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good afternoon everyone my name is Tina Sadowski we are from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and today we will be discussing poverty traps and sustainable solutions in Indiana so the purpose of our research was to investigate local poverty and barriers to getting out we use mist mixed methods so quantitative and qualitative to both get a broad picture of poverty using economic statistics and also to see how specific problems affect individuals differently using a community based participatory research approach enabled community partners to inform our research questions and design in conjunction with the center for community growth we gathered data using large federal reports in order to calculate the cost of living in Indiana County the high cost of food housing and daycare prompted more in-depth qualitative research with the Indiana County Community Action Program and the Department of Human Services I will now turn the presentation over to Lucas who will further discuss the cost of living in Indiana County hi there my name is Lucas and my colleague and I are going to give an overview of the political color the Occupational climate in Indiana County so as you can see on the tables here at five dollars and sixty-six cents an hour one is at the poverty line this is a single adult living in Indiana County 725 is the Commonwealth minimum wage as well as the u.s. minimum wage and if you notice as you go up in wage you begin to lose you begin to lose the ability to qualify for certain programs at 753 an hour or only one hundred and thirty-three percent of the poverty line you lose the ability to qualify for commodity supplemental food program and at 906 an hour or only one hundred and sixty percent of the poverty line you stop qualifying for food stamps this can be a big problem when you look at the percent of minimum wage needed to attain a living wage in Indiana County a single adult requires two hundred percent of the minimum wage or about two times the minimum wage in order to obtain a living wage as you add children you can see it only gets harder at with one child a single adult with one child requires three times the minimum wage in order to sustain a livable wage hello my name is Joseph friends I'm going to talk about the industry breakdown of Indiana County this graph shows the industries of Indiana County and order of percent of employment due to the University in Indiana office and administrative support makes up a large percentage of employment the green bars represent industries that pay above a living wage for a single adult and the yellow bars represent industries that pay below a living wage for a single adult as you can see for the top five industries do not pay a living wage for a single adult and these for industries make up forty two percent of the of employment this graph shows the median hourly wages of industries with the least at least five percent of employment the bars represent the median hourly wages the darker green line is the living wage for a single adult in the yellow line is a is the living wage for a single adult with one child as you can see here the top six industries do not pay a living wage pressing adult with one child and these six industries make up fifty-nine percent of employment based on these statistics children are very costly to impoverish delts and poverty often continues into the next generation hello my name is Kayla good so throughout our research we have found that childhood rates of poverty are consistently higher than the overall rates of poverty and this is evidenced in Indiana County where 26.6 percent of children under the age of five are in poverty as compared to the fourteen point seven percent of the total population that is in poverty getting impoverished children access to quality childcare and preschool and will likely have a positive effect on their future schooling and employment and this is supported by various studies that have shown that kids who receive higher quality child exhibit higher average math and reading skills throughout childhood compared to those who do not receive higher quality education these children are also more likely to graduate from high school they're more likely to earn more and be able to maintain steady jobs and they were arrested fewer times quality early education results in greater productivity later in life creates quote the best workers which gives businesses a reason to stay local and this will ultimately help the economy and reduce the poverty problem so one of the common childcare programs in Pennsylvania is called stars and stars stands for standards training assistance resources support the performance standards of stars are grouped into four levels so it stars one through stars for and each level built on the previous level and utilizes research-based best practices to promote quality early learning environments and positive child outcomes as previously discussed per capita income in Indiana County is low and the cost of childcare is very high so one subsidized program called childcare works helps low-income families pay their childcare needs in order to be eligible for this program one must earn two hundred percent of the federal poverty level or less and they have there's a work requirement of 20 hours per week unfortunately as you can see from this graph even with the subsidy only 9.5 percent of children under five in Indiana are served by stars 2 or higher hi my name is Victoria I'm going to be discussing power pack it is a program offered through I cap in Indiana County they collect easy to manage food to provide in power pack and it's designed to meet the needs of children at risk of hunger when food resources aren't available to them this could be after school hours are on long weekends and currently power pack only provides 700 students and 3,700 are eligible for power pack so in the power pack they provide non-perishable food so items like dry milk and canned ravioli and total cost is five dollars and seventy-eight cents per power pack hi I'm Savannah like the African grasslands Indiana large is considered at high risk of food insecurity if you look at the map the area's highlighted in bright green are considered food deserts federally defined as places where nutritious food cannot be obtained because of low income and/or low access and in rural areas that's considered a 10 mile distance of the 748 family serviced by I cap forty-three percent lack reliable transportation twenty four percent have cars but they are unreliable or need prepared need repairs so they can't really get anywhere and eleven percent don't even have a driver's license though supplying them with a car is not helpful at all furthermore about twenty percent of children are considered food and secure in the county of Indiana that's about 10,000 students we were interviewing people who are suffering from food and security and there is one person who is currently working for the Department of Human Services who is also currently homeless this person was quoted as saying I was I have been homeless since June I tried to tough it out and put my big girl pants on and not need help from I cap but guess what I'm finally hungry my photo ID from work was me in january i weighed 315 pounds now I'm down to under 200 simply because I'm starving so clearly there's a huge food and security problem in our very County but there are means to start to alleviate that a lot of people in Indiana benefit from snap to qualify you must be one hundred and thirty percent of the poverty line there are about 12 million dollars that come and snap benefits to Indiana it's about 61,000 issuances are about fifteen percent of households we also have a branch of the greater community the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank in Indiana County that distributed about 800,000 pounds of food last year about thirty percent of that came from the government about twenty percent was purchased by the food bank and fifty percent was donated by citizens of Indiana so they are trying to make a difference and in fact those who garden in the local community gardens are required to donate at least a third of what they produce in the gardens back to the food bank so that's sort of a economic quantitative overview of poverty in Indiana and now we're going to talk a little bit about the qualitative side of you know putting a face to poverty okay so my name is Rachel hon and while economics and numbers often defined who is in poverty we as the applied anthropology portion of this project wish to illuminate the lies behind the statistics part of this process included asking people at our local homeless shelter to define poverty and this is what one of our clients said poverty to me is where someone gets very low income to where they can't they barely have anything left over from their paychecks where they have nothing to save for there are some that don't have money for their retirement I know sometimes when I get done with my bills at the end of the month I have no money left to do planning or anything and this coil just really highlights the luxury of being able to plan for the future and the impact of having financial strain for this study we use both qualitative open-ended interviews and quantitative surveys and we interviewed a total of eighteen people including 12 social workers from I cap and DHS and six clients at the local homeless shelter hi my name is Robert weirder and i'll be talking about some of the barriers the clients face when interviewing some of these social programs they told us about some of their clients one of them express their opinion on the barriers they face they said it's not all housing some might be jobs some might be medical the qualitative team then asked what are the top three barriers that these clients face these were transportation living wage and income and skills and you can see that we separated these into structural non-structural and there's many different barriers that we came up with but the main barrier that we found was transportation so with when we talked to one of these clients I'm sorry when we talked to I cab they were talking about there's a there's a the food bank program and they want to get their food transported back to where they lived and this is what she said about that she said again that that can be transportation issue because imagine you walk to the pantry imagine carrying a box of food on the bus waiting two hours for the bus transferring to another bus transportation is a big issue so then we begin to ask questions like what are the the details of what's going on with the transportation indiana county and because transportation is actually not that bad within the borough that's where you need to live in order to get to your job but what's happening is the fair market rent is actually higher in the borough so then people have to be moved to the outskirts of of the county and so they're forced to use transportation that's not as abundant and the costs are quite high for that then we also talked to people who did have personal vehicles but they really weren't reliable or their cars weren't working that well and the gas prices are a little high for because they were in economically disparaging situations hello my name is Daniel shinsky and I'm going to discuss two other of the larger barriers that we discussed which were jobs and stigma when it came to jobs we learned that this was the greatest concern for our clients wasn't even necessarily getting a living wage job even though that is ideal the biggest problem was finding a job in general in Indiana that they could it was accessible so there's a huge lack in jobs and one of our clients that we interviewed stated unless you have experience they don't want to hire you this idea that you need experience to get a job but they don't want to give you the experience and certifications education all those things are so expensive how are you supposed to get that when you're not even making enough to eat stigmas were something else that we noticed that most of the community kind of already had ideas about what poverty was and what homelessness meant and who they were and what they did and one of our one of the icap employees made a comment stating in our interview the community assumes that all homeless people are lazy dangerous and crazy and they even noted that some clients modify their behavior so they don't have to be seen with assistance programs they'll chop at night so that they don't have to be seen with food stamps or food assistance also the landlords often have opinions landlords and employers often have opinions landlords will think that they're irresponsible so they're not going to pay for it employers know the homeless address so when they get an application with that they won't even they possibly won't even look at it move it back down okay so this was from I cab we don't have a crystal ball we treat every client the same we provide them the same services we wish we knew what made some clients successful but we don't and you can't predict success or failure this quote from my cap speaks to the variability and uncertainty in poverty related work which helped us realize how much work is still left to explore some of our future research includes how does poverty affect those who do not receive a social assistance program or social assistance and also kind of investigating issues with public transportation to develop solutions and increasing awareness on education and poverty so in our three-month period we were unable to accomplish all the goals we had but moving forward we have to still answer some questions like why are only 700 students out of 3700 receiving power pack and also how can we make it more nutritious so we are going to work with I you peas nutrition department to evaluate power pack and to hopefully conduct some randomized control trials and also surveys so we can provide more nutritious power packs and hopefully reach more students eventually we also are applying for a grant for a walk-in cooler that will hopefully reach more students as well aside from power pack we really realized like we weren't aware of the homeless population in Indiana a lot of students at our university aren't so it really opened up our eyes to what was going on in the county and we really want to raise awareness about what's going on in Indiana and we'd like to thank our professors dr. Vic and dr. Poole as well as I cap and the DHS and the aarc you you hi my name is Jonathan for New Year's Eve pittsburgher Bradford so you talked about the stigma of Haredi so it's very apparent that children are being raised in a culture of poverty as well as malnutrition which he spoke to and uh I think we all understand it's very hard to change poverty especially if you're an adult that's it's hard to change but you could change the future generation so how essential is it for you target children and the change their outlook from a culture of poverty and oddly change the future poverty in your county urgent it's very important we did a lot of studying in our classroom the class that we took our the econ kids we around a lot of books about you know different types of poverty so we studied both rural and urban poverty developing versus established country poverty and when we studied rural poverty specifically in Appalachia generational poverty was huge bigger than any other area that we discussed so with initiatives like power pack initiatives like the Stars program we think that they are absolutely urgent to like breaking the stigma and breaking the cycle more than anything so in our research we actually had a lot when we were talking to UM caseworkers especially they mentioned two different kinds of poverty there's the idea like this is all I the and it's not really it's kind of hard because there's generational poverty and then there's also poverty that happens and then you're upset about it and then you're depressed and you feel like they're you're hopeless and there's no way of getting out of it and then that's how you kind of perpetuate the circle internally but there's a lot of structural issues that exist within that the deal that were brought up in our DHS and I cap meetings that like keep people there because you like you ca
only try so hard to keep your benefits and to do everything to get better until something has you have to pick one and it's also really complicated with the culture of poverty because with the idea of a culture of poverty because often we that's explained as a crutch like oh well it's just their culture like we can't change it but that's not true because a lot of them do want to change it but they just don't have the means there's not a lot of good programs designed to actually like get them those jobs and like get them where they need to get to to actually be at a place where they can get a living wage or get a higher job even if they have the interview clothes even if they look the part if they don't have the money to get certification if they don't get have the money to get education if people won't give them a chance it kind of goes back to the comment made before like if you if you don't get a chance how am I supposed to show you that I can do it and you'd rather and people would rather believe what they already some people would rather believe what they already believe and say well they're irresponsible they're not going to do it they're not hard workers that's why they ended up here when it could have been I broke my leg and then I couldn't work at my job for three months in my family ended up in poverty or I lost my lease because i was late twice on my payment and now nobody wants to give me a house even if i had a job and now i'm too far away to keep my job because I can't get there because transportation there's so many different factors that it's so hard to actually determine like even with our interviews with clients there were so many different factors that I feel like it's just so complicated like oh thank you hi my name is Alyssa from the university of pittsburgh at bradford my questions almost opposite of John um so in economic policy we see a lot of we target children a lot but we don't spend a lot of time paying attention to the adults that are actually taking care of those children did you guys find any discrepancies and could you possibly speak to anything you found on the aspect of taking care of the adults okay many of the programs targeting children the one that I'm going to touch on to answer your question is the one regarding child care you know we talked a lot about you know all of the issues surrounding child care if you're working a low-wage job if you're a single parent and you don't have a reliable car so the programs to help target child education also help the adults by subsidizing better quality childhood education we sort of see a lag lag effect on that so that the children can produce more as they get older so in terms of answering your question that specific program actually more targets adults who can now spend more time working and have their children in better facilities anything else any other programs in particular okay uh so what one of the things we found was that financial literacy okay imma be financial literacy was kind of an issue like these people can't fill out resume sometimes are there they they don't even have basic reading levels so when we're talking about guess with the with the programs okay so when we're dealing with adults we notice they introduced a way to teach people to be more financially literate or to do basic budgeting skills but those were only for a young group so one of our recommendations were to integrate programs in which they could be educated a little bit better not just for a younger people but for older people as well yeah we actually got a chance to talk to a bunch of the community leaders indiana's on the outskirts of like you know the the Col towns that that were along the west the biggest problem that it's seeing today is the students that drive up the costs of living in the city and I think we touched on that with the transportation all the students live near the University where most of the supermarkets are so the people who can't afford that live on the outskirts and can't get there in addition when we spoke with the community leaders there was a huge problem in taxes where the community is getting worse so the people who had the money to make it better keep leaving so there's still it gets worse than people leaving it gets worse and people leave so we have this you know really bad tumbleweed going on yeah on that too the other thing that's happening that was mentioned I know in our I cap meeting was that there's a lot of generational poverty and like it's really hard for them because a lot of the area there's no jobs and if there's no jobs how are you supposed to find a job how are you supposed to do anything about it and it's really like it's it's honestly a mess like because you tell our you're telling these people find a living wage job and then they're like what jobs exist and then they're like it's just and then the other problem is and that perpetuates to their children because their children then start to realize like there aren't jobs so they try to prepare for a future when their parents can't plan for their future so then they're like trying to compensate with the fact that I have nothing and I'm trying to get out of this but how am I going to do that with nothing and it's like if your parent and I know for at least my loan my student loans I have to get a parent cosigner what are you going to do if your parent has no money then you're you're stuck back where they are it's just a full problem because there's not that option click great discussion thank you i you p presentation