Poverty: Easing the Pain, Part 2

NOTE: This entry continues two previous posts--"Poverty Sim: Walk in My Shoes" and "Poverty: Easing the Pain, Part 1."

REMINDER: The ideas included in this blog post are not terribly new—most have been at least attempted. And, keep in mind that my goal in sharing these ideas is NOT to end poverty, but simply to remove some of the stresses that are added to poor people’s lives because they are poor. Most of these ideas are met with skepticism, others with outright hostility. Alas. I can’t let a negative reception keep me from putting all of these ideas together in writing in a publicly available forum.

ODJFS: Burn-out prevention Thanks to cutbacks in almost every program for poor people, county Job & Family Services departments across the state are under great stress. They have laid off workers to cut their budgets at the same time that the number of people requiring services has soared. This puts the remaining workers—the ones charged with helping the poor—under great stress.

          I call upon my own memory of the poverty simulation I participated in recently. I was the mortgage banker in this valuable role-play experience, collecting rent and mortgage payments from poor people. The rapidity with which I developed an intolerance and even a scorn for the people I served was shocking to me. It was stressful to see that I was powerless to help and was often the agent of pain for my customers. I don’t know if this bears on the stress carried by JFS caseworkers, but I have seen some workers treat some clients with the same rudeness and eye-rolling that came over me in the simulation.

          These workers need help. They need a plan for burn-out prevention. I don’t know what the plan would be—massages at work? Weekly debriefing sessions? Free coffee and bagels every morning? New desk chairs? (OK, the desk chair thing is personal—I know a new desk chair would be valuable to me personally.) I think regular infusions of food from our local wunder-chef, Chef Mary from Flutes & Peppercorns, would be a welcome stress reliever. Anyway, something needs to be done for these dedicated professionals to help them feel like something other than a paper-pusher or payment policer.

Expand OBB (Ohio Benefit Bank) The Ohio Benefit Bank (OBB) is a wonderful computer program that determines likely eligibility for various programs, from food stamps to FAFSA, from TANF to tax filing. (TANF is “temporary assistance for needy families,” pronounced TAN-iff.)  Individuals may process themselves through the OBB program, but usually a trained volunteer guides the data collection and entry. OBB is a one-stop application process; applications are generated and sent directly to appropriate agencies, whether it is for your Golden Buckeye Card or for WIC for your baby.

          OBB can be used anywhere there is a computer and internet service (like our shiny new McDonalds in McArthur). Or, it can be used at your bedside at a retirement home. Or, you can use it by yourself on a computer at the library. The casualness of the settings removes barriers for many people, especially people who are dropping painfully out of the middle class and cannot face going “up on the hill” (as we say about Vinton County’s JFS) to apply for assistance.

          Some Job & Family Services offices see OBB as a competitor—something that is eroding their authority. OBB counters that the program only allows people to apply for benefits more easily—JFS still has total control over determination and administration of benefits. I hope that these two entities can find a way to co-exist or even cooperate in bringing services to poor people.

Appalachia last in line: 2-1-1 The twenty or so counties who still do not have 2-1-1 information line service are all in counties designated as poor and Appalachian. The Appalachian counties that do have 2-1-1 are often serviced through neighboring non-Appalachian counties—and that’s fine.

          But a county like Vinton is surrounded by other struggling counties. Who is going to step up? Where is the funding going to come from? The United Way is the implementer of 2-1-1 in many counties, but my United Way only has one part-part-time employee—me.

          I think It’s funny that between United Way and my other employer, I am sort of a mini-2-1-1, a referral service to a range of callers. And my efforts pale compared to the real 2-1-1 woman in Vinton County—Brandi Betts of the Chamber of Commerce. Thank you, Brandi, for your patience with so many random requests for information.

          2-1-1 would assist every resident to navigate among care providers, find the food pantries, find Sojourners for runaway and homeless youth services or for Youthbuild or work programs. 2-1-1 would focus only on helping and not be torn by numerous other responsibilities. When are the poor people of Appalachian Ohio going to get it?

Subsidize family activities: The free ride I remember from my own impoverished childhood what it felt like to  be left out, what it meant to never go to the amusement park everyone else was excited about, to never ride the rides at the county fair. That’s just one reason I am proposing that we find ways to subsidize rides at local events such as McArthur’s Wild Turkey Festival (no, not THAT kind of Wild Turkey) and the Vinton County Junior Fair.

          When I mention this idea, many people respond with outright hostility. They refuse to consider it. As I often observe, there is a feeling that the poor must be punished for being poor.

          But I insist. Let’s find funding for all children to ride free. It shouldn’t be necessary for families to sacrifice food or rent money to make sure their kids can ride the rides.

         In Vinton County, where 90% of schoolchildren qualify for free lunch (highest percentage in Ohio), the school district recently decided to just give free lunch to every child. Everyone gets to eat. No more stigma of being identified as one of the free lunch kids. This generous act may have been the result of financial realities, but it is the free lunch for all attitude of the schools that made me think about free rides at local events. Now, where do we apply for the free tilt-a-whirl grants?

My parents used a pencil and
ruler to make their own
spreadsheet.

Sidebar: The Frugal Poor--My Parents

          My family was poor--poorer than my sisters and I really understood. As with all children, our own family was the norm--we couldn't believe what went on in other families! Others were "less" normal than us.

         What set my family apart from other poor families is that my parents had a plan. From their church, they learned about budgeting and tithing and record-keeping. (To figure your tithing, you had to keep track of your income and expenses--sort of like God was your shareholder.) We always asked whether something was a necessity--and the opposite of "necessity" was "no." There was always a big sheet of paper magnetized to the fridge, on which my mom or dad would record anything we spent individually or as a family. This was a good thing and kept us off public assistance and kept us housed, clothed, and fed. We even had some savings. 

         However--yep, there's a "however"--the budget of my parents didn't allow for much extravagance in the fun-having department. Our gifts from Santa were a bit on the practical side (while our poorer neighbor kids received a lavish haul every year--we were jealous). And only once do I remember going on a non-church-camp vacation. (We hardly knew what to do with ourselves.) And we seldom rode the rides or saw the latest Disney movie.

We always got "books" of Lifesavers for
Christmas--and socks and underwear, of course.

         I felt that I was privy to some deep knowledge in terms of how my parents handled money. I knew my parents were doing the right thing. But I hated it. I had wants that just wouldn't go away--my wants had way more to do with not seeming peculiar than about a deep urge to ride a Ferris wheel or eat an elephant ear or see a movie. I became my own outcast, went about in my own world, became mentally inventive, grew into a writer. But I have never lost the outsider mentality fostered by my parents' budgeting zeal (and other family peculiarities, of course). I'm pretty frugal, too, and it has kept me marginally afloat during the past several lean years. But it's still not fun. Free rides would be great.

Poverty: Easing the Pain, Part 1

NOTE: Please read my previous blog post, "Poverty Sim: Walk in My Shoes," before you read this one. It will put into perspective my motivation for continuing to brainstorm about poverty.

Admirable hours--most banks close at 5:00 most
days and are closed on Sunday, making it hard for
working people to get their banking done.

Poverty: Yuck. Poor people: Can't be punished enough for being poor. Or that is how it often looks to me. It seems like every piece of assistance comes with a value judgment attached, or with a sneer, or with a shower of condescension. Those people are poor because that's what they want. They don't want to work. All they want is a handout, all they do is suck the surplus out of the economy.

I hear these attitudes all the time, from my middle class friends, from political candidates, from the very people who serve the poor. Harsh words for the despised, the discarded.

Yes, I know I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but I do not want to end poverty. What I would like to do is restore respect for a group of people who work very hard, even when it doesn't earn money; who care deeply about their children and their children's futures; who jump over a hundred hurdles a day and never get to the finish line. I would like to find ways

(1) not to end poverty, but to ease some of its worst stresses;
(2) to remove some of the chains that bind people to poverty;
(3) to establish dignity for every person regardless of whether they get food assistance or subsidized childcare, or work in a jobs program instead of "real" job.

Many BHPH car dealers overcharge for the car,
loan at obscene rates of interest, repossess
fast, and sell the same car again.
(Rinse and repeat.)

Heather Pennington from the Ohio Association of Food Banks said she wanted to know more about the people in my county (Vinton, perennially one of the poorest in Ohio) and what might help them, in food terms and in general. Accordingly, I have been brainstorming with myself (always fun to call on my many selves), with co-workers, with the internet. Every time I came up with something, I wrote it on a little piece of paper and stuck it into an envelope. Last week I had a wonderful time hashing all the ideas out with Heather and her associate Dawn on the front porch of my ramshackle bungalow on the edge of McArthur. I think they were wondering exactly how many little pieces of paper were in that envelope.

Heather asked me to type up the list for her and I thought: "Bing! If I'm going to type, I might as well type right into a blog entry, then cut and paste them to her." Never waste a keystroke. So, here it is--my list of ways to make the lives of poor people in my region less stressful and more productive.

DISCLAIMER: My purpose in this blog today is not to discuss feasibility or all the problems people have had who tried to implement any of these ideas in the past. And, these ideas are not new. People know these ideas. But implementation has been sporadic and best and non-existent at worst. Keep in mind--I am not trying to end poverty, just to ease the stress and strain of it.

Enough caveat emptor. Here we go.

Barefoot and pregnant: Cheap and easy birth control.

Early pregnancies make possible
the classic 5-generation family photo
and allow for the rise of a matriarch
whose power crosses many
generations.

I know that condoms are cheap and easy, but men don't like them and often won't use them. That's why this strategy is directed toward women preventing their own accidental pregnancies through the patch, the pill, the shot, the shield. These do not prevent sexually transmitted diseases, but that's not the issue that drains the energy out of our women. The shot and the shield would help in the prevalent but under-reported instances when the man throws the birth control pills or the diaphragm in the wood stove and insists on having sex anyway; or when sex is only marginally consensual; or when the husband will not let his wife have the car to go to a doctor's appointment. My local domestic violence shelter can tell you some horror stories about how "accidental" pregnancies are often associated with family abuse. They exposed my own condescension on this issue.


Have I put your nose out of joint yet? Read on....

This is a quaint vision of the parent-teacher
conference...but I mainly selected this picture
because Bob Cousy is featured in this issue.

School conferences on Saturday and Sunday. Yes, each child's whole family may come along, and yes, teachers definitely need to be compensated in some way for doing this. But I am advocating weekend parent-teacher conferences--let's have a party. Get some pizzas cooking; get some Ski delivered from the local distributor; plan some entertainment for whoever is waiting around in the cafetorium. I do not buy the stereotype that poor parents don't care about their kids' education. They have many barriers to weekday conferences--no paid time off from work, being fired for absence from work, distance from work places, multiple users for one vehicle, no child care for the other children in the family or elder care for Grandma, no appropriate clothing for the institutional setting...are you getting the picture? I believe that, given the opportunity, poor people will demonstrate how much hope and concern for they have for the education and future chances of their children.

Stay with me now....

In Appalachia, the road to recovery is rocky and
full of detours and hairpin curves.

Community-based treatment and treatment beds. Every parole officer, social worker, and law enforcement officer, or anyone else whose life intersects with addicted people is familiar with this issue, and efforts have been made in my community to attempt to make help available locally. Too often, though, a person who desperately needs drug or alcohol addiction treatment has to wait weeks or sometimes months for a bed to open up--and the bed may be 50 to 150 miles away. These sufferers are often lost to the system by the time treatment is available.

We all know that the War on Drugs has neglected to supply funding for treatment. But in rural communities, this is especially serious. The number of counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, and mental health services in general is minuscule and services are far apart. I can't get blood work, a mammogram, and a bone density test without driving to three different towns more than 100 miles apart. Put me on drugs, give me a broken-down car and gas at $4.00 a gallon and I am not going to get to treatment.

The best painkillers are simple phrases of love and
appreciation.

The rural poor also suffer disproportionately from painkiller addiction. And it's not only the dealers who are getting rich. Drug-makers are dumping huge numbers of pain-killers into the system, and doctors are prescribing them. If you read my "Poverty Sim" blog entry, you'll remember the upstanding gentleman who ended up committing robbery to keep his family together--it wouldn't be a hard decision to sell just a couple of your pills to a neighbor. Twenty bucks could get your kid a nice outfit to start school in.

Are you getting me now? Still with me?

I apologize for dragging you through all this, but please don't tune out. I've got a lot more to share, but this blog entry is getting too long for a single-setting read (which violates my "rules of blog"). I'll try to post Part 2 on Monday.

Poverty Sim: Walk in My Shoes

Why am I interested in the poor?

First, I've been pretty poor at times, getting closer to the fire than I ever dreamed. Imagine Star Trek's Enterprise skimming the outer edge of a planet's atmosphere, feeling the heat, but pulling out just before being burned to a cinder. That's me and poverty. I've never really  had to land on that planet, live its culture, get wet from its rains, experience the upheavals of its plate tectonics. I've just skimmed. My parents were poor and I was raised poor, but Mom and Dad managed (through hard work and amazing self-sacrifice) to keep the nose of the ship just above the re-entry burn.

Second, I live in an impoverished rural area and work with low-income families. I am curious about the values and practices that are common to my home. And, from study (thank you, Ruby Payne) and observation, I see that most of the "help" that is applied to my region is misguided and sometimes damaging. There's nothing like help that feels like a smack in the face or that makes no allowance for local conditions, desires. My favorite image for the help applied to Appalachian communities is butter spread on cold toast. It just don't soak in. Interventions must be guided from within, not smeared on from without. Low-income people will tell us what they need. Will we listen?

Third, I am aware of my own good fortune and assets. My mind is good. I went to college. I have people who care about me. I have enough--I can move to the next level, enhancement. At the same time, I am aware that I am about two months away from full-blown poverty if I lose my job, need expensive medicines, or add a child to my household.

Fourth, humans have always been explorers, and I hope to be part of that long tradition. As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, I see that each person is his or her own planet, developed in response to very specific conditions; and yet we are all part of a phenomenal spider web of connection and commonality. (Thanks, Darwin.) If you would cross a concert harp with a spider web, you'd get a sense of the concerto of interdependence I'm talking about.

So, exploring other person-worlds and community-worlds and walking in the moccasins, pumps, trainers, wing-tips, steel-toes, flip-flops, fluffy pink house shoes, and plain old bare feet of this world is my favorite hobby. And, might as well start at home, right here in poverty-stricken but incredibly rich Vinton County, Ohio. That's why I'm interested in the poor. That's why last week I attended an exercise called a poverty simulation, in which a group of non-destitute middle Americans did a guided role-play of being poor. If you ever get a chance to participate in one of these, please do it. You'll be richer for a better understanding of the poor.

About 60 people filled up the social hall of the Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Ohio, to do a sort of being-John-Malkovich slide into someone else's--a poor person's--skin. The edges of the room were lined with tables representing community entities--Job & Family Services, a bank, a daycare center, the Quicky Cash vendor, utilities, the mortgage banker, a school, a workplace, Community Action, the homeless shelter, and jail. Inside this ring of tables were chairs grouped into any number between one and six chairs.

The chairs represented families. Out in the waiting area, each attendee was given an identity card. When the doors were opened, participants searched around until they found their "home" and met their "family." Each family had a packet of information, telling them all about themselves--age, medical condition, mortgage/rent obligations, placement of children, employment status...a demographic souffle. To simulate the money spent on transportation, each family was given transportation vouchers that had to be spent at EVERY stop they made. Lots of play money floated around.

The facilitator (from the Ohio Association of Food Banks) announced that the simulation would last a month--a month of 15-minute weeks. She would blow a whistle to announce the beginning and ending of each week. If you went to school or work, you had to spend 7 minutes there each week before you could go about your business. During the month, the family was to keep itself fed and housed and serviced with utilities. Week 3 was summer break from school. (One woman lost her "job" because she couldn't find daycare for Week 3.)

The groups dug right in, sometimes talking right over the facilitator in their urgency to get a plan together, to somehow make sense of their new lives. What do we do first? How do we get baby Jill (a 50-year-old man with a full beard) to daycare? Should we go for food or for transportation first? While you go to work, I'll drop the boy off at school, pick up my unemployment check, and go pay the mortgage... Oh, their plans sounded so great, logical and clear.

Except. Meet me, Joy the mortgage banker, one of the "providers." We had packets, too, giving us a set of activities for each week in the simulation. I had a "closed" sign. I had warning notices. I could evict. The careful planning blew up when the line was long at the bank and by the time you got to my office, the "closed" sign was out and I was walking through the community handing out overdue warnings. When I got back to my place of business, I could see a participant eagerly pushing through the crush to get to me. Then the whistle blew. That's one week late on the mortgage.

The simulation was loud and pushy. Common courtesies vanished. Raised voices. Arguments over who was next in line at the bank. One of the saddest reactions I saw (several times) was tired resignation, like when I refused to take a housing voucher because they were no longer accepted after Week 2 of the month. There was no flexibility in the rules. My mortgage banker self developed more rapidly than I thought possible into a confrontive and snotty worker. By Week 4, I was (to my shame) flipping groups of chairs over with a grim glee--the signal for eviction. When the evicted participants came to me to ask what was happening, I found myself saying (with shockingly smug superiority), "You're homeless--the shelter is right down the street."

One participant started an argument over getting incorrect change at the Quick Cash place, with police involvement. The police, of course, sided with the business owner and off the cheated man went to jail. While this argument was diverting everyone's attention, another participant, without even thinking, cleaned out Quick Cash's cash drawer and tripped merrily over to me to pay the mortgage. Stealing really seemed like a rational act. The thief could feed and house her family. The man who sought traditional justice got screwed. In real-life, the thief is a respected member of the community who probably never even gets pulled over for speeding.

Several families in our group did not manage to feed their families. In fact, a couple of families had not managed to secure food for their families during the entire month. The facilitator worked her way down: who had managed to get food all four weeks; a decent number of hands went up. Three weeks out of four; a larger number of hands. Only two or one of the weeks; several hands up. No food; a smattering of hands. When the connection was made to children and families going without food for a significant amount of time each month, the whole group sobered up. This wasn't just a game about poor people--it was a regular experience for many of them.

These types of insights were happening all around the room. Even in the wrap-up, people were angry because the bank didn't have enough tellers. The simulation was still playing out inside them--the stress lasted.  It was a high blood pressure experience.

Some of my insights (these are not unique or special--most people in the group had these insights).

INSIGHT 1: Many of the behaviors associated with poor people, such as pushiness, hostility to authority, and not paying the bills on time, spring from the conditions of poverty, not from the personalities of poor people. Most of the "nice" people participating in the simulation rapidly developed these traits.

INSIGHT 2: Poor people do not have leisure time. They are our modern hunter-gatherers, always on the go, on the move, just to fill the most basic needs of their families. Poor people are either working or exhausted. Throw a parent-teacher conference into the mix and the whole structure of the week may collapse.

INSIGHT 3: Helping kids with homework (oh, those middle school "projects") and tending to your key relationships is something there is little time for. The participants I was with gasped when the facilitator asked whether they had interacted with their families in any way other than urgent problem solving. None of them had.

INSIGHT 4: A low-income or part-time job can be more of a liability than an asset--it greatly increases transportation and daycare costs and, given the structure of our business culture, may bar you from all of the activities that are only available from 8:00 to 5:00.


Conclusion and INSIGHT 5: Making assumptions is a human way to simplify the data each of us deals with in our lives--but assumptions make an ass out of u and mptions. Please add imagination to your assumptions--try on someone's dollar flip-flops and see how it feels. Sign up for a poverty simulation. Read any book by Ruby Payne. We can't afford to write off a whole group of people--any group. Put your "ass" in compassion instead of assumption.