Wizard Of Oz Coffeyville Community

Overall, the book gives an incredibly unique outlook on such an underserved community and exposes the harsh economical and social realities these people face under the ruse of “family” and “community.”

Author Bryan Stevenson (2014) writes, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned”(p.18). According to the non-profit, Feeding America (2016), in 2015, 43.1 million, or 13.5%, of people in the United States were impoverished. Poverty is a vicious cycle, trapping people and families for generations. The inability to escape poverty is due in part to difficult class mobility in the U.S. but also because certain factors reinforce the idea and state of poverty. Bryan Stevenson’s bestseller Just Mercy, Lindsey Cook’s article “U.S. Education: Still Separate and Unequal”, Michelle Alexander’s excerpt “The Lockdown”, and Sarah Smarsh’s “Poor Teeth” all explore the idea of poverty and the systems that sustain it. While all four readings focus on poverty differently and explore it using different techniques, they all share similar big picture ideas about how poverty is fortified through systematic, societal, and psychological efforts.

In The Other Wes Moore, both Wes and the author, Moore, faced challenges because of things such as poverty, housing, and education. In terms of Wes, he had it much worse. In the first chapter of the book, when Wes is talking about his father, he says, “By Saturday afternoon we found out that he had died from acute epiglottis, a rare but treatable virus that causes the epiglottis to swell and cover the air passages to the lungs. Untreated because of the earlier misdiagnosis, my father’s body suffocated itself” (Moore 15). This is the first big event that occurred in Wes’s life that definitely influenced the person he turned into.

Poverty plagues the entire nation. People assume that the worst of poverty is in the midst of heavily populated areas such as New York or California. What they don’t realize is that poverty rates in Grand Forks are worse than the average poverty rates in the entire nation. And it isn’t just a slight increase, poverty rates in Grand Forks County are 150% worse than the national average. The poverty rates are ridiculous, yet there are only a few articles in the Grand Forks Herald that actually focus on poverty. I researched through the Grand Forks Herald database and came up with less than ten articles in the past 5 years that focused on poverty in the area. That’s a maximum of ten articles in 1,825 days. This report focuses on the effects that

In America, we all have these certain ideas of what it means to be poor. Linda Tirado, having experienced all levels of the lower economic class, in a voice of brutal honesty, takes all the perceived notions of Americans and shatters them to bits. Linda Tirado’s story begins with explaining her introduction to poverty after she dropped out of college and went out on her own. Tirado claimed that she constantly had to work multiple jobs in order to keep up with all the bills, especially the medical bills from her accident, childbirths, illness, and depression. Tirado was in an accident in which the uninsured other driver escaped paying for the jaw surgery she needed, so she found herself not only in constant pain and without teeth, but in serious debt. And so it began, with no car, severe pain, and increasing depression, Tirado’s story continued to struggle down.

Like the previous example of our class activity, you can gather some information about the family to personally consider whether you think the people portrayed deserve help. In the opening of the book, Andrea Campbell gives us information about the couple’s job status, income, and family size, which allows the reader to make a first opinion on the family’s deservedness. Once this introduction is made, the reader can see the twists and turns that can lead a family into needing government help, which is often the part of the story that gets lost – as most assume those in poverty are there because of their own ambition or actions. The wife gets in an accident, which forces the couple to take an insurance plan from the California government that is designed to keep them in poverty by taking away their income after a set cap is reached (Campbell 2014). The book continues to take the reader through the experience of trying to survive on social insurance and means-tested programs (those where recipients must hold a job or other status to maintain benefits), and ends with three Chapters discussing the difficulties that means-tested programs create for those in poverty. By forcing the reader to, in some way, experience a very average story about surviving in poverty, the book forces the reader

Moran (1992) began following William and Nancy, an impoverished, illiterate couple living in the ghetto of Prince George during the 1940’s (p. 81). They had a family of fifteen living children together, thirteen of which received income assistance. By 1960, the family increased in size to 65 members and the majority of the grandchildren had been in care or incarcerated (Moran, 1992, p. 81). Circumstances hadn’t changed for this family by 1965- Moran shared that 80% of William and Nancy’s descendants were “dependent on government funding” and the poverty-related social ramifications of low literacy, inadequate housing, poor physical and mental health resulted in a “reoccurring pattern of anti-social behavior” (Moran, 1992, pp. 81, 145). When Moran and her coworkers attempted to determine the financial impact this family had on provincial resources, they concluded that “this multiple-problem family had cost many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars…the cost in terms of waste and suffering was beyond description and equally incalculable” (Moran, 1992, p. 82). Twenty years later, the family consisted of over 1000 members, with “700-800 in social or financial distress” (Moran, 1992, p. 146). This story demonstrated to me the importance of not just giving adequate funding to families with historical poverty – rather, providing education tailored to a family’s needs along with services such as

Poverty. Unemployment. Potential foreclosure. Words all too familiar to Americans everywhere. The PBS Frontline documentary, Two American Families, is the heartbreaking, yet hopeful look at the struggles of two Milwaukee families, the Neumanns and the Stanleys, over roughly two decades, 1991 to 2012. While ideally the concept of meritocracy would indicate the efforts of these hard working families should influence their social standing, the reality of social stratification remains, with their wealth, power, and prestige, or lack thereof, used to cement their place, and primarily that of their children, in society.

We decided to focus our community assessment in Dallas County (see Appendix C for the community map) because poverty in this area is a rising epidemic. According to Mayor Mike Rawlings, “the gap between the haves and the have-nots is still too wide, we must close the gap”. Dallas is home to a variety of races and ethnicities, but it is the Hispanic and the African Americans that poverty has effected the most with the rate increasing by 42% over a span of 15 years (Dallas City Hall, September 7, 2016). Our focus was more on South Central and Southeast Dallas spanning across Districts 5, 7, and 8 because of the significant increase in poverty in these areas. In Dallas, “almost 1 in 3 Hispanics and African Americans

Located in the beautiful rolling hills of Southern Eastern Indiana, Scott County has suffered from decades of generational poverty with its associated problems like drug abuse. As of 2016, the population of the county was estimated to be 23,730, with about 97.9% of the residents being whites. The county ranks last among Indiana’s 92 counties on several fronts. It has the lowest life expectancy, 9% of the population is unemployed, 19% live below the poverty line, and 21% have not finished high school (Conrad et al, 2015). With such low economic and health indicators, it is not difficult for one to predict that Scott County was sitting on a time bomb for something bad to happen.

Imagine coming home to a house that has no warmth or food. Constantly feeling like you are in a place you can’t get out of. This is how poverty may feel to others. The expeirences from the author Jo Goodwin Parker in the story “What Is Poverty” and the McBride family from the novel “The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute To His White Mother” show that there are various effects of living in poverty that include emotional problems, adolescent rebellion, and

Go to Chicago, New York, Paris or Madrid, on every street corner you see a person less advantaged, poor, and desperate. Then go in a store, see others carrying expensive bags, swiping their credit card left and right. We live in a world of extreme poverty, balance seems nonexistent. Poverty can result in broken homes and in turn, broken lives. In the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Walter Mcmillian’s adult life, Trina Garnett’s childhood and Antonio Nuñez’s domestic life show that poverty was the cause of their incarceration and determined the success of their lives.

Poverty is a harsh condition which is relentless at any given age. The difference among poverty in children and poverty in adults is that poverty in children could leave effects impacting the children for the rest of his life. Southern Nevada, specifically the Las Vegas Valley has one of the highest rates in children poverty of the nation. According to Talkpoberty.org in the state of Nevada itself, one in every four kids live in poverty. The issue of child poverty is one which the majority of Nevadans don’t take into consideration. Child poverty is an issue which affects the children in all aspects of his life and leaving life lasting impacts.

So many people in the American society live paycheck to paycheck and are one financial catastrophe away from financial ruin. In my own experience, after my husband’s employer continually embezzled from employees and clients, we found ourselves in a terrifying position. Jobless, penniless, and entrenched in mountains of subsequent debt, we were acquainted with the terror many American’s face while struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over our family. Just as the chapter 9 in our textbook describes, Aaron and his wife quickly realized that their income was “no longer sufficient to meet their needs,” (Openstax Intro to Sociology, 2015), we found ourselves in the same position. During my husband’s search for a new job, he began doing all he could to keep food on the table. He participated in tree removal, a laughable wage for hard physical labor. In desperation, I took a full time babysitting job looking after two very difficult little girls for a measly $250 a week. Looking back, although the situation was terrible and trying, we cannot wish it away. The situation taught us what mattered. There were so many things my family took for granted. The situation opened our eyes to the trials and suffering of many people in our society and allowed us to develop compassion, love, and understanding. Now, as we think back to our own struggles, it is much easier to reach out

The pinpoint cause of poverty is challenging to find. People who live well off and are above the poverty line may be quick to assume that laziness, addiction, and the typical stereotypes are the causes of poverty. Barbara Ehrenreich, a well known writer on social issues, brings attention to the stereotypical ideology at her time, that “poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles” (17). Ehrenreich is emphasizing the fact that statements like the one listed, often influence readers to paint inaccurate mental pictures of poverty that continue to shine light on the ideology of stereotypes being the pinpoint cause to poverty. However, there are many other causes that are often overshadowed, leaving some individuals to believe that poverty was wrongfully placed upon them. Examples would include: high rates of unemployment, low paying jobs, race, and health complications. Which are all out of one’s ability to control. There is no control over a lack of jobs and high rates of unemployment, nor the amount of inadequate wages the working poor receive. Greg Kaufmann, an advisor for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Half in Ten campaign, complicates matters further when he writes, “Jobs in the U.S. [were] paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent. Jobs in the U.S. [were] paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent” (33). Acknowledging Kaufmann’s fact, the amount received for a family of four is fairly close to the yearly salary of a high school graduate, which means, receiving that kind of pay for one man may seem challenging, now imagine caring for the needs of four individuals. To make matters worse, certain families receive that amount of money and carry the burden of paying for