Students educated on poverty

It may dip down close to the thirties. There are no cell phones, no car keys, and most importantly, no home to shelter them from the bitter temperatures of a mid-February night.

They are not truly homeless, but the students who volunteered for this week’s Poverty Simulation made sacrifices to come to a better understanding of what it really means to be homeless.

Some student participants were only present for a part of the experience Wednesday night, but other students spent the whole night on front campus in and around tents.

Junior Political Science Major and participant Taylor Sellers said the experience helped gather a good crowd.

“(Participating) just seemed like a good idea. It’s a good cause,” Sellers said. “There are a lot of good people out here.”

Sellers spent approximately 8 hours on campus Wednesday, beginning at 2 p.m. He cited two tests on Thursday as the only reason that he was not going to spend the night to complete the experience.

Sellers helped collect car keys, cell phones and wallets as students arrived to participate throughout the evening.

“If you’re homeless you don’t have a cell and you don’t have keys because you don’t have a house,” Sellers said. “And if you have a wallet, it’s probably empty.”

Good company and good conversation were the main aspects that kept students going through the dropping temperatures Wednesday night.

Junior psychology major and Poverty Simulation participant Jenna Monforte participated in the event as a representative of the American Humanics Student Association. She said the simulation was a good way to help students learn through physical experience.

“I think it raises awareness of what it’s like to be homeless in the cold in the middle of February,” Monforte said. “You learn best from experiences. You can tell someone what it feels like to be hungry but you don’t know what it’s like until you experience it. Same with any emotion.”

The simulation was a part of Academic Engagement Week, which director of the American Humanics Program and Poverty Simulation creator Sara Faircloth said encourages learning through experience.

“These programs address the mission of the university,” Faircloth said. “Our mission statement is concerning learning with action-hands on experience connected to inside the classroom is a different type of learning from a textbook.”

Various forms of participation were available in the 24-hour period, and Faircloth said student participants were supposed to learn through experience by attaining an assigned identity. Some students acted as social workers and took other students through what they would have to do in order to get what they needed simply to live.

Identities assigned to students included descriptions of living conditions and guidance through attaining food, shelter, education, health care, clothing and other essentials.

Part of the objective was for students to become familiarized with the difficult processes and programs that many homeless go through every day, including Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and Medicaid.

“The point is that a lot of people think that the services provided for people in need-that they just walk in there and get a check- and that’s not how it is,” Faircloth said.

Faircloth said one of the items she wanted to educate students on was the 27-page Medicaid form that low income senior citizens are expected to fill out before receiving assistance.

“The ‘security net’ our society has provided is not complete,” she said. “It’s not easy to navigate and it’s not always fair.”

The American Humanics Student Association and students

currently enrolled in the Nonprofit Leadership course provided the Poverty Simulation. The experience began on Wednesday at noon and ended at approximately noon on Thursday; the same students also led a can food drive during Academic Engagement Week for donations to local homeless shelters.

Funding for the project was provided through the Coverdell Initiative Grant as well as through Arizona State University’s Center for Nonprofit Leadership. Among covered costs were food and supplies for participants; the food shelter supplies included vegetable soup, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and water for Wednesday evening and cold cereal, milk and coffee Thursday morning.

Classes and individual students who were not signed up for the event were also welcome to engage in the experience.

The total number of participants for the poverty simulation was not yet available to the public.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 17 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry