Recognition

Most of the people that read this blog will probably not have too much first hand experience with being underprivileged and below the poverty line. In fact, I think a lot of Americans kind of turn a blind eye to it, out of sight out of mind, right? For the most part that's how it was for me growing up and in my own personal life now. It wasn't until I got to college that I really started being exposed to what happened outside of my little middle class suburb just south of Denver, Colorado. 

America is supposedly this land of opportunity but somehow the rich always seem to stay rich and the poor always seem to stay poor. There's this cycle that perpetuates some individuals continually having low-socioeconomic status and less opportunity generation after generation. Me, I was basically set up to succeed even before being born. My mother's parents had both been well educated, and she too was well-educated. She made sure we were in good schools and that my college was paid for.After going to college, I started having a hard time turning a blind eye. My first hands-on exposure to those less fortunate to me was doing practicums in some Head Start classrooms. I fell in love with the model. Getting to children in families earning below a certain level of income and giving them a head start in their education and life. They had them see dentists and get their eyes checked. We served them balanced meals, taught them about eating healthy, had them brush their teeth, and basically instilled a life-long love of learning at an early age. Granted it didn't always work so great. Some parents basically undid anything we did for the kids at school. There were kids showing up in the same clothes everyday with dirt all over as if they hadn't bathed in weeks. Home visits introduced me to some pretty harsh realities as to the living conditions of some of my students.

Something really drew at my heart strings and I wanted to make a difference if just a small difference. So I did my undergrad internship at a local housing authority, working with families receiving assistance from the government via subsidized housing. Visits to the properties was again eye-opening, "People live like this?!?!?!" But I began working with the Family Self-Sufficiency program that was attempting to get people out of that same cycle of receiving assistance from the government. We tried to work with people to gain better employment and set goals for themselves to be able to purchase their own property.

Several years later, I moved to Chicago where I currently live and experienced an even greater dichotomy of rich versus poor as well as white versus black. For those of you who don't know, Chicago is quite segregated. There are neighborhoods where white people just don't exist. In fact, there are a lot of neighborhoods that you should just stay completely clear of because of the gang violence and crime rate. It was these neighborhoods that I was venturing off to in yet another internship as a young white girl from the white west trying her hand at going into homes as a therapist to people who lived a completely different life than I. Though I will never truly understand their experience since I have not lived it, I try my hardest to offer any kind of support that will somehow assist in breaking the cycle of permeated poverty. These are my stories...