Poverty is Not Just in Africa. Sometimes It’s Right Next Door.
This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day, joining thousands of other bloggers to write about one topic for a single day. This year’s topic is poverty.
I grew up in Southern Ohio in a county with one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. Incidentally, also close to another county where the number of drug trafficking arrests were also high (no pun intended). Families who lived on welfare were abundant.
I remember houses that still didn’t have inside toilets and days when families would gather to get government subsidized foods like cheese. Five pound blocks of cheese were handed out from the back of 18 wheeler trucks to long lines of people who drove a long way. Sometimes this subsidized food was the only protein in a family’s diet.
The summer of my sophomore year in college I worked as a mentor for the Job Training Partnership Act-Youth Training Program. The government funded program served to provide jobs for kids 14-21 from low income families and to provide job training. As mentors, we taught resume writing, job search, professionalism, interviewing skills, self image, self esteem, and general life skills. The kids were placed at job sites all around the county and did jobs ranging from working as a court assistant to painting bridges.
The main thing I learned from this summer was that I could make a difference in these kids’ lives just by showing them that they could break the welfare cycle in their families. You see, many of them thought that their mission in life was to collect welfare checks. That was all they knew. Their parents had been living this cycle for generations so they were waiting to turn 18 and earn their place in the welfare ranks. I was so saddened and moved by this fact that I worked harder to connect with them and show them that I was not so different.
Although my family wasn’t on welfare, we certainly weren’t wealthy and I was putting my self through school at Ohio University. I had some help from my parents, a few scholarships but I worked two, sometimes three jobs to make it all work. I wanted these kids to know that they had to strive for something better and that they had the power to change. How is this related to Poverty you ask? Were they starving? Some of them were, Yes. But the bigger picture is that they weren’t contributing everything they could back to the society. They were settling…and they didn’t even know it! What if each one of these kids had a mentor that helped them be their personal best? What could THEY do to solve poverty? The five of us mentors did what we could over the summer to lead by example and to influence our teams to step up to their lives. We had a lot of fun with them and tried to be leaders. They made us better too and taught us a lot about leadership as well.
This summer job changed me forever and had a tremendous effect on my views of welfare and handouts. To this day, I don’t donate money to causes that have no built in efforts to improve the process and I never give money to people on the streets. This isn’t because I’m unsympathetic, it’s because I believe in systems to make things better and process improvement and making a bigger difference than just 50 cents in someone’s hand. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that I have the answers. I haven’t studied the welfare system in detail. I am an armchair opinionator at best, but I do know that there is no incentive to change anything. What if we used all that money to motivate people to end poverty?
Six Figure Moms, what are you doing to teach your kids about world poverty? As important, what are you teaching them about poverty in the US? Where I live in sunny San Diego, it’s easy to think that every body lives a happy, prosperous life but that just isn’t the case. In the spirit of giving in December, our Six Figure Moms Club event will focus on Microfinance. Look for more details coming soon on our events page.
Hope you can join us. Today, take some time to visit other blogs. As of the time of this post, there are over 11,000 bloggers participating in Blog Action Day writing about Poverty. I’m excited to read what they’ve written and I hope you are too.
2 Responses to “Poverty is Not Just in Africa. Sometimes It’s Right Next Door.”
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I love this topic “Poverty” as it simply serves to remind us of the ebb and flow of life. Thus, realizing the laws of nature as they apply to our finances is no different than their influence on our health or perfect self-expression. Like Angie Swartz, I always looked to the solution. My parents both worked full time in the early 70’s and earned, collectively, $18,000 a year. The ebb was clearly out for any college funding and I was ready to get going. Unfortunately, I graduated from a senior class of 1800 students, was not a minority and, in brief, fell between every funding eligibility crack that existed. It felt like it was raining golf balls and I lived in Arizona and didn’t own an umbrella. On the upside, I was 18 years old and also very naïve (to my advantage). I quite NATURALLY walked into The Arizona Bank where I had a small savings account safely guarding all of the babysitting money I had managed to put away over the last few years (approximately $150 derived from a going wage of 50 cents an hour). The bank manager for some reason gave me a loan of $4000. Something about my physicality and natural sincerity won her over. I was on my way! After that I left no rock unturned, even when it was hailing golf balls in a town where the sun never sets. The moral of the story, “ Maximize YOU and if it’s raining, grab the umbrella that has been sitting in the bank (local or piggy) for the last six months drawing interest. If you don’t have an umbrella, it might be wise to get one. Some people actually fall prey to pneumonia more easily than others and don’t survive bad weather as easily as some.
When the recent stock market dilemma presented itself, a huge panic response blasted throughout the media. People were addressing it as if it was a surprise. The reality is “what goes up MUST come down”. It has reportedly happened NATURALLY many times in the last 140 years. It is often referred to as the Year Seven Phenomenon addressing the influence that natural law has over the seventh year of every decade. Given that the laws of nature (3 and 7) are pretty clearly defined scientifically, mathematically and even spiritually, it appears we are likely to experience the tide going in and out quite regularly. Sometimes it just goes further out but IT ALWAYS COMES BACK IN. Give your attention to creating solutions during that time. The answer is always with Y.O.U. and understanding how this game of life works. It’s simply the “Natural Mathematics of Man”, and mastering Y.O.U. morning, noon and night seven days a week will save a tremendous amount of personal energy.
Everything in Nature, right down to finances and behaviors subscribes to the same formula. Learn the Math and how to use Y.O.U. and there will be no surprises. You may think you have it all figured out from a popularized opinionated perspective but the reality is “You can’t fool Mother Nature.” Moms are so important…listen to The Mother. She has Laws that serve and protect YOU. The Six Figure Mom’s Club has a philosophy that supports and understands the importance motherhood plays in the Nature of manifesting an intelligent intuitive society versus an ignorant one. Thank you, Angie, for creating a place for the MOTHER to be understood and respected. This is wisdom at its finest.
I think this is a great topic. When I was fresh out of college – which I had a little help with, but worked at least 20 hours a week all through and graduated with some hefty student loans – I volunteered for Jr. Achievement. I was assigned to a junior high in Pacific Beach. The class was half local students, and half bussed in from the depths of San Diego’s poorest neighborhoods. Many of them came and went through the year, as their parents found odd jobs picking produce. They were all very sweet kids. I set up a program where they earned ‘money’ for participating in whatever lesson I gave them each week. I remember two boys sat at the back of the class, arms crossed, rolling their eyes at me and making odd noises as our activities went on. About 4 weeks in, I held an auction for the students to buy prizes, such as little $1 store things, snacks, cans of soda (this was the 80s), etc. The two boys kept saying, “AWWWW man! You mean we could have earned money to buy stuff???” They were two of the top participants from that point forward!
I am raising my children (6 year old boy/girl twins) to know that we are among the world’s top 1% wealthiest (and we certainly are not ‘wealthy’, but we have two nice homes, two cars, good food, great clothes, we get to do lots of fun things, we have insurance, etc.). They know that most people have much less than us. My husband and I travelled for 6 months through Europe and Indonesia before having kids, and we share those our stories and photo albums with them. We are very close to my grandparents, whose caregiver drives up from Tijuana every day to work with them (even though she is a US citizen). She tells us of the families who paid $1000s to be transported here to try to have a new life, only to be deported and now they have NOTHING except the clothes on their backs. We regularly go through our ‘things’ and anything that does not serve a purpose (or that we LOVE) we give to those who have less at this time. We put pennies in the peace jar in my son’s class to go to building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. My daughter regularly brings me things she has found, or made, to donate to those who have less than us.
We donate our time, as well, because time is – to me – as precious a commodity as anything else.
We know that situations can change at any time, and we are grateful every day for all that we have, and all that we can give.