A taste of poverty

Photo: Nicholas Johansen

More than 70 people packed into a meeting room at UBC Okanagan Tuesday to get a taste of what life is like for thousands of people living below the poverty line.

The United Way of Central and South Okanagan Similkameen and UBCO Student Union hosted a "poverty simulation" to give the public an idea of what struggling to make ends meet is like.

The hour-long simulation took participants through a four-week scenario of living as a poor person.

“They’re assigned to one of 26 family profiles, so they could be a senior living on their own, they could be part of a single-parent family with two kids in any one of those roles within the family,” said Sheilah Pittman, manager of community investment stewardship for United Way.

Mock community resources were set up around the room for the participants.

“The families have to access resources and just meet their monthly objectives, like pay their bills, go to work, get their kids to school,” Pittman said. “These families are stretched financially, so it gets very hard to make everything happen and keep all of those moving pieces together.

“We really find this creates a lot of empathy.”

Pittman said the event’s success comes from bringing together a diverse group of people to discuss the issue.

Suzanne Chavarie didn’t know what to expect, but said the exercise surprised her.

“I was a grandparent raising my grandchildren in the scenario, so the sense of urgency (surprised me),” said Suzanne Chavarie. “Feeling not respected, not valued … I had to have a bus ticket to go to each place, I couldn’t afford to buy my grandchild’s glasses. 

“It gave me the real experience … it was very uncomfortable.”

For Ellen Boelcke, a service provider with Kelowna Community Resources, the event reminded her of the challenges her clients face.

“I think we sometimes lose touch with who we’re really serving,” Boelcke said. “Instead of being buried in proposals and staffing and things like that, getting back to the root of what it is like for the participants we serve and the challenges they face.”

She said her mock family had their bus passes stolen during the exercise.

“She said, ‘I felt so desperate to care for my grandchildren, and I had to get to work. I didn’t have bus passes, so I had my seven year old steal these bus passes.' So her emotions went way beyond the simulation of what we had on a piece of paper,” Boelcke explained.

“It’s something as a society we can all do better at,” said former MP Ron Cannan. “Personally, I see that we can be a little bit more understanding of the challenges of communicating the services available and the hours. Especially government agencies are open the same hours a lot of people are working, so they get off work and rush to the agency and they’re closed, so they can’t get their social assistance or whatever.”

The United Way has run the exercise several times in Kamloops, but Tuesday’s event was the first of its kind in the Okanagan.