Let’s Be Poor
15th March 2024
I learned about the “Poverty Simulation” by means of a colleague’s letter to campus announcing such an event at the central Pennsylvania liberal arts university where I work. My colleague explained that “many families” in the local communities around the campus are in poverty. The figure she gave was 6 percent, leading me to wonder if “many” is the best term used to describe a phenomenon not being experienced by 94 percent of the people under discussion; also, since the national poverty rate is closer to 12 percent, it would be worth noting that the local poverty rate is extraordinarily low.
In any case, the school looks to involve our students in collaborative work with local communities, and so my colleague argued that they should know something about all this poverty. Such knowledge will require “dispell[ing]…preconceived notions about the experience and roots of poverty,” and an excellent method for dispelling such notions is “through experiencing and sensitizing participants to the realities of poverty.” The Poverty Simulation, I learned from my colleague’s letter, is “not a game [but rather] a role play in which participants get to experience the difficult choices” of those in poverty.
I wonder whether those of us who were actually poor when we were younger can test out of this for credit.