2. FATHER JOSEPH WRESINSKI
Founder of International Movement ATD Fourth World.
Launched the International Day of the Eradication of Poverty.
Member of the French Economic and Social Council.
3. I N T E R N A T I O N A L M OV E M E N T A T D
FOURTH WORLD
Which aimed towards the eradication of chronic poverty through a
human-rights based approach.
The International Movement ATD Fourth World conducted many
activities. (E.g. : To promote access to culture and education. )
4. WHY WAS THE
FOUNDATION FORMED?
Fr Joseph Wresinski was born to a poor immigrant family and
grew up living in great poverty and social exclusion.
He did not want anyone to be at a disadvantage because of their poverty.
He started to make the organization when he was assigned to be
a chaplain of 250 families placed in an emergency housing camp
in France
He noticed that the families lived in quonset huts erected in a muddy field with just four public spigots
providing water for all of them.
He did not like the kitchen soup kitchen there, and therefore closed it, stating that “it is not so much food or
clothes that these people are in need of, but dignity, and to not have to depend on other people's goodwill”.
5. ATD’S PRINCIPLES
The fight to eradicate poverty - a human rights approach
-Rather than distributing emergency aid, ATD Fourth World seeks to create
sustainable cultural projects designed together with people living in great poverty. It
attempts to change the way society sees people living in poverty and social exclusion. "We
are not here to manage poverty, but to destroy it", said Joseph Wresinski.
6. Priority given to people living in the most extreme situations
of poverty
-ATD Fourth World works with individuals, families and groups struggling with
poverty, in urban and rural areas. It breaks with traditional top-down ways of dealing with
chronic poverty, by enabling those with first-hand experience of poverty and exclusion to
meet policy makers, researchers and others on equal ground to pool their expertise in the
struggle against poverty.
