There's a reason poor people are often described as "mired in poverty." To be "mired" is to be stuck in something that's hard to get out of, and that's sure true of poverty. Whether people are born there or fall into it, they tend to be stuck -- struggling to slog forward only to be pulled back.

Poverty too often means bad neighborhoods, bad schools, bad health, bad attitude -- a lot of weight to struggle against, a lot of forces perpetuating the problem. For example, getting an education is the best way to increase your chance of getting out of poverty, yet poor children too often live in areas with inferior or ill-equipped schools.

And in Michigan, there are 500,000 children among the more than 2 million people living at or near the poverty level of $21,200 in annual income for a four-person household. These are people who struggle every day with work, family, transportation and utilities. The rest of the population can try to ignore them, but cannot deny their impact or the reality that Michigan would be a much stronger state with fewer people "mired" and more moving up.

But the state is going the other way as the auto-dependent economy continues to shrivel, driving more and more Michigan residents into a place they've never known.

"We have so many families come in who need food and shelter lately," said Cindy Morton, 56, an early childhood nursing specialist who was among about 5,000 people in attendance at a state-sponsored Voices for Action Poverty Summit Thursday at Cobo Center in Detroit. "They're losing jobs and they're losing hope.

"Now that we're living in a time when people who have never known the possibility of poverty are suddenly feeling it, you just have to hope that everyone can get on the same page in terms of doing something to help."

The summit was envisioned by state Department of Human Services Director Ismael Ahmed as a way to both demonstrate the scale and impact of poverty in Michigan and bring service providers together to discuss problems and strategies to stabilize the lives of poor people.

The battered Michigan economy has the state high on the nation's misery index, at or near the top of such unfavorable categories as mortgage foreclosures, unemployment and growth in poverty. Michigan's 2-million-plus poor people include about a third who are labeled "food insecure," a government way of saying they regularly go hungry.