The Rev. Sandra Selby knows a little more about poverty after spending Thursday morning rushing around the John S. Knight Center in downtown Akron, trying to hock her Nintendo for food money.
Selby is a former executive at B.F. Goodrich who now serves as associate pastor at the Furnace Street Mission. She had a little trouble paying her bills after leaving graduate school but says she has never been poor.
She joined a group of more than 100 community leaders for the Cost of Poverty Experience, a simulation of the hassles, hunger and anxiety of being poor. Akron Summit Community Action Inc. sponsored the session.
The goal was to inspire local leaders to address barriers the poor face.
“They are tied in some way or another to policy decisions that can affect people living versus not living in poverty,” Valerie McGruder of Akron Summit Community Action wrote in an email after the meeting in describing the participants. “They can make changes. They have pull.”
Selby’s role: a 22-year-old unemployed high school dropout with a fondness for marijuana. Her mother is a breast cancer patient with mental health problems that prevent her from working. She also had a father, the one person in the family with a job, a brother and a sister who also likes weed.
The family knew it couldn’t pay the bills, so Selby was assigned to sell her game console at the pawnshop. In the scenario, she had limited time.
The store closed with her standing in line.
“So I never even got to do anything,” Selby complained. “I never got to the pawnshop!”
Other participants’ tasks included trips to a gas station, homeless shelter, faith center, day-care center, a community services office, bank, court, adult and juvenile probation, police and jail, pawnshop, mega mart, a place to pay rent or mortgages, the county human services offices, a minimum-wage employer, a health clinic and a school.
The point was to demonstrate how being poor is a difficult job.
Before the simulation began, state Rep. Vernon Sykes, D-Akron, told of how he lived in poverty and how he overcame it.
He told of how his mother sat him down at a table, showed him how much money she had and why she couldn’t afford a new suit he wanted for a school function.
“She wanted me to understand that we had to make choices,” Sykes said. “And if she took $49.99 out of this stack of money, there would be less to pay for these bills that we didn’t have enough [money to cover] anyway.”
But he said he needed more than just a strong mother.
“How did I make it?” he said. “Not just because I was motivated and had a little luck here and there, but because people outside of my immediate household were gracious enough to help me in so many ways.”
That help included coaches, encouraging teachers and counselors who directed him to the right courses and scholarships.
After that pep talk, he joined the family played by Selby, Bernett Williams of Akron Children’s Hospital, Dan Flowers of the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank and Donae Eckert of United Way. Together they figured out the family’s budget. (No one suggested it might be cheating to use a smart phone to add up the bills.)
When organizers told the families to start doing their 16 tasks, the large meeting room was filled with people in suits running table to table.
In the second time period, Selby successfully pawned a make-believe crossbow, shotgun, games, the Nintendo and an iPod estimated to be worth $600 when new. She was paid only $205 and gave all the cash, represented in Monopoly money, to Flowers, who was playing the father’s role.
She later realized “a savvy youngster” would have held back some of the cash.
When the family gathered again to talk about their successes and failures, Flowers said it did not add up. The mortgage couldn’t be paid; they didn’t have enough food.
“We are going to be homeless,” Flowers said.
And after running around the room for only an hour, Eckert concluded, “It’s exhausting to be poor.”
Dave Scott can be reached at 330-996-3577 or davescott@thebeaconjournal.com
