Sign New Hampshire Banking Living Will Later

Industry sign banking new hampshire living will later

[Music] [Laughter] i grew up in new hampshire banked by the spring waters of the connecticut river and the imposing hills of the monadnock valley my years were measured by the changing colors of the trees the spirals of frost on my school windows and the brief warm days of summer i am a dunkin donuts drinking boston sports cheering nor'easter prepping new englander in fact i'm such a new englander that one of our most tongue-in-cheek expressions has become a sort of epigraph etched into my life it's a commonly used phrase most often said by a big burly man at a gas station and he might say you can't get there from here for those of you who are not local and are listening this phrase is a colloquialism supposedly from maine but i couldn't find a source on that so please don't ask and it's commonly said by those in the northeast corner of the united states to dismiss a destination that is so difficult or complicated to get to that you might as well not even try in other words the place you are trying to reach is too hard and maybe not worth the hassle i like to think that i'm very lucky to be here on the stage today where i was born you had to go through my village and two towns to reach a hospital a grocery store and even a walmart because of that a lot of things felt inaccessible and out of reach both physically and metaphorically despite that i was class president of my high school i went to smith college i recently returned from a year in india on a fulbright grant i'm currently working at an organization organization that i love doing work that i'm very passionate about and i don't say any of that to be boastful because i wouldn't be a very good new englander if i did but i do say that to point out the fact that my story is an anomaly for most people who grew up in a low-income family specifically in rural new england the path to financial freedom stability and agency is one paved in potholes and dead ends for a family of four living in the united states you are considered within the poverty guidelines if you make at or below 26 000 a year i am specifically concerned with those families who have less than two weeks of income in their savings accounts families who would be unable to pay their bills if they missed one paycheck or had an unexpected financial burden i'm specifically focusing on families outside of big new england cities those who do not live in manchester hartford or boston while the majority of low-income people in the u.s do live in cities a higher percentage of rural communities are made up of those below the poverty line so that means that while there may be a higher number of individual low-income people living in a place like boston you're more likely to run into one of those people in a place like hatfield so i'd like to take a break from some of those numbers that i was just talking about to tell you a little bit about my own hometown i grew up in ashwile which is a very very small village within winchester new hampshire which is just about an hour north of here growing up i can remember my friends and i having debates with the kids that went to the winchester public school with us about whether or not ashfield was actually a town i land on the fact that we are because we have our own post office and our own zip code we are very much like most other mill towns except for the fact that our 150 year old paper mill was destroyed in 2005 by a flood when that happened a lot of people lost their incomes the community lost its industry it was 2005 when that happened which meant that i was in sixth grade and deep into my hot topic phase i can remember that many of my friends parents lost their jobs those former mill workers now work in low-wage professions like food service or retail and because that industry is no longer local they must drive far distances to reach smaller cities nearby growing up it was very important to my family that we were able to provide for ourselves and get the resources that we needed when i began this talk i spoke about that phrase you can't get there from here it's begun to have a very important impact on my life i can remember several times as a child when my father would work at the warehouse packing and moving pallets of food from one truck to another when he would injure his back sometimes he would need costly and time-intensive surgeries when that would happen my family and five could not survive on the small salary that my mother earned working as a teacher's aide at the local public school so she would swallow her pride take us children the 30 minutes to the local community kitchen and we would bring our laundry baskets i can remember going up to the food bank and taking a ticket from the front door like you do at a deli and we would bring our laundry baskets through the tables of volunteers who would fill them with food i personally loved trips to the food bank they were fun they were filled with different people there were bright colors and often food that i had never seen before i can remember specifically this beautiful mural they had on the wall where they had children's toys diapers and baby formula i can also remember the day that going to the food bank stopped being fun i can remember the day that i finally understood why my father always refused to go with us i was standing outside the door with my mother chatting away as i always am and i could see my friend david a few people behind me in line standing with his grandmother now like i said i thought the food bank was such a fun place to be and i expected that david would be just as excited to be at this wonderful grocery shopping experience as i was so of course i turned to him and i waved the biggest wave i had you can imagine my disappointment when david turned beat red and he turned away from me i remember turning to my mother and saying mom mom why won't david say hi to me and she looked at me and she said well crystal he's probably embarrassed that you saw him here it's hard for people to know that you don't have any money that was the first day that i understood that we were poor it was also the first day that i understood i was expected to feel ashamed about that david never left winchester to my knowledge david still works at the warehouse where my father first injured his back like many of my peers growing up in a low-income family can mean struggling with generational cyclical poverty it can mean battling a lifetime of economic inequality lack of access to education and poor job prospects one of the most significant barriers facing families in rural areas is the simple ability to get from point a to point b if you're someone living in a place like burlington vermont boston or even springfield massachusetts you can assume that you will have access to affordable public transportation if you live in a rural community like winchester you must have a driver's license you must have access to a car however the average cost of owning and operating a car in 2019 was just over nine thousand dollars if you are a family of four living off of twenty six thousand dollars a year that is more than a third of your annual income and then if registration or insurance lapse or falls during a difficult pay period these already struggling families face fines and fees they may not be able to pay despite that families living in rural and low-income communities understand that the burden of owning a car is what allows them to get to their job or get to services that allow a low income life to be bearable the community kitchen that my mother and i visited was a 16 mile drive from where we lived it was in the same town that housed the wic and social security offices housing authority fuel assistance family services and other programs that we relied on now of course these programs must be in the places where the most people live that makes sense however when low-income communities struggle with a lack of resources existing organizations must pick up the slack in small towns often existing agencies begin to serve dual purposes public schools become community centers they teach about nutrition or parenting classes police officers become social workers they connect families with child services or prepare them for early intervention programs churches become food banks or homeless shelters so much of the new england character is based around the idea that necessity is the mother of invention these organizations and these individuals see a problem within their communities and they rise up and attempt to meet that challenge unfortunately despite these best intentions so often these individuals and these organizations become burnt out and overwhelmed while it's wonderful to have these communities rally around one another until we can find systematic ways to support these communities in ways that make sense the systematic problems will continue to persist this image looks a lot like the home that i used to live in with my mother this image looks a lot like the home that many americans live in today so much of poverty is about lack of access it's about lack of access not just to physical space and possessions but about lack of access to ideas and knowledge you cannot get to a place if you do not know that it exists many families living in homes like this or in small one-bedroom apartments or in homes that are falling apart struggle to survive on a daily basis their children often miss out on important educational opportunities that will allow them to succeed later on in life affluent families have the privilege of using after school time for violin lessons sports swimming and tutors with the average cost of child care in america being just under ten thousand dollars low-income families have to hope for subsidized programs after school programs or volunteers sometimes even local unlicensed daycares as someone who grew up in one of these communities as someone who has spent the last four years working with low-income families in three different new england states i understand that the rest of my life is going to be spent trying to get from here the reality of low income life in america to their this absolutely imaginary idea of what success looks like it is my hope that by sharing my story here with you today and by sharing the story of my peers we can better change our idea of what poverty in the u.s looks like i hope that you will think of david at the food bank i hope that you will think of me i hope that you will think of the one in four american children who live in poverty in the u.s i hope that together we can make the path from here to there more attainable thank you so much