One and one half hours until we'll be living in poverty. Well, we'll kind of be living in poverty. This is an experiment where my family is going to be living at 100% of the federal poverty level for three weeks. What does that mean for us? $18,310 per year or $1,056.35 over the three week period. After our mortgage payment, one cell phone, childcare, utilities and health care we will already be starting way in the hole. So, we are in need of governmental assistance in the form of Food Stamps and a child care subsidy. The Food Stamps are going to provide us with $287.25. Pretty good really, except when you consider that this amount is only $1.52 per person per meal. This leaves us with $11.36 over the three week period for all of our non-food items. Toilet paper. Soap. Dental floss.
But, really, we won't be living in poverty. We'll talk about this in more depth later, but I'll quote Barbara Ehrenreich who did a longer term, more in depth experiment on poverty ten years ago: "there was no way I was going to 'experience poverty' or find out how it 'really feels' to be a long-term low-wage worker." After all, poverty, for us, is only three weeks. And we are volunteering. While it is not a game, this experience is really just a challenge for us, not a way of life.
Over the next three weeks I'll be writing about food, transportation, utilities, school, gardening, healthcare and more. My family will be learning a lot and will hopefully be able to teach a bit in the process.
Why are we doing this? To raise awareness about poverty that 254,000 Utans are experiencing. Who are these people in poverty? Almost all of the adults are employed but a large portion of this number are children.
Poverty can be ended for almost all of the people in this country. But it will take some long hard thinking and some heavy lifting.
I hope this will be a thorough and thought provoking blog.
Thank you.
Shawn
