Message to the Congress Transmitting First Report of the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity.

To the Congress of the United States:

America's War on Poverty is fought on many fronts, with many weapons. Dozens of programs span the entire spectrum of human need. They range from increased social security benefits to financial aid for slum schools; from medical care for the poor and aged to a higher minimum wage for the Nation's workers.

In their varying ways, all these programs have helped to improve the conditions of life for millions of Americans in the past five years.

With the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the Nation mapped a concentrated poverty-fighting strategy around two basic concepts.

The first was that assistance to the poor would be most meaningful in the form of expanded opportunities--in jobs, education and training. Consequently, the programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity are designed to help a man increase his skill and earning power, and broaden his opportunity to participate in the mainstream of the country's economic and social life.

The second concept was that poverty can ultimately be defeated only by action at the local level--in the cities and towns and rural areas where it holds a paralyzing grip on people's lives. Programs and guidelines can be drawn up and administered in Washington and in regional and State headquarters. But their effectiveness depends on how they turn to action in the neighborhoods where the poor live.

This is the concept of Community Action. In principle, it means that the citizens of a community--government officials, welfare and other agency representatives, and members of the poor themselves plan and carry out comprehensive attacks on the causes and conditions of poverty in their area, tailoring a wide variety of special programs to the particular needs of that community.

The National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity which the Congress established to review the operation of programs under the Economic Opportunity Act, focused its attention in its first year primarily on Community Action as an instrument to combat poverty. In its first report, which I am transmitting to the Congress today, the Council documents the effect of Community Action in practice.

The report tells what the anti-poverty program has meant to a Mexican American migrant worker who lived with his wife and eight children in a shack in Visalia, California. When he could find work, he earned less than $2,200 a year. When he could not, his family existed on welfare.

He had never gone beyond grade school. But when an adult education course was made available--through a Community Action Program--he enrolled, and earned the equivalent of a high school diploma.

He then signed up for another program and received on-the-job training as a butcher. Through still other programs he was able to get a low-interest loan for a decent home-and learn enough construction skills to help build the house himself and thus provide his equity with his own labor.

Locally organized counselling services gave him his first guidance in how to budget his newly earned income, pay his debts, and start a savings account.

The effect on that man's life is nothing less than a shattering of the pattern of poverty and failure in which he and his children were born.

Not all the stories of success through these programs are as complete. For the great work we have undertaken to banish poverty from America must proceed against stubborn problems of long entrenchment.

But the great story of our day is that we are moving. The heartening success which has transformed the life of a migrant worker in Visalia is quietly reflected--at least in part--in the lives of millions of men and women and youngsters across this land.

Today there are about 1,000 Community Action Agencies operating in every part of the United States.

City and county government officials, school officers, health and welfare councils, and federally financed agencies are working with the poor for the first time to attack the roots of poverty. Neighborhood centers are being established and strengthened to provide greater access to social, health, welfare and other 'public services for those who need them most.

However difficult these accomplishments are to measure statistically, they have had great impact in terms of new hope, an increased sense of citizenship, and better days in the minds and the lives of many poor citizens.

I think it is vitally important that the American public understand what these programs have done and can yet do to break the cycle of poverty.

This report will contribute to that understanding. I am pleased to commend it to the attention of the Congress.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

The White House

June 18, 1968