb the issue.

Michael Gillespie, a professor of sociology and anthropology who has researched extensively poverty and food insecurity issues in the Coles County region, will facilitate the discussion.

Ahead of that meeting, our staff feels it necessary to stress how important these issues are, especially in the community that Eastern students call home.

It’s not often we actively promote a university event, and for good reason—the very nature of our publication requires objectivity, and we prefer to err on the side of caution. However, over the years, many of us have covered these issues—have seen, first hand, just how endemic poverty is in the Charleston area—and it’s therefore pretty close to our hearts.

So often, it’s easy to view issues like poverty in the abstract—to try and quantify in numbers or statistics what, exactly, poverty and hunger look like. But no graphs, no charts, no tables can truly convey what it feels like for the 40 percent of Coles County residents for whom food insecurity is a very real and crippling problem, day in and day out.

No editorial or column does justice to the 12 percent of Coles County families who live under the poverty line. Like most truly saddening issues, words simply don’t suffice. One has to see it firsthand.

That isn’t to say tomorrow’s lecture series will necessarily startle one to action. But it’s still a good place to start. After all, helping those in need doesn’t necessitate jumping in feet-first—even simply realizing there’s a problem is a step (albeit small) in the right direction.

Many of our staff has reported in the past on the good that’s come from groups headed by Gillespie. Last year, those groups helped bring awareness to overwhelming hunger issues in Coles County by pledging to live on food stamps for a week. They’ve continually spearheaded campaigns to help in the Charleston area, and have been a consistent source of community service all around the county.

With that in mind, we’d like to challenge Eastern students to not only attend the lecture, but make a concerted effort in the future to not only be aware, of but be a force against, poverty in America. Because it’s not going anywhere otherwise.

The event will be held tomorrow at 7 p.m. in Booth Library Room 4440.