Poverty hurts.
Maybe not physically, although that can happen sometimes, too — and that doesn’t take into account the mental, emotional, social, and even spiritual aspect of that complex problem.
Fortunately for Chatham County residents, the grassroots organization UPLIFT (an acronym for Understanding Poverty: Lifting Individuals and Families Together) Chatham is hard at work trying to bring both awareness of and solutions to local poverty.
While definitions and descriptions of poverty vary depending on the agency talking about it, most often it centers around family income and the ability to acquire basic needs. Saturday’s UPLIFT “Poverty Awareness Day” workshop brought that point and more into sharp focus for the diverse motivated people attending it at Chatham United Methodist Church.
John Moore, founder and executive director of UPLIFT, which began in 2012 and was formerly known as Circles Chatham, pointed out at the workshop that while there are several goals, the overarching intent of the work is to break the cycle of generational poverty and “to help people build themselves up.”
“That takes relationships,” he says, “with people and with coordinating with agencies. We’re working now on a pilot program for 2020 to do that.”
Moore reaffirmed the organization’s goal was to break the cycles of poverty by identifying and targeting problems and finding solutions that promote a better way of life for county residents.
Attendees at the event learned that poverty is also complex. There are different kinds, different reasons, different responses. And the overall question, when people think about it, is “What do we do about it?” or sometimes “Is there even anything we can do to combat it?” A sad reality, attendees learned, is often there are fewer people who think about poverty than those who do — but if you’re living in it, it’s a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week situation.
And it’s more than just a thought; it’s a way of life.
Joelle Brummitt-Yale has conducted research with UPLIFT and similar agencies for 15 years and said to attendees that the event would not be comprehensive but “to help you start or continue your journey...to evaluate your views, to understand the complexity of poverty, to see the challenges, and how families function.”
She went on to ask for perspectives on families living in poverty and got a wide range of answers — lack of basic resources, depression, multiple part-time jobs, few options, uncertainty, limited food and less access to health care, among others. While all those factors are present in poverty, she said, “poverty is hard to define but income is almost always the main factor.”
“Basically,” she said, “it means making less money than it takes to live on.”
Several government agencies deal with poverty in the U.S. and locally, including the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Each of those three has its own income-based definition of poverty, Brummitt-Yale said, “so you see some of the complexity of dealing with the situation; even the government can’t agree.”
But the bottom line is that of the current pre-census population of Chatham County — 73,139 persons — a total of 13.3 percent fall below income levels defining poverty, a figure that is slightly better than the state average of 16.1 percent.
“Of those numbers,” she said, “the highest concentration of individuals in poverty is found among children under 5 — at 24 percent. The smallest are individuals over 55, at 7.2 percent.”
Those three federal agencies break down their data this way: Health & Human Services says annual income for a family of three (one adult, two children) to be considered in poverty is $21,330 while for a family of four (two adults, two children) the income is $25,570. The Census Bureau puts those same two categories at $19749 and $24,858, respectively, while USDA figures show $27,014 and $32,630.
Chatham County has two primary locales identified as poverty areas, based on federal income guidelines — the southwestern corner and central Siler City.
“The huge gaps in deficiencies leads to families living in poverty, becoming generational poverty and receiving services to help make ends meet,” Brummitt-Yale says. “What we’ve found out is that 40 per cent of Chatham County residents are not fully self-sufficient.”
Complicating the issue, she says, is that poverty levels don’t come close to reflecting the actual costs of living families face, typically about two times the poverty rate for just a basic budget. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study revealed that a living wage in Chatham County for a family of three (one adult, two children) needs to be $59,942 while for a family of four with one adult working the figure is $53,560; with two adults working the amount is $65,520. A United Way study shows a family of three needs $53,394 and a family of four, $60,757.
“You can see there’s a gap,” Brummitt-Yale said. “The system was set up to support people in crisis but today it’s locked up in generational situations.”
She added that there are barriers within the system, such as one called the “Cliff Effect.” That refers to the way assistance benefits — such as food stamps, child care, children’s health care insurance, and others — are calculated. As people improve their incomes, benefits will decrease and usually at a higher rate. The net effect is a lower effective income, which doesn’t provide incentive to do better.
“The system is not matched with reality,” she said. “People wonder why should they keep doing this when they’re getting further behind.”
As a part of the Poverty Awareness Day workshop, attendees were given an opportunity to participate in a mock exercise by forming families and trying to exist for a month on poverty level incomes, providing a “hands-on” component to the earlier presentation and discussion.
Both Moore and Brummitt-Yale encouraged attendees to further their personal understanding, to improve their relationships with people in poverty and to become more involved in supporting basic needs. One obvious way, Brummitt-Yale said in her closing remarks, is to “work with UPLIFT Chatham as we work on an integrated service model to connect people to resources.
“We encourage you to find your passion and get involved.”
For more information, visit www.UPLIFTChaham.org.
The Cost of Poverty Experience (COPE) poverty simulation was a real eye-opening experience for me. Each participant takes on a role within a family in crisis. The COPE stands out in that the families profiled in the simulation are based on real people — folks who were willing to capture their family situations for the creation of this simulation. That helped bring the simulation to life. We were each asked to navigate as that family member for a simulated one month, doing all the things you can imagine in real life.
If you have a job, you need to go to work. If you’re an adult without a job, you probably need to find a job. If you have children, how will you care for them? There’s school for school-age kids, yet what about younger children and what about after school care?
In my simulation, I was fortunate to start out with a job. But I had no car. I had to figure out a way to get from place to place. Transportation is real problem for many in Chatham County. COPE creatively simulates various methods of travel such as buying gas if you own a car, getting a bus pass, and even walking through town.
Then there are bills to pay (e.g. rent, food, utilities) requiring money, of course, yet also the time to shop and to make the payments. After working all day, there’s not much time for such things. And there seems to lines of people everywhere.
All in all it was powerful since I got to experience poverty from the standpoint of a real person with the stresses, chaos, lack of planning time and sense of hopelessness which seems ever present. After the workshop, I was able to go home to my usual life. Yet I now have a much better understanding and empathy for what some of our Chatham neighbors experience every single day. I think everyone who works with families with low income or who hasn’t personally experienced poverty would benefit from this workshop offered by UPLIFT Chatham.
— John Moore