Nelson Diaz

As someone who grew up in poverty and got out because I got an education, it pains me that so many people in our city are trapped in a cycle of poverty. Our sky-high poverty rate is an embarrassment. It's an indictment of our political class and our willingness to accept a deeply dysfunctional status quo.

Attacking poverty isn't just good public policy: It's a moral imperative for every Philadelphian. Efforts to end poverty have to be focused on three main pillars: a good education, good jobs available in every neighborhood, and reduced crime and smarter policing.

I struggled in school for years because of behavioral and health issues. Once those were solved, I was able to learn. Many children face the same issues today, but they don't have a support system to help them through. We must recognize that problems in the classroom often originate at home. That's why our education system needs to employ the full range of social services and after-school programs to help kids with great potential who we can't afford to lose.

Once our children graduate, there need to be good jobs available to them in every neighborhood. We need a renewed focus on broad-based economic growth that doesn't just rely on one or two parts of Philadelphia, but instead helps revitalize every neighborhood and community. We have a template: what the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. did at the Navy Yard, combined with capital and the expertise to use it.

And we need criminal justice reform to end generations of cyclical arrests. We need community policing to prevent crime in the first place and restore community trust, and intervention programs and alternatives to incarceration for low-level and nonviolent offenders to put them back on the right track.