In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. More than 40 years later we are still losing the war. The U.S. Census Bureau says 12.7 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2004 (up from 12.3 percent the previous year). That’s 37 million people. The poorest state was Mississippi, with a 22 percent poverty rate. New Hampshire and Connecticut had the lowest poverty rates, at 8 percent. Oregon stands at 12.1 percent.

Nearly 25 percent of blacks live in poverty, as do 21 percent of Hispanics. For non-Hispanic whites it’s 8.6 percent, for Asians 9.8 percent. Nearly 18 percent of all children in America under 18 years of age live in poverty, as do almost four of every ten single mothers.

But what do these numbers really mean? The poverty line that Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration drew back in 1964 was, even then, a sort of best guess. She simply calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. Surely there are more sophisticated formulas today? Surely the Census Bureau has recalculated the cost of an adequate diet or remeasured the share of income spent on food? Four decades, several economies, and a few technological revolutions later, other than adjusting for inflation, Orshansky’s formula is completely unchanged. The borders of the nation of poverty are defined by what it cost to feed a family in the 1960s, in today’s dollars.

Which results in these figures: for a family of four, an annual income of $19,307; for a family of three, $15,067; for a family of two, $12,334; and for an individual, $9,645. As the Census Bureau itself is the first to admit, the poverty line “is not a complete description of what people and families need to live.” For one thing, housing takes a far greater share of income than it did all those years ago: nearly 33 percent today. For another, the free child care often provided by the mothers and grandmothers of the mid-20th century is now a serious expense. Neither does the measure take into account what the government provides to fight poverty: non-monetary benefits including food stamps and the earned income-tax credit for the working poor.

The Census Bureau, along with the federal government’s Office of Management and Budget, have experimented with new, more up-to-date measures, but there has been one large problem: any honest change to the formula will likely raise the official number of Americans living in poverty. No administration, red or blue, wants that. After all, when it comes to the world’s 17 leading industrial nations with the largest percentages of their people living in poverty, America is already Number One.

Beegle’s welfare check had been cut to $250 a month, and not long into her first year at community college, she was evicted yet again. She managed to find a Community Action Agency voucher for a seedy motel on Sandy Boulevard.

“It was better than the streets,” Beegle says, “but for two months my little boy and my 6-year-old daughter were exposed to a lot of crime and drugs. I left them with my mom as often as I could.”

She pressed on across the ocean. She enrolled in the journalism program. Her family lived on food stamps. She published her first article in the school paper. She got her clothes from relief agencies. She learned everything she could from every class. She hid the fact that she didn’t understand many of the words the teachers and other students used. She wrote them all down in her notebook, and at night she’d look them all up. She had no phone. She struggled to find Section 8 housing. Just give up, the chorus sang, get some job, maybe find another husband. She almost quit more than once. But in June of 1988 she walked across a stage at Mount Hood Community College and was handed a diploma — the first in her family’s history.

People encouraged her to go after a bachelor’s degree. She couldn’t believe she was even considering it. But on a campus visit, Beegle fell in love with the University of Portland, and her high grades and low income won her a few scholarships and some financial aid. Could she and her kids stay above water for two more years? She gathered her transcripts and sat down with Steve Ward, then head of the University’s communications department. He began to scratch off the courses: “We can’t take these credits. Or these. Or these ...”

Beegle began to cry. The chorus in her head reached a shrill crescendo. She wasn’t going to make it after all. She had to complete her degree in two years or lose her housing, and she just wasn’t going to make it. She left, still in tears.

Two days later, Ward called her. “He told me that he’d had a talk with his wife about me,” Beegle remembers, “and he thought could find a way to work things out. It wasn’t the only time that someone at UP would change my life.”

She’d rarely felt so out of place — she was older than most of her fellow UP students, who all seemed to have nice cars and new clothes and money to spend, and a few of them laughed at her outfits and her speech. But by the end of the first semester, Beegle was on the honor roll. Her financial aid and a job on campus paid for tuition with a few hundred dollars left over each semester, so she was weaning herself off welfare. But something was still tugging her back toward the shore she was trying to escape.

“The hardest thing I had to do to move out of poverty was to violate my entire system of values,” Beegle says quietly. “I was raised with the belief that if you had two dollars, you should give somebody in the family one of them. That if there was some space on the floor, someone who needed a roof should be sleeping there. Whatever belonged to person belonged to everyone.

“So I’d get my financial aid and go home and my brother’s power would be shut off and he had a new baby, or my mom would be down to milk and bread — and I’d have to say ‘No, I can’t help you.’ I knew they’d give it to me if they had it. But I also knew that it only perpetuated the cycle. If I gave away what I had, I would never escape, never be in a position to really help. I cried myself to sleep many nights, because it went against everything I was about. Those were some of the lowest points.”

Beegle went to her family’s home less and less often. There was always chaos, always some kind of crisis. Days in her new country were full of ideas and insights and possibilities. She just couldn’t afford to be dragged back, not when she was this close. So she left her family behind.

She became fluent in her new language, won awards, met new people, followed opportunities. Few other than journalism professor Bob Fulford knew she was from a distant land. But late at night, every night, she felt empty.

One day in a theology class, Beegle was given what seemed like a simple assignment: write about how freedom, or the lack of it, had affected her. That night something opened up inside of her. It was instantly clear: What was wrong was that she had abandoned her roots, and since poverty would always be a part of her, no matter how successful she became, abandoning her roots was abandoning herself. She would never be free of her story until she told her story. For hours she poured words and tears onto the keyboard.

She wrote about all the freedoms she had never enjoyed. Freedom to not see her mother crying, to not watch her father unload trucks full of watermelons for 16 hours then try to decide whether to spend the handful of cash he earned on food or shelter. Freedom to not watch police take her brothers away, to not come home to an eviction notice, to go to the doctor when she was sick, to hold her head high. And the most important of all, the one so many people had helped her discover: freedom to get an education.

The instant she turned the paper in, she was certain she’d blown it. Everybody would know she was an imposter, just a dumb poor kid pretending to be someone else. When she got the paper back, she could only stare at the words scribbled across the top by her professor: A+. Best paper I’ve ever received.

She began to tell her story again and again, speaking to various groups and being interviewed by journalists. She completed her major in communication. In the spring of 1990 she graduated with honors, and the University named the woman who spoke Middle Class English as her second language its student Communicator of the Year.

Professors encouraged her to go to grad school. Eventually she earned her master’s, taught at Portland State University, began, with her mentor Bob Fulford, the consulting business she owns today. She received her doctorate in 2000. Her dissertation focused on students from generational poverty who go on to earn college degrees — how, in other words, to make the crossing. Within her family, the seed planted by her education and escape is growing: two of her brothers have graduated from college, and she has nieces and nephews who grew up living in a car who are headed for grad school.

The big new house on a cul-de-sac in Portland’s suburbs makes Beegle uncomfortable. She and her second husband, an engineer, have recently moved in, and some of the rooms aren’t completely unpacked. They came to the neighborhood for the very good special programs in the schools — their 6-year-old daughter Juliette is autistic. (Beegle’s son Daniel is now 22, and well on his way to being a golf course architect; her daughter Jennifer, who had just been accepted to Columbia University, died in a car crash one wet night in 1996.)

“I’m having a hard time with the house,” Beegle says one afternoon.

“I still find it sort of distasteful to have this much space. But I’m sure I will fill it up with people!”

When she’s surrounded by her many friends and family, Beegle slips back into the “aints” of her old language. Everyone talks at once, and it soon becomes apparent why Bob Fulford (who died in 2000) once called Beegle the most “oral-cultured person” he’d ever met.

“That’s the language difference between my people and the middle class,” says Beegle. ”Everyone talks at the same time, and the subjects are usually the latest crisis or someone’s relationship or what happened to someone. It’s as though when all you have is the people around you, that’s what you focus on. And it’s the difference between oral culture and print culture. People get almost all of their information verbally. There’s lots of repetition and spontaneity. Compared to the middle class, people stand closer and talk louder. Middle-class people usually talk one at a time, and the subjects tend to be travel and food and money and what they’ve bought for their homes.”

Beegle does have middle-class friends, and enjoys a fine meal and a good glass of wine, something that didn’t exist in her homeland. She’s always amused when these friends ask her — she who spent so much time homeless, endured countless evictions and slept so often in the backs of cars — to go camping.

“Sleep outside in a tent?” Beegle says. “But I’ve just gotten used to heat and running water!”

Beegle is, though, not completely at home in her new nation.

“There are aspects of the middle and upper class I don’t respect,” says Beegle. “So many find it so easy to write another human being off. I’ll never be able to do that.”

Neither will most of the people she trains, from teachers to prison guards to judges to politicians.

“I grew up believing that no one who wasn’t in poverty cared about poverty,” Beegle says. “What I’ve learned from my work is that you can make people care, once you help them see the ways people are like each other, regardless of social class. We have the same needs, the same emotions, the same desires. When I can show someone of privilege how they and I are alike, it’s transformative for them. In education, in social work, in law enforcement, in government, once people put aside the assumptions and stereotypes they have always used to get rid of guilt, they can really begin to connect, to understand the real causes and behaviors of generational poverty. Most of these groups are trained to keep their distance from the people they work with, and that couldn’t be more wrong. As long as we are ‘other,’ we’ll never break through.”

A few days later, a woman walks to the front of a group of single mothers on welfare. She is poised, well-dressed, well-spoken. She commands respect. Perhaps someone in the audience will hang on her every word. Perhaps there will be a glimpse of a distant shore. Donna Beegle begins, “A few years ago, I was sitting where you are...”

Todd Schwartz (schwartz@spiritone.com) has written deft profiles of many University alumni, among them brain scientist Mike Merzenich ’64, the courtly grocer Gene Wizer ’60, nurse Joan Moye ’73, surfing legend and inventor Jack O’Neill ’49, music-education visionaries Charles Lewis ’94 and Michelle Boss Barba ’00, and Columbia Sportswear’s legendary Gert Boyle ’97 hon.

The University’s Office for Volunteer Services places student volunteers in many programs that help families in poverty change their circumstances. Help stop the cycle of poverty and create more advocates like Donna Beegle by making a gift in support of volunteer services.