available to propel us. until women say this is going to be over. we are half of the population. there's no reason for our women and for our children to be in poverty. there's no justifiable reason except complacency and unwillingness of women to do what was done in the first part of the -- the early part of the 20th century that made it possible for us to be on the platform today. >> women aren't just half the population. women make up the majority. you are right, i'm augmenting. i am not disagreeing, just augmenting. i was going to say women make the majority of americans in poverty. i raise that because back to what the labor secretary said earlier. i want to get everybody involved and mix it up. there are people who haven't spoken yet. let me make the round and we

will come back. i want to go to cecilia fire thunder, one because i love saying that name, cecilia fire thunder. please welcome cecilia fire thunder. [ applause ] i want to come to you, cecilia because, cecilia, and all of these women have compelling stories. suze and i have been friends for a long time. suze was born in to poverty on the south side of chicago. everyone has a great story. but cecilia has a story that is just mind boggling, thank you, for me. so often these conversations we don't include our knave american brothers and sisters. i'm so gladded to have her here for that particular reason, number one, but when my friend, dr. cornel west who's in the audience somewhere when we took a poverty tour around the country, we started on a native american reservation. when we asked for this

documentary about poverty in america about the recession. how has the great recession inl pacted you. you know what the women said to us, what recession what recession? it is always this way for us on the reservation. so cecilia fire thunder is a single mom, she has two kids. she goes on to become a nurse so she can take care of her kids. she later runs for office and becomes the first woman to be the president of her sioux tribe. it is a wonderful story of single mothers. [ applause ] >> of single mothers exercising their own agency. so when dr. malveaux says we don't even keep track of what happens on the reservation, cecilia fire thunder, tell me what it is like for poor women and their children trying to navigate life on think the reservation where the recession means nothing to them because it is so much worse. >> i'm one of millions of

american women's identified as native american. we represent a little over 500 tribes in america, large and small. the largest being the halve zero and the largest is my reservation, 2.5 million acres of land. 40,000 citizens living in my country. over half of our population are 18 and under. he talks about what recession. during the depression, i can recall my father and uncles talking, what depression? so, america, unfortunately, there's a huge piece of land between l.a. and new york city called middle america, where we live. many of the indian reservations are in middle america. we have much land, a lot of poverty. one of the things that i like to remind audience, is the american indians are the only ones mentioned in article 6 of the

united states constitution where, in fact, the quote is to honor all treaties made by this government and the united states of america. so, when we go to washington, d.c., and we're always in washington, d.c. trying to get one more penny for health care, one more penny for education. the question arises, if we are mentioned in the constitution of this country's founding documents, why are we always hustling around trying to get more money to address the poverty in our communities? the other thing i want to be very clear is that we have at this point, that the majority of the women who work in tribal communities are women. and most of them are college graduates in our tribal community are women. many of the positions held in our tribal communities, whether they be principals, superintendents or teachers are women. so, when you take a look at this huge leadership amongest women

in our tribal communities, you know, when people say why are women, indian women taking the lead? we have a lot of entrepreneurs. we have small businesses. one of the greatest challenges that we face in our tribal communities is access, access. we have so rural and isolated, it's really difficult to get from point a to point b. and then you factor in poverty. and then that makes access even more difficult to get to a grocery store to make sure your food dollars go further. to get tot a town to see a specialist. so when we look at where indian people live, we are looking at isolation and large miles between point a and b. that makes it difficult many times. in the city, you have subways and mass transit. in our rural communities we don't have that. yes, poverty exists and has existed for many, many years in

o our driebl communities. and it will continue to exist unless some changes are made unless opportunities are made for young women to go back to schools. we change the snap laws, there are many federal programs that may look good, but actually when you start to implement those programs it makes it difficult for people in rural communities to be able to use those types of services and programs. one of the other things that's been successful is getting our young women back in to school. we have a high dropout rate. it is connected to other social problems. i could sit here and talk about everything. however, in many tribal communities, like mine, women have stepped up to leadership roles. as the first woman president of my tribe, i'm sorry, white women have a glass ceiling. how many of you have heard about the glass ceiling. indian americans don'ten have a

glass ceiling. we have a buckskin ceiling. [ laughter ] >> the buckskin ceiling works like this. buckskin is pliable. so it stretches. so for many years they made -- we felt like we were really making progress. we'd get only so far and it knocks us flat on our rear end. what it is, that is internalized depression and how in our communities of color we hold each other back. not only women -- thank you for making that comment, women hold us back but sometimes some of our men hold us back. and this is where the buckskin ceiling came in to play. one of the things i wanted to share with you is i took my oath of office to be the leader of my nation. i was given a knife, a symbolic gesture to use this knife to cut through red tape and go and to places where there's barriers.

i tell the story because it is so true. the first person that cut the buckskin ceiling was a man killer. the next person made another little cut may have been wynonna laduke. so there were women cutting the buckskin ceiling. so on the day of my inauguration, i took my knife and i went -- and it opened up. [ applause ] and the symbolic gesture was giving indian women permission to do what i did. >> i want to go to randy winegartn in a second. because i want to get to education in a second. what is, d.c. doc and i spend some time on a reservation with young people. give me a sense of what life is like for a poor child in a tribal community, a poor child on a reservation.

>> it is very challenging. when you look at poverty it always -- a tribal community in south dakota one, two and three. one in cheyenne river and number two is pine ridge. we have eight tribes in south dakota and they are both in the state of south dakota. so many of our children are in communities but there are many financial challenges. that's a nice way of saying being poor. and being poor has been multigenerational and mull being poor is ongoing. we have -- one of the things i want to be clear about is our educational systems which are funded not only by the united states government but by the state of south dakota is our children have access to pretty good education. they get on a school bus which is paid by the government. they come to a school paid for by the government and they go to

a classroom paid for by the government. so when you have high rates of poverty, a lot of children go without. they go without other things that other children might benefit from. on the other side of that coin one thing i noticed about communities of poverty is everybody has a tv. everybody has a television set. everybody -- they can find a way to put all of their resources together to get some things that those children could benefit from watching television perhaps. because of the poverty, we have many, many households that are mixed. we have many people living in one household. because, here again, the housing situation is at a crisis and has always been at crisis. so we have multiple families living together in one household. therein creates another problem. the statistics are out there in terms of who we are and where we are at. my sister talked about the -- there's little data on indian women and poverty.

however, there's there. i just wanted to celebrate the tenaciousness of indian women. indian women are so awesome. they are resilient. and you know what else? they are really smart and they are auto mechanics. strong enough to lift a car. >> you got me on that one. >> i know. and i cannot encapsulate that in a short period of time. however, you go on a website anywhere and you will find all of that data. >> i thank you. >> randy, i promised i was coming to you. as i said this conversation would not be possible here at nyu if it were not for the generation support of the american federation of teachers. to please welcome their leader randi winegarten. i can jump right to this because the link to education or the lack of a quality education and poverty is so well established in this country. that's the one thing we don't have to debate.

even republicans agree there's a link between miseducation and lack thereof. so no debate there. so the what is the link between poverty and the child's ability to learn in the classroom? >> i'm glad you asked that question. my colleagues here are so much better at the statistics than i am. let me just start by saying thank you. we don't ever talk about poverty enough. it's always a one off and the fact that you are making this a priority so that we shine the light on poverty so no one can say it can be ignored. thank you very much. [ applause ] i find it in my field just morally reprehensible that the debate is a total false choice of the moment you utter the word poverty if you are a

schoolteacher you immediately get, well, you are using it as an excuse. i don't want to use it as an excuse. i want to mitigate it. i want to make sure we address it. there's a bunch of things we need to do in terms of the advocacy, which this town hall is a part of, but also in terms of the interventions which people don't believe we can do. so i think ufr to have both tracks a the same time. so, on the question we asked is about the interventions. right now what we see, there is a 40% achievement gap between rich and poor kids. >> 40? >> four zero. >> that's double the achieving gap between black and white kids. 40%. 40%. >> rich and poor is that much worse than black and white? >> right. stanford study. that's before the recession. 44% of children in the united

states of america live in low-income households right now. 44%. it goes back to dr. malveaux's point about priorities. we know one third of the achieve gap, whichever achievement gap you want to talk about happens for a child between zero and 5 years old. because kids are so nimble then. that's when they are sponges and pick it all up. one third. we also know that when there is a good, early childhood program, everybody, republicans, democrats, everybody loves early childhood. there is a rate of return on investment for $7 for every $1 you invest in early childhood. don't know too many investments better than that. so, less than 30% of 4-year-olds

are in publicly funded 4-year-old pre-k programs in the united states of america. so we know it works. we know it is a great rate of return. we know particularly for kids who are poor, if we can get them in, it's fantastic, and we know, take a place like new york, my hometown, it's harder to get in to a pre-k program here than it is to get in to harvard. [ applause ] that is -- so when you talk about the issue of austerity, this is an intervention that we know will work. and why are we not doing it? not just doing it on a pilot program and secretary of education has a pilot program trying to put some, you know, money together.

mr. pltz -- [ applause ] i got a number of foulups on that and you do some great work. when you talk about education, particularly college education, there's no community pushing harder on this issue than our hispanic brothers and sisters. these dream act has to get passed. it had to get passed, it has to get passed. it has to get passed. [ applause ] nelly galon is a latina, she is an entrepreneur has other own company doing a great of great

work to engage and involve women. in case you have been looking at her, where do i know the face from "celebrity apprentice." you say ah-ha. so welcome nelly galon. "celebr" please welcome nellie gallon. with regards -- i have never seen a community that people want to exploit more politically, socially, economically, culturally, people want to exploit them in so many ways, and yet i have never seen a committee that madison avenue here in new york craves more. they're trying to get to latino moms more aggressively than any other consumer in the country right now. and i wonder if you might speak to that dichotomy between being exploreded on the one hand and being craved on other hand. >> it's very difficult for us

all to read continue wall statistics about us that don't really explain who we r are. it's kind of like a downer, and are kind of framed in a way that make us feel that something's wrong with us and we are taking something away from this country. and the dichotomy is that when you go to consumer products companies and to advertisers, they look at us as we're the greatest thing since sliced bread. we're living in a multicultural society. 30%s of country is multicultural and 60% of that group are latino, and by the year 2030, we will be 30% of this country. so they look at it like, the more money you make, the more money we make.

i think nobody really ever says how do we think? do you know that latinas come from latin america or where our families have come from latin america, where banks have defaulted, where we live in cash societies. where someone like me could not grow up to be like me. i could never be an entrepreneur in some other latin-american country. so we come here in gratitude and hard work. when we hear things about poverty, and our relation to poverty, it's a little shocking because we don't live in a state of mind of poverty, we think it's a transitional thing. we have been in and out of poverty for generations and it doesn't mean we're stuck there. i think that's very important. latinos do not see ourselves as stuck in poverty, ever.

we are working toward the american dream and that's why we came here and we will do whatever it takes. and latin women, the reason wall street is so after latin moms is they took the same staticstics about policy. where was the good number? that's very important. and the number they found is that in the middle of the worst economy in the united states, when everything was horrible. when latinos were in the worst boat, latino moms out of nowhere were striking out in the numbers, latino moms were striking out in business. they didn't want their kids to go under the bus. and so when i looked at those numbers, i said to myself, oh,

my god, you know, what are these women missing? they even went and drilled it down, what is it that they need? if they went from here to here, we make more money, and they make more money. the consumer products companies want us to make more money because then they make more money. they want us to go here into .1% that would bring us to a whole other league of financial success. what they immediate is women. latinas with latinas, so they know what other latinas have been through. they need african-american women, white women to bring in information that they don't have. and they need to know how to access capital. they need to know how to get a government contract, how to get money from advertisers who give away 10% of their contracts to women owned business.

i decided i was going to start a movement for latinas, because there's never been a movement for latinas. so i engaged advertisers, because they get it. i don't have to explain it to them. sometimes politicians, it's like talking to the walls, you know what? let's talk to the people that already get us. advertisers know the most important thing we have in this country is our buying power. what we purchase, we have rights for that purchase power. we don't realize that if we just bought from each other, we would all be rich. so we started a tour in december and we're going to go to the country and all the information all the other people get, we're going give it to latinas. we have to remember something else that i hear in these board

rooms all the time. if we want to ask people for something, then we have to come through too. if we're asking for the government to do something, then we're asking to vote. if we're asking a corporation to give us money, we have to buy their products. if we are asking a network to put more african-american and latinos and native americans on tv, then we have to watch their shows. it can't just be a one-way street. we're no longer in a world, the world has changed. it's not about them giving to us. we have the power to make our break their companies. we are the main stream. >> please welcome suze orman. suze's latest "new york times" best seller, they all are,

thanks to you "the money class, how to stand in your truth and create the future you deserve". suze, last time i saw you, you said something to me that just arrested me. and let me just tell you, i've been using this line across the country. and i haven't been given you the attribution for it either. >> and i know what the line was. >> what was it. >> that there is a highway into poverty and there is not even a sidewalk out. >> that's it. >> i know when i say something that's good. >> that was it, by the way. >> i heard you. >> the whole nation knows i'm stealing from suze orman. if that's true across the board,

how much more true is it for women and children, that there's a highway in, but not even a sidewalk out? >> i've been sitting here and i've been listening, aren't you all surprised how quiet i've been? because i've been listening deeply. and listening deeply because they're all good reasons that we are here, the docongress this, e education this, the whole thing, it all in my opinion boils down to is what is every single person in this audience today, what is every single person that is watching this program today, tonight, listening to it on the radio, what are you going to do for yourselves. women are very interesting to me

and it is no doubt that women have the ability to give birth, no most cases. in most cases, women have the ability to feed that which they have given birth to. so on some level, it is a woman's nature to nurture. and she, in my opinion will nurture every single person, spouse, family member, pet, plant, employer, employee, before she will nurture herself. and so the reason that i think it affects women and children more than it affects men is women stick by their children. women stick to what they have brought into this w