But after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail. Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids.

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When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse — usually to a state or county child abuse hotline — a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly — especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers.

The trouble is, algorithms aren’t designed to find new information that humans miss — they’re designed to use the data that humans have previously input as efficiently as possible.

“If you give it biased data, it will be biased,” explained Cathy O’Neil, mathematician and author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, while speaking with me for a story I wrote for Undark last year. “The very short version is that when you’re using the past as a kind of reference for how it works well, you’re implicitly assuming the past is doing a good job of rewarding good things and punishing bad things. You’re training the system to say if it worked in the past, it should work in the future.”

Historically, low-income families have had their children removed from their homes at higher rates than wealthier families. As a result, these new algorithms work to codify poverty as a criteria for child maltreatment. Some of the variables that these tools consider are public records that only exist for low-income parents, such as parents’ poverty status, whether they receive welfare benefits like SNAP and TANF, employment status, and whether they receive Medicaid. Other factors, like previous criminal justice involvement and whether or not there have been allegations of substance misuse in the past, are also dramatically more likely for families living in poverty.

This bias exists even in systems that have been highly praised, like the Allegheny Family Screening Tool currently being implemented in Pittsburgh, where prior arrests and parents’ mental health histories are considered factors in whether a child should be removed. It’s similar in other, less-transparent systems, like one in Florida where tech giant SAS contracted with the Florida Department of Children and Families to research which factors were most likely to contribute to the death of a child by maltreatment. According to press releases by SAS (some of which have been unpublished since they began garnering media attention) the company used public records such as Medicaid status, criminal justice history, and substance-use treatment history.

The results led jurisdictions in Florida to zoom in on factors that apply to huge swaths of families, including mine. In April of last year, an allegation of drug use and child abandonment led Broward County, Florida child welfare investigators to investigate my family. When my drug tests were negative, the investigation pivoted to my recent financial setbacks, which had been caused by my husband’s acute health crisis. My children were ultimately removed from my care, and we have been separated for nine months for reasons that are primarily financial. My case is far from unique. Three-quarters of child protective cases in the United States are related to neglect, not abuse, and that neglect usually means lack of food, clothing, shelter, heating, or supervision: problems which are almost always the result of poverty.

Ira Schwartz, a private analytics consultant, thinks he may have found a way to help re-balance this system. He conducted a research study in Broward County — the same county in which my case is based — that discovered the current approach to child welfare substantiation is highly flawed. According to his research, 90 percent of system referrals were essentially useless, and 40 percent of court-involved cases (which typically involve child removal) were overzealous and harmful, rather than beneficial, to the families. He created his own system that, like the Allegheny tool, predicted the likelihood that a family would become re-involved with the system. But he admits quite openly that predictive algorithms like his target the poor.

“We found in our study that lower socioeconomic status was one of the significant variables that was a predictor [for reinvolvement with the system],” said Schwartz. “The issue with higher-income families is … they just don’t really come into the system because they have other options. With higher-income families, when there’s child abuse or neglect or even spouse abuse and it’s reported, they can afford to go to private agencies, get private mental health services; they can see a psychiatrist or social worker or psychologist … it’s a discrimination factor.”

Schwartz believes that these types of admittedly discriminatory computer programs can still be put to good use when combined with prescriptive analytics, which would determine the services that high-risk families need in order to remain out of the system in the future. Schwartz says this would include services like rental assistance, food assistance, day care funding, and housekeeping services. This would help welfare agencies understand which families need what services, and streamline the process of providing them. (All jurisdictions are legally required to make “reasonable efforts” to help families resolve the issues that brought them under investigation, but how agencies go about meeting that standard varies widely by location.)

The issue with these algorithms is certainly not malice on the part of their creators. Even the more secretive, proprietary algorithms being created by companies like SAS claim to want to create a safer system that results in less child maltreatment. But it’s unclear if that is possible with the data that’s available. Without comparable data from wealthier populations, which are better protected by privacy laws, the new systems cannot produce accurate results — and even if more data were added, it would mean more families are being separated and surveilled.

When most people hear “the state took my kids,” their minds jump to the worst conclusions. These cases are quiet and the courtrooms are closed, so I don’t blame you for assuming I was beating them up, or looking the other way while they were abused, or some other such nightmare scenario you see on the Lifetime channel. Those kinds of cases happen, but far more common are the ones where parents do their very best but still come up short on money for the heat, or the rent, or a licensed babysitter. My case is one of those, in which a little more cash and sympathy would have kept my daughters with me.

Three-quarters of substantiated child maltreatment cases are related to neglect, and the kind of neglect that triggers a CPS case is almost always the result of poverty. Although each state gets to set its own specific definitions for neglect, they typically center around deprivation of things like food, shelter, clothing, or medical treatment, which are problems almost totally exclusive to poor people.

The accusation that brought child services into my family was related to drug use. My mother-in-law, with whom I’ve never really gotten along, called the child abuse hotline and told them she suspected I was out using heroin while she watched the kids.  After a series of urine and hair panels tested negative, child protective services broadened their investigation. They raised concerns about the fact that I was living with my in-laws, and that I had been unable to attend trauma therapy for a month while I waited for my new state insurance to go into effect.

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The investigation lead to a dependency trial, where the investigator made it clear that my daughters showed no signs of abuse or neglect. I lost anyway. There are no juries involved in child welfare cases, and the burden of proof is lighter than in criminal cases: It only requires a “preponderance of the evidence,” which means the judge’s ruling depends on their personal opinion. In this case, the judge didn’t think I was a credible witness, so she ruled against me.

This means that my daughters now live with my in-laws, and I am legally barred from being in their home after 8 p.m. I get two supervised visits per week while I navigate a web of random drug tests, mental health evaluations, parenting classes, and trauma-based therapy — the details of which get reported back to my case worker, the state attorney, my daughters’ guardian ad litem, and the trial judge — in an effort to win back custody.

If I had been in a different city, or a different state, things might have turned out a lot differently. Child protective services is an umbrella term used to describe individual local agencies. They are governed by standards set at the federal level but operate independently in each state, and city-level jurisdictions set their own policies to manage reports of neglect or abuse. This means that location plays an enormous role in CPS response. Families who live in an area experiencing an economic boom are more likely to receive support, like help turning the water back on if it was shut off for nonpayment, while families in more depressed areas are less likely to have resources available to them. Because of the subjectivity of these cases, it’s likely the politics of the judges and caseworkers play a large role as well.

I’ve experienced this difference first hand. This time last year, I was living in Seattle. When I overdosed during a brief relapse in 2016, the King County child protective agency inquired about my family’s financial difficulties. After learning that the relapse had been prompted by legal difficulties with my abuser — for which I could not afford representation — they referred me to an agency that was ultimately able to provide me with an attorney pro bono. When I disclosed that I was having difficulty accessing trauma therapy because I could not afford child care, they helped secure placement for both of my daughters in a free, comprehensive daycare. And when I told them our utilities were pending shut-off, CPS paid the portion required to keep them running. My daughters did not spend a single day out of our home, and our lives began to improve.

But Seattle is a very wealthy area, with a high cost of living. When my husband had a mental health crisis that prevented him from working, we had to move somewhere more affordable and closer to his family. That somewhere ended up being Broward County, Florida. The economic differences are stark: Seattle’s median household income is almost 50 percent higher than Broward’s, and its minimum wage is nearly twice as high. Although it can be hard to catch your breath in Seattle if you’re poor, there are more avenues for help available than in Broward, and the CPS response between the two areas reflects that. In Seattle, we were given a chance to recover. In Broward, it was assumed we wouldn’t be able to.

Josh Michtom, a Connecticut public defender who represents child-welfare involved parents and children, says that poor families have the most difficulty when they come under CPS scrutiny. “Starting from the beginning…poor people as a general rule live a little closer to the edge. Scrambling to and from daycare, hurrying from job to job or job to home, living in more precarious housing or housing that isn’t as well kept-up…it’s not to say all poor people are neglectful or abusive, but run the simulation a hundred times and it’s going to come out with more things that raise an eyebrow for a teacher or daycare worker or hospital worker [who are mandated to report suspected abuse or neglect to CPS].”

According to Megan Martin, vice president of public policy at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the “vast majority” of child welfare cases are poverty related. Martin also points out that the numbers may not even fully capture the extent of the relationship between poverty and child welfare involvement. She says that the official figure, which links 47 percent of cases to poverty, measures families who are financially unable to meet their basic needs. (For example, a parent who does not have the means to heat their home in the winter.) But that doesn’t include other issues related to poverty. She uses the example of inadequate supervision, a common factor in child removals that has gained some past media attention.

“If you can’t afford child care and don’t have other resources like family to watch your kids, you might end up with a nine year old watching a two year old,” says Martin. “When kids are removed for inadequate supervision, that’s not necessarily included in that 47 percent.”

In his practice, Michtom also struggles with the huge cultural divide that often exists between mandatory reporters and many parents living in poverty. He describes how something such as a parent deviating from the typical upper- or middle-class vernacular may lead a teacher or pediatrician to subconsciously distrust the parent and therefore ascribe malicious intent to something like a bruised knee or unkempt clothing.

Even using that vernacular can count against parents who don’t look the part. At the end of my trial, the judge cited my “skill with language” as her reason for disbelieving my testimony, adding that I could “sell ice to an Eskimo.” My advanced education and ability to communicate clearly should have benefited my case, but coupled with my poverty and substance use disorder diagnosis, it led her to read me as a con artist instead.

“Middle- and upper-middle-class people have a language and way of talking to professionals that seems ‘good and responsible,’” Michtom observes. “When a kid has a completely not abuse related injury and the school nurse calls the parent and says ‘can you explain this?’ and the parent maybe doesn’t speak English as well or just seems less trustworthy to this middle-class nurse in a way maybe the nurse can’t quantify, then the nurse says ‘I have a duty to report this.’”

Once an investigation is opened, the family’s life is picked apart. Even if the original allegation turns out to be unfounded, a myriad of other factors — issues that may not have been enough to prompt a call on their own — can be used against the parent. In my case, the state obsessed over the fact that I didn’t have my own housing, despite the fact that more than one-third of adults were living with their parents in 2015.

Michtom believes that cultural differences between investigators, judges, and other people involved in the substantiation process directly affect how even small deviations are perceived. “If you don’t know what it’s like to be poor and you don’t know what it’s like to make the compromises poor people have to make,” explains Michtom, “the wrong social worker calls them deplorable or filthy even if it was just messy or cluttered, and that increases the likelihood that it leads to a court petition [for the child’s removal].”

As he says this, I remember the shame and anxiety I felt doing something as simple as going to the playground, where my daughter’s coats, though surely warm enough, looked dingy and stained next to the kids running around in clothes so absurdly bright they looked like something out of a cartoon. My anxiety wasn’t just based on embarrassment; it was also couched in the visceral fear that people would assume I was a bad mom because of something as simple as clothing my daughters in used coats.

Parenting in poverty creates a cycle of factors that compound each other. For my family, an inability to pay for child care or legal aid in 2016 created a snowball of stressors that ultimately led to a relapse and almost killed me. This year, when we were managing to get by, a sudden unexpected health emergency sent us spiraling right back into the system.

As I continue to fight for the return of my daughters, I can’t help but wonder what it would look like to have a uniform child welfare system that recognizes these types of complexities. Maybe my daughters would be with me now. Maybe my husband would be on a road to wellness instead of struggling alongside me to find permanent housing. Maybe the other 3 million families involved with CPS would flourish and thrive. Maybe parenting in poverty would stop being so hard.

Welcome to summer break.

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I’m a low-income single mom with two kids, and summer break feels like a giant blurry question mark. I cannot take time off of work. We don’t have any vacation plans. I cannot afford to hire a summer babysitter or send my kids to a string of various camps. While I considered more creative options, like kid-swapping with friends, the logistics—work schedules, child temperaments, and distances between homes—became too complicated to figure out. And while I’m all for the concept of free-range kids, this week it’s 108 degrees. That’s about ten degrees hotter than the National Institute of Health thinks humans can withstand before their bodies start shutting down, which means sending the kids outside to play with sidewalk chalk and roll down hills all day is…not a thing.

As a writer, I only get paid when I produce something, which is hard to do with a three-year-old in my lap. So, since earning money must continue through the summer, my entire work plan is to write while my children are sleeping, lean into my coffee habit, and beg babysitting hours from my parents—a privilege compared to those who don’t have relatives able or willing to help.

 *           *           *

Accessing and affording child care is difficult for everyone all year, not just in the summer. For those like me who are living on a single income, the cost of child care cuts deep into our pocketbooks and chips away at our quality of life. To afford child care often means forgoing something else—reliable transportation, household goods, or even food. Today, the average cost of child care for a single child in the United States is approximately $9,000 per year, which is more than one-third of my income.

In fact, the cost of child care ranks near the top of a recent survey that found American women are choosing to have fewer children, or forgo having them entirely—which could help to explain why the childbirth rate has fallen to a 30-year low. In an article about the declining U.S. birth rate, journalist Amy Westervelt writes, “for all its pro-family rhetoric, the U.S. is a remarkably harsh place for families, and particularly for mothers.” It’s also especially rough for contracted laborers—a group projected to surpass 50 percent of the American workforce over the next decade–who sacrifice income each time they aren’t able to take a job. “That gig economy you keep hearing so much about, with its flexible schedule and independence?” writes Westervelt. “Yeah, it sucks for mothers… I can tell you exactly how great and balanced it felt to go back to work two hours after giving birth.”

I went right back to work after both of my births. Less than 48 hours after I had my first child, I was hauling produce on my vegetable farm. Two days after my second child was born, I sat in a business meeting while my milk came in. Now as a freelance writer, most of the time I work 7 days a week writing articles, editing other people’s articles, pitching stories, and chasing late payments. Sometimes I work on projects for months before seeing a dime.

While women are increasingly entering the gig economy (a 2014 study showed that 53 percent of full-time freelancers were women), there are real questions about a burgeoning economy that dangles the carrot of flexibility to busy, multitasking women (many of them mothers), yet still manipulates and mistreats them through pay discrimination and abusive power structures. FastCompany reported that “[female] Uber drivers earn 7 percent less than male drivers, while women freelancers charge lower rates, are more likely to get paid late, and are four and a half times less likely to be earning over $150,000.”

And then there’s child care. In 2016 alone, nearly 2 million parents of children age 5 and younger had to quit a job, not take a job, or greatly change their job because of problems with child care.

That means many parents—and statistically, mothers more than fathers, due to the archaic, sexist nature of both workplace and household expectations—are forced to cut back hours, miss out on trainings or job-related experiences, or pass up promotions due to the inability to work more or the need for flexible hours. It’s part of the “motherhood penalty” that stunts career advancement and reduces income, which snowballs considerably over a woman’s lifetime. That penalty reduces the ability of entire households—especially those of single mothers—to accumulate wealth or gain social mobility. In contrast, most working fathers earn more than men without kids.

In a conversation on NPR’s 1A about the motherhood wage gap, Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers said, “Our culture and our policies have just failed to account for the fact that we have families. … And in the 21^st century, that means we actually need child care. We need elder care. We need paid family leave. These are just basic infrastructure assumptions we need to make that we haven’t caught up to.” She notes the emergence of new ideas and solutions, such as Universal Family Care, a proposed family care insurance fund that working Americans could draw upon to afford child care, elder care, and paid family medical leave.

While I’ve been able to carve out a successful job as a freelance writer and editor, there are limits to my ability to thrive. As a single parent, jet-setting off to cover breaking news or spending weeks away from home investigating injustice is out of the question, even though I think I’d do it well. I need predictability and routine, stable income, and child care for those long days when I’m on deadline. I find working from home while parenting to be beyond frustrating and near-impossible. I literally cringe at the zillionth snack request of the day and the never-ending chorus of Mom! Mom! Mom! Some days I’ve barely written a sentence by 2 p.m.

Still, there is something missing in these conversations about working and motherhood. The statistics cannot measure the bone tiredness of a mother any better than it can articulate the fierce tether that connects me to my children. There is magic in the unmeasurable. There have been actual moments when I have thought, If only someone could see me changing a diaper and typing at the same time. Or the phone calls with editors while balancing a newly-potty-trained toddler on the toilet. How many times I have held a sleeping feverish child while simultaneously racing a deadline. As Rufi Thorpe writes, “It is lovely; it is intolerable; it is both.”

Six decades later, I’ve watched this city get burned down and built back up. The Petworth row house I grew up in, on the corner of Upshur and 7^th, now costs 75 times what it did when I was a kid. I’ve gone from concessions to catering, from cheap hole-in-the-walls to high-end establishments. I’ve always liked puzzles, and that’s basically what serving is: you need to make sure all the pieces—the people, the staff, the meals, the timing—fit together. The prize for solving that puzzle, day after day, has crept up to a minimum wage of $3.89, plus tips.

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Even with tips, that isn’t enough to live on. Many of the places where I’ve worked have found ways to cut into our paychecks, taking a percentage off the top. Some people in the city still made good money working for tips, but a lot of us really struggled. That’s why I pushed for Initiative 77, which would raise the tipped minimum to match the actual minimum wage, to pass. It’s why I was happy when it did, and it’s why I’m so frustrated with the D.C. City Council now.

Last week, City Council Member Jack Evans—who represents the Ward where I go to work every week—introduced a bill to repeal Initiative 77. No compromise, no discussion, just a one-page bill to block the ballot initiative from ever becoming law. Even though the city voted for it overwhelmingly. Even though the slogan on D.C. license plates is about how often the city doesn’t get that chance (“No Taxation without Representation,” it reads). Even though the people who voted for it are also the people who stand to benefit the most: We’re more likely to be poor and black, and to live in the parts of the city where poverty is still rising. Even though the rest of the city is getting richer. Even though one of the Mayor’s signature agenda items is giving black workers a fair shot. Even though all we’re hoping for is a law that would mean we don’t have to worry about how to pay the bills if the rain or the heat keep people inside.

It’s hard to imagine what my life would have been like if I’d had that kind of stability for the entirety of my 58 years as a server. Maybe saving for retirement wouldn’t have been such a luxury. But it’s not just about me. I, along with a majority of DC voters in 7 out of 8 wards, support Initiative 77 because I feel like I have an obligation to leave the industry better than I found it, to make things a little easier for the folks who come up after me.

The obligation to make things better for the next generation isn’t mine alone—City Council shares it. In the District, people don’t get many chances to have their voices heard in a public way. When I started working, city residents had just won the right to vote for the president—almost 200 years after the county was founded. D.C. still doesn’t have a say in Congress, and Congress can still overturn our laws when they feel like it.

To see the city council robbing residents of an explicit expression of self-governing feels like a betrayal. I believe that all of us, no matter the position we hold, have an obligation to try to make things better for the future. If you serve in public office, that responsibility is even greater.

It doesn’t have to be hard. Voters already told you what to do. Initiative 77 asked a question and the voters gave a resounding answer: yes, all of our residents deserve a stable, living wage. Now you just have to listen.

I wake up—I think I must have missed my alarm, or snoozed it too many times. I grab my phone to check the time. It’s late. I snap out of bed in a rush and curse myself for sleeping in.

I usually work as a freelance software engineer. Today, I’m a bike messenger. Thanks to a surprise layoff, I have to scramble to pay my rent and bills next month. For the last four days, I’ve worked 12 hours a day on my bike to hit an average of 18 deliveries a day. If I can do 20 more before midnight, I’ll earn a total of $1,100—just enough to tread water until my next gig pays out.

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I still check my email compulsively to keep up with messages from the new client I just started working for. I can’t send them an invoice until the end of the month, and I won’t get the money until two weeks later. I need money now so I can afford to work, so I bike.

I had fantasies this week of getting up early, getting in a few hours of programming, working the rush hours for bike deliveries, and programming more in the lull between lunch and dinner. My body didn’t cooperate—it takes the entire day to do the number of deliveries I need, and it turns out I need recovery time after 12 hours of cycling up hills and in rush-hour traffic.

There’s part of me that knows this is a stupid situation. Everyone knows you should have three months of savings before you start freelancing, you should never depend on just one client, you should never treat a contracting gig like a full-time job no matter how much your client might want you to, and so on. But sometimes you make sacrifices. Sometimes you don’t want to just follow the money—you want to work on something you actually feel good about. You want fulfillment, and to feel like you’re making a real impact instead of just lining someone else’s pockets.

That’s why I went into debt to keep working on a project I really believed in, for a client who had trouble paying their bills on time, and who insisted that I treat the work as if it were my full-time job—even though the position didn’t come with benefits, legal protections, or even my usual rate for freelance work.

Sometimes it feels like it’s my fault for sticking around; like it’s my fault for expecting something as luxurious as “fulfillment” from my work. For people like me, first-generation college graduates without intergenerational wealth to insulate them from risk-taking, asking for “fulfillment” is being greedy.

I think about what it would take for me to become OK with giving up my dreams, and if that might make me happier.

11:12 a.m.

The rush hour alarm goes off. No time for contemplation now. Regardless of how I got into this, the only thing that matters now is paying the rent. Planning the next step can come later.

I get dressed in the same wool jersey and leggings I’ve been wearing for four days. I haven’t managed to do my laundry, either.

11:25 a.m.

I’m brushing my teeth when my first delivery notification goes off. I accept it without looking. I don’t know how the dispatch algorithm assigns work, and I worry that being too picky about which orders I take will reduce the total number I get. I can’t afford to be picky—20 deliveries is a lot, even on a good day. I rush out of my house and take off down the road.

I didn’t have time to stretch. All the muscles in my legs scream at me up that first hill. There’s nothing to do but keep pushing.

12:05 p.m.

I have time after the first delivery to grab a cup of coffee and a muffin for breakfast. I’m scrolling through Twitter on my phone—the big news today is at the Google I/O developer conference, where Google is announcing some fresh dystopian horror: a new tool that enables busy professionals to use robots with convincing human voices to take on the drudgery of interacting with service industry employees.

The job I’m doing right now isn’t all that different. I’m a buffer between the different castes in our economy: My deliveries bring people restaurant-quality food in their homes, without having to ever interact with an actual restaurant worker. This is supposed to be “innovation.” This is supposed to make people’s lives easier.

I think about inventions that are legitimately making my life easier today. This cafe has little plastic splash guards, so that when I inevitably have to take this coffee on the road with me, it won’t get all over my clothes. This is innovation.

I’ve just barely taken the first sip of my coffee when another delivery notification comes up. Thank God for splash guards.

12:34 p.m.

2/20 finished, now waiting for a restaurant to finish preparing my third of the day.

I examine the new EBT card in my wallet. I got up early yesterday morning before starting deliveries to go to the San Francisco Human Services Agency to sign up for MediCal (California’s version of Medicaid), and, while I was at it, CalFresh (California’s SNAP, or food stamps).

I haven’t seen a doctor in over two years. When I started freelancing full time in 2017, I was told that since I didn’t have any income yet, I qualified for Medicaid. By the time I tried to use my benefits, I was working part-time and earned too much to qualify. Because I had never actually “activated” my Medicaid benefits, losing Medicaid eligibility was not a “qualifying life event” enabling me to sign up for individual insurance. Or so I was told over the phone. I haven’t read the law.

So I waited. By the time open enrollment rolled around in 2017, I was working for a new client 40 hours a week, who assured me they would start regularly paying my invoices in full by mid-December. I signed up for health insurance, but mid-December came and went, my bills came due, and my invoices still weren’t paid. My client advanced me enough money to pay off the debt I’d incurred by working for them without pay, but not enough to pay my new insurance bill. My health insurance was withdrawn. I was told over the phone, basically, “better luck next year.”

My invoices weren’t paid in full until April of this year. When I demanded a new contract with penalties for late payment of my invoices, I was told my services were no longer required.

It was bad news, but it gave me an opening—if I could claim zero income and get on MediCal, I might have a chance to get on Covered California (California’s health insurance exchange) before the end of the year. But it wouldn’t be easy. My rent in San Francisco is $1,400 a month. The MediCal eligibility cutoff is $1,366 a month. I asked my caseworker whether that meant I would make myself ineligible by earning enough to pay my rent, and she said, exasperated, “yes.”

That leaves me with a very short window of time to qualify for Medicaid, report myself for disqualification (or be accused of fraud), then take evidence of my disqualification to Covered California, which is, of course, managed by a separate agency.

The fact that I have to do any of this just to obtain the privilege of paying for health insurance is madness. A program like Medicare for All, without all the means-testing busywork, would smooth this out and make life many times easier for all the people stuck waiting in line at the county benefits office.

While I’m musing about this, I realize my order’s been up on the counter for a few minutes. I glare at the guy at the counter and he sheepishly brings it over to me. “How long has this been done?” I snap at him. “I’m working here.” I exit the restaurant, fuming, and take off down the road.

1:41 p.m.

Finished delivery 4/20. Grateful the customer ordered a drink in a bottle instead of from the fountain. People love having fountain drinks in flimsy plastic cups delivered by bicycle, but nobody thinks about how it’s done.

1:50 p.m.

I get in an argument with the manager of a restaurant that won’t accept orders from my delivery company.

“It’s not our problem,” the manager says. “We told them to take us off their website but they haven’t done it yet.”

I’m pissed. This restaurant was way out of my way in a less busy part of town.

“You know I don’t get paid for my time when you don’t take my orders, right?” I say, raising my voice. “You know that people like me are the ones you’re hurting, right?”

“I’m sorry sir, take it up with—”

“Look at me,” I say, getting a little out of hand. “I’m the one you’re screwing here, not the delivery company. Think about who gets hurt when you do this shit.” I slam the door behind me and hate-bike away, back up the hill I just came from.

2:15 p.m.

As I’m riding to my next delivery I realize that if I finish 20 today, I’m already going to be cutting it close on my Medicaid eligibility. I’m going to have to get into the technical weeds on how to make the transition to individual insurance if I want coverage this year.

Delivery 5/20 is ready, and now instead of thinking about how to pull off the sleight-of-hand I need to go to the doctor, I’m thinking about how to transport this expensive, delicately plated avocado toast, through potholes and up and down 45-degree inclines to its destination at … an art school.

I am literally living one of those grouchy articles about #millennials. It doesn’t matter. I need the money. I pad my delivery bag carefully and take off.

3:00 p.m.

It’s a beautiful day out and my face hurts from scowling so much. I’m mad at everyone, my legs hurt, I’ve been sweating all day, and the orders won’t stop coming. I was hoping to take a break around now but I know I can’t afford it—I’m currently at 7/20. I can’t stop thinking about my bad interactions with restaurant workers today. I feel like I made a huge mistake.

4:05 p.m.

9/20 now. It’s been unusually busy. The wind has been at my back all day. So why am I so pissed off? I decide to turn off the delivery app and take my first real break since breakfast.

I read somewhere that drinking beer doesn’t really give you the kinds of carbs that you need for a long bike ride, but I’ve decided whoever wrote that is a liar. I order a beer and try to collect my thoughts.

One of the reasons doing this work is so jarring is because, when I was working in Startupland as an engineer, I was the one being served. Everything in this city was arranged for my comfort and convenience.

Now that I’m the one doing the serving, everything is different. Managers want me to stand in a different part of the restaurant. The doorman is suspicious of me by default. Everyone can afford to make me wait. I am part of the invisible support network, increasingly orchestrated by unaccountable algorithms.

This support network, this comfort machinery, is noisy, messy, ugly and dangerous. Everyone is hustling for every single dollar. You can measure your payout by the sweat on your back.

This is what startup founders like to make believe their lives are like. They’re not.

In Startupland, almost everyone is white and aged 21 to 45. The hours are long, but the pay is good and basic needs aren’t a concern. In service industry land, everyone speaks with a different accent, almost nobody is white and ages range from 16 to 70-something. Retirement isn’t an option, and making rent isn’t a given.

I know I’m just a tourist in service industry land. The last time I worked full-time in a restaurant was before college, and I don’t plan on going back. I’m never going to be as hard as the lifetime bicycle couriers, like all the cool kids that hang out at that one statue plaza along Market Street. The least I can do is remember that we have more in common with each other than any of us do with the people we’re serving, and act accordingly.

I finish my beer and go back online. My first order comes up almost immediately. I take a deep breath—I’m probably not getting another break until I finish for the night.

5:02 p.m.

A huge percentage of this job is delivering fast food hamburgers to the top floors of luxury apartment towers that are located within walking distance from world-class dining.

5:30 p.m.

I got another break, but now I’m getting nervous. It’s been an unusually long lull.

6:00 p.m.

Still nothing. This is supposed to be rush hour.

6:20 p.m.

Got another delivery, but I had to order from the restaurant and they’re taking their time. I try to remember that they’re doing their best. I go outside and look at the map on my app. It’s flooded with orders everywhere, but it’s slow for me. I worry that I’ve somehow angered The Algorithm. Maybe I jostled the garnish on the avocado toast too hard earlier and got a bad rating. I hope not. The next two hours are going to make or break my night.

6:24 p.m.

My order is finished, and as I’m riding away the little chime in my headphones lets me know my next delivery is already scheduled. Deliverance! The Algorithm smiles on me.

6:48 p.m.

13/20. There’s nothing worse than looking at your destination and seeing words like “Alta” or “Terrace” or “Heights.” Every time I deliver to the top of a hill, the customer always lives at the top floor of an old walkup and wants their food delivered to their door.

7:07 p.m.

The Algorithm stacked two massive orders on top of each other, so they both have to be carried in the same bag. “Doesn’t fit” isn’t a cancellation option, so I have to get creative with my delivery bag.

Thankfully, I’m in a part of town where everyone loves having food delivered to their houses from 4 blocks away. The decadence is irritating, but I can’t be mad about it right now.

7:49 p.m.

Another stacked delivery, another restaurant absolutely slammed with takeout orders they can’t get out fast enough. There’s a guy sitting behind me who’s picking up dinner for himself, puffing his chest up, getting ready to throw a fit about his order being late. I’m not happy either, but I’m keeping a lid on it. They get my order out first. I thank them and rush out the door.

8:06 p.m.

Two deliveries to damn near around the corner from the restaurant. God bless these people and their excess disposable income.

8:15 p.m.

Four deliveries right on top of each other, and now, nothing. The dinner rush is almost over. I need three more deliveries. I’m losing it. What have I done now to offend The Algorithm?

8:16 p.m.

18/20. Frozen yogurt delivery, straight up a hill. The fog rolled in an hour ago and it’s cold and drizzly, but sure, great time for frozen yogurt.

8:45 p.m.

19/20. Somebody ordered a single piece of garlic bread for $3.99 and paid me at least $5 to deliver it. Up six flights of stairs.

9:18 p.m.

20/20 COMPLETE! They were a model customer—met me outside the door of their luxury apartment tower instead of making me fight with the security guard, and offered me a cash tip.

Cash tips are strictly forbidden by lots of gig economy platforms, in part because keeping total control over the entire transaction makes it easier to discipline workers. If I depend on the app for my payout, I only serve one master, and if there’s a conflict between what the app wants and what the customer wants, the app wins.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. I’ve paid cash for app-based rides before, and I tip in cash. But obviously I would never accept a cash tip in violation of the terms of service.

9:26 p.m.

I didn’t turn the app off quickly enough after I finished my last order, so I have one more to finish the night. It’s a single order of bubble tea from a brand new shop, on a gnarly stretch of 6th street just south of Market.

As I’m locking up my bike, somebody calls out to me: “Hey white boy, you all fucked up, right?” I look up and see an angry white guy, a little younger than me, aggressively walking toward me. “I said you’re all fucked up, right?”

I have no idea what he’s even asking me or what he wants. He gets six inches from my face. He’s glaring at me like he’s mad, or wants something from me. I can’t tell if this guy is high, or fucking with me, or what. I finish locking my bike and rush into the restaurant. I half expect him to run up behind me and attack me.

I’m a little shaken up. The bubble tea guy doesn’t say anything, but the guy who was yelling at me is still standing next to my bike. I’m trying to keep an eye on him.

My order comes up. I don’t see the guy out the door, but part of me assumes he’s around the corner. I step outside—he’s not there. I check my bike tires to see if he slashed them or something. They’re fine. I’m OK for now.

I strap my bag down and head south toward Mission Bay, the city’s fakest and least accessible neighborhood. All the buildings and roads are brand new—so new that Google Maps routes you to dead ends. I’ve been on this same road, an isolated stretch under several freeway overpasses, dozens of times this week. But this time, it’s unsettling. I’d never considered myself vulnerable on my bike until just now.

9:54 p.m.

I finish the delivery—naturally, on an upper floor of a luxury apartment building. I walk outside to my bike and lean against it. It’s a little early—I only had to work 10 hours today, better than the average of 12 hours it usually takes.

I get back on my bike and head toward my favorite dive bar. I get an hour or two to celebrate paying my rent. Tomorrow, I’m a software engineer again. I’m working with economists studying the behavior of consumers who are subject to major income shocks, and separately, working on open source software for Medicare and Medicaid provider screening. Fucking kismet.

I’m going to be busy trying to hit those deadlines. So busy I might even have to order delivery.

The first day I stood in the courtroom, all I had was my story. I prepared to tell the judge that I had been groomed by the man seven years my senior since I was 14; that I had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten, bitten, strangled, and raped. I prepared to tell her that the last time we were alone together, the petitioner strangled me while I was holding my infant son until I had a seizure and dropped my baby. I prepared to tell the judge that my son was now an eight-year-old boy who still wore diapers and could not speak, while I was in recovery from a heroin addiction that had, for many years, been my only means of coping with the PTSD.

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My abuser came to court equipped with an attorney. His lawyer was a tall man with an olive complexion and an easy self-confidence that he showcased by strolling through the courtroom, addressing the clerks by name and punctuating their interactions with a rolling belly laugh. My abuser’s attorney had all the papers in order. I, attorneyless, did not.

When the judge entered she told me I needed a lawyer, and offered me a continuance I didn’t know I could request. I took it, thinking it would give me a little more time before my son would officially belong to the man who had terrorized me when I was little more than a child myself. I knew the continuance would ultimately make no difference; there was no attorney I could afford.

This type of legal divide is not uncommon. According to the American Psychological Association, abusive fathers file for sole custody more often than fathers who have no history of domestic violence. Since 99 percent of domestic violence victims also face some form of financial abuse, abusers tend to have more money and thus more access to legal resources than the women fleeing their abuse. That gives them an advantage in the courts that makes them just as likely, or even more likely, to gain custody.

These prolonged legal battles can turn into an abuse of their own. Court-related abuse—sometimes called litigation abuse—is a widely under-recognized phenomenon in which a perpetrator of intimate partner violence will use family law court as a means of maintaining contact with their victims, even when legal protections would otherwise forbid it. Women and their children who have endured horrific abuses, including sexual molestation and rape, can be forced to interact repeatedly with their assailants in the courtroom upon escaping the relationships.

My abuser discovered his judicial advantage in 2016. I had a five-year protective order against him, a length of time I was told is rarely granted except in cases of extreme violence. But even that did not stop my abuser from dragging me to court.

Unlike many women, I got lucky. I won a lottery for a pro bono attorney through a program offered by my county that mentors licensed lawyers hoping to switch from their previous specialty to family law. These lawyers are only available—in limited quantity—to domestic violence survivors involved in custody cases where a child faces significant danger should the outcome favor the opponent. My attorney’s previous specialty was personal injury law. My abuser’s attorney had been practicing family law for decades. He filed claim after claim trying to dispute my testimonies, forcing me to recount abuses I hadn’t even yet addressed in therapy, and painting me as the negligent junkie who abandoned my son and couldn’t even keep a home clean.

When the case was over, I asked my attorney if she still planned to pursue family law. She said no.

After a year of litigation that included a comprehensive assessment by a child’s advocate, threats of Child Protective Services involvement, numerous courtroom proceedings that placed me side-by-side with my abuser, and an attempt at mediation, my abuser got bored and gave up his parental rights. Or maybe his new girlfriend became angry that he was giving me so much attention. Or maybe he litigated himself out of money, though that’s extremely rare in these types of cases. I don’t know. What I do know is that my son’s biological father now gets to put his name on the birth certificate. I know that I still have a domestic violence protection order, but it no longer covers my now-10 year old son, who is nonverbal and cannot call for help or tell anyone if he is harmed.

During the proceedings, I lost my job as a fundraiser. I began hallucinating the face of my abuser over the faces of men who resembled him, which made me afraid to leave my home. I had to start taking medication for trauma nightmares that made me dizzy if I stood up too quickly in the morning. I also relapsed on heroin, briefly, and take medication now for that too. Before the case began, my PTSD centered on events in the past. Now I have to be scared of the future: of the possibility that my abuser will come after my son and me again.

Litigation gave him freedom to pick at the most private things about me. I had to defend the reasons why my son didn’t live with me. I had to defend how and why I have PTSD. I had to reveal my addiction and treatment history, and then defend that too. On the other hand, I learned very little about my abuser. What I did learn was that he has a new girlfriend. She is not yet fully fluent in English, which fits his pattern of bouncing between underage girls and women who are new to the country and language. I learned that he lives with his girlfriend on a small piece of land outside of the city. I heard they raise chickens, and that on some weekends his girlfriend’s daughter—a young girl who has begun experimenting with hair dye—stays overnight.

Editor’s note: To protect the privacy of certain individuals, identifying details have been changed. 

I’m here to offer an effective outcome: Me.

I grew up in a rural Western Massachusetts town surrounded by forest, farms, and shuttered mills, where it was a 30 minute drive to the nearest grocery store. Winters were a wonderland filled with snow days, cross-country skiing, roaring fires, and sledding. However, when I was 12 years old, my dad left and took our financial stability with him. After 21 years of marriage, my suddenly single-income mum had to find a way to pay the mortgage, keep food in the fridge, put gas in the car, and—in a town where snowfall is measured in feet rather than inches— heat a drafty home through the New England winters.

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The original 1970s heating system was intended for a single floor house. Despite its best efforts, the heat would be sucked into the large, dank cement basement, and never reach the second floor that my crafty grandpa added himself. When the temperatures dropped outside, regularly into the single digits, the painful damp cold seeped through the walls and into my bones. I would layer socks with slippers and pair flannel pajamas with sweaters and thick robes. I walked around the house wrapped in blankets, gripped with a constant panic because I could not get warm. Then, when I looked at the thermostat, I would find the already-inadequate heating system was only set to 55—nowhere near the temperature that could have forced the heat up from the basement and into the termite-riddled corners of our house.

But my mum was rationing the heat.

We staged silent, passive-aggressive battles over the temperature for years. I could not understand why we didn’t set the heat to 70 or 72 like my friends’ warm, comfortable houses. So, as the temperatures went down, I would tip-toe to the thermostat at the top of the basement stairs and crank the heat up twenty degrees. Then, when I was caught—and I always got caught—conflict would erupt.

During one particularly tense argument, my mum snapped and told me that the only reason we could even afford to keep the heat in the 50s was the government assistance that helped pay for the oil that heated the house. She was still paying for heat, but the program helped shave a few dollars off each gallon. If I kept turning up the thermostat to more bearable temperatures, we would run out of oil for the month.

Our family only talked about finances during arguments like that: Once someone had been pushed too far, the truth would come rushing out. I pieced together my understanding of money, and adulthood, and class from my memories of those moments. But during the winters when I was still a teenager, I couldn’t get past the disbelief. How could turning the dial to 70 mean we would be without heat in the heart of a Massachusetts winter? How could regions with extreme cold allow residents to live without a basic need like heat?

It took years for me to realize my mum was hiding our financial problems because she was trying to protect me. She was working hard to help our family recover after we lost our only source of income. My mom had stayed home to raise me, so when my dad left, she didn’t have a career to fall back on. She paid the bills by begging friends and the family priest to let her clean their houses and edged her way up to juggling a variety of part-time jobs: temping in offices, restocking clothes at TJ Maxx, and working the night-shift as a receptionist in the emergency room. During this time, LIHEAP was a short-term resource that helped pull us out of a terrifying financial black hole.

When my mom finally secured a full-time receptionist position, she immediately donated to fuel assistance programs because she was so grateful that LIHEAP had given us a chance to stabilize financially. It didn’t keep my house luxuriously warm, but it kept us safe and alive in dangerously cold weather.

Today, only 20 percent of all the households in the US that qualify for LIHEAP actually receive assistance paying for heat or weatherizing their houses. That means for the 6 million families who receive help, there are another 24 million families who are eligible but go without. The program has a brutal, “first come, first serve” policy: When each state’s LIHEAP money runs out, agencies stop accepting applications for assistance—often before winter ends. The families lucky enough to receive LIHEAP can find themselves exhausting their funds before winter is over. The remaining families are left with impossible choices: whether to pay for the heat or the mortgage, whether to live with the cold or to put kerosene heaters in the house.

Trump’s budget would make that a reality for everyone.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the reason the author’s mother’s career history. 

I try to make myself small. I fold into myself hoping that if I don’t make eye contact, if I just don’t look up, no one will notice I’m there. I pack away my loud laugh and hunch my broad shoulders.

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My mom mentioned the same thing to me in a phone call last week. On her daily walk during her lunch break, she asked me if she could share something that had been weighing on her recently. Her whole life, she said, she has tried to make herself invisible. As a child, she tried to make herself invisible as a means of survival. As a teenager who was undocumented, she tried to make herself invisible so that she wouldn’t be detained by INS. And as a single mother, she tried to make herself invisible so that she could raise me in an environment that was safe. Recently, people have been cutting her in lines, as if she isn’t there.

“I’m starting to think I got too good at making myself invisible. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”

The concept of shrinking one’s self down to navigate the world safely is not at all new. When what you have learned in life is that self-preservation may be your only means of survival, invisibility is a refuge. But over the past year—a year in which our country has been led by a man who won the White House by being sexist, racist, and violently anti-immigrant—invisible people have stepped into the light.

When being seen is dangerous, choosing to be visible is an act of resistance and radical love.

We see this with young undocumented activists who are protesting at the Capitol: seeking out the elected officials who would deprive them of their home, knowing fully well that they could be arrested and detained. We see this with the members of ADAPT who fought to take down Trumpcare, through arrests in front of the White House, in the Capitol Rotunda, and Mitch McConnell’s office. We see this in the survivors of sexual harassment and sexual assault, ranging from movie stars to domestic workers, who are speaking their assaulters’ names.

We are done making ourselves small, and we are done staying quiet out of fear.

There is no asking for access anymore, or asking to be listened to. Instead, there is truth telling and a demand for acknowledgment. We are showing up, in record numbers, and we are not losing energy.

We have realized that our seat at the table will not be given to us if it requires someone who has privilege to relinquish it. So we are doing what Shirley Chisholm taught us, and bringing our own folding chairs. And in doing so, we have stepped out of our invisibility and into the light.

I sent the post to my little brother, a well-coiffed yuppie who organizes most of his social life around food, and asked what he thought about the recipe. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Ham’s still hard for me.”

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With consistent refrigeration, a baked spiral ham will stay fresh for three to five days. That’s when its color shifts from a cheerful pink to a dull grayish-green, as the preservatives begin to buckle under the pressure of prolonged oxygen exposure. After a few more days, it starts to develop a thick, snot-like slime. That’s the bacteria breaking down sugars in the meat, as the decay sets in for real.

Most people throw their food out well before they have to confront this arc in the circle of life. But most people aren’t starving. If you are, you learn to wash the slime off—under hot running water, with soap if you need it—and hope for the best.

There was a point before the weeks of rotting ham, or months of tortillas and processed cheese, when I could have asked for help. I didn’t.

I had already been fat for my entire life. When I was born, my baby cheeks were so big that they squeezed my eyes shut for the first three months of my infancy. As a kid, I was the worst-case scenario in every game of “would you rather.” I was also stable, smart, and well-adjusted—except that I was miserable. That’s what being fat does: It swallows up everything you do right and hides it in the giant failure that is your body. For women in particular, being fat is such a colossal fuck up that it squeezes out the room to be anything else: Being fat and isn’t an option. (The only exception is being fat and funny, if you manage to be in on the joke of your own fatness.)

By the time I was a teenager, I had learned how to avoid anything that would draw attention to my body: to wear clothes that hid my size, to avoid activities where people looked at me, and above all to hide the fact that I ever ate.

Hiding your eating is tricky in the best of circumstances—there are only so many times that you can just “not be hungry” during lunch, and there’s a thin line between tapping your pen just loud enough to cover the sound of your stomach growling and actually doing desktop drumrolls during Math class. But hiding your eating and asking for help getting enough food is actually impossible: You have to admit that you eat to tell someone you don’t eat enough. And I couldn’t do it.

Instead, my little brothers and I made it five years without setting eyes on a vegetable, eating stale scraps and spoiled meat. It sounds almost foolish now—like we were undone by our own vanity. But the truth is, society uses appearance as a shortcut to determining value. Thin is good; fat is bad. Fat people know that. We are acutely aware that we are considered lazy, weak-willed, and even incompetent—doubly so if we’re also poor.  But humans simply can’t endure being told we’re terrible all of the time. So we avoid situations where that’s likely to happen.

It turns out the stigma against being fat is so intense that it stops people from getting health care, exercising in public, or interacting with other people. For me, that also included finding someone who could help me get food. I knew what I would be up against—what it would take to convince someone I was telling the truth—and I didn’t have the energy. I had homework to do, power to get turned back on, and college essays to write.

Eventually, through no work of my own—I’ll cut off my own feet before anyone ever turns me into a “pulled herself up by the bootstraps” folk hero—the food available to me got better. It got more plentiful. It got healthier. I stayed fat. And now that I’m okay—now that I have water, and heat, and trash pickup—that’s fine. I have the luxury of rejecting the idea that the things that society says give me value—like thinness and prettiness and obedience—mean anything. Because right now, my survival isn’t tied quite so closely to whether or not other people think I deserve to be alive.

We live in a cabin in Trescott, Maine. Our nearest neighbors are a half-mile down the road in one direction and about two miles in the other, with woods surrounding us. There are two variety stores about 6 miles from us in either direction, and a larger store is 11 miles away.

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Our roof has been leaking for a few years. My husband patches whenever we are able to buy a bundle of shingles and tar, and covers the undone sections with plastic tarps. He has pretty bad arthritis but we can’t afford to hire anyone to help. If we did hire someone, it would use whatever savings we’re trying to scrape together for that elusive new, used vehicle. Meanwhile, we put repairs to our current car on a must-do list since it’s two-and-a-half months past inspection and we know it won’t pass. For example, we had a rusty gas filler pipe, so gas would puddle on the ground. To alleviate that we only put in $5 at a time—smaller puddle. You wouldn’t think that would be a $300 job, but when you add up the estimate for what else needed replacing it was closer to $400.

Both of us are collecting Social Security—I have additional income through part-time work with the Senior Community Service Employment Program. We qualify for food stamps, but an experience 35 years ago has made it a choice of last resort. It was our son’s eighth birthday. We splurged on strawberries and cream for a strawberry shortcake, and on steaks, for his birthday dinner. We may have had to scrimp the rest of the month but at least we would celebrate his birthday. The looks. The cashier and the woman behind me in line watched me handing over the food stamps, and then their eyes went to the steaks and strawberries, and then back to me with an expression I could only describe as scorn.

We built our cabin in 1980-81, and except for five years in Orono while my husband went back to school, we’ve lived there ever since. Yet the Maine State Housing Authority (MSHA) wants more proof that we live there before we can complete an application for heating assistance. We don’t have electricity—we heat with our wood stove—but we’ve had propane delivered here all this time, and bank statements mailed to this address. None of that counts to MSHA, so we don’t apply for heating assistance.

Recently, things became harder for us when we discovered our cell phone account was closed. SafeLink had provided us with a phone that would work in our area. Then, for reasons unexplained, they terminated our service without notice. (Services that help low-income seniors seem to be getting cut, or made more difficult, quite a bit these days.) It’s mean to cut a service that in rural areas can be lifesaving. Our solution was to purchase a simple Tracfone and a card with minutes. The new phone doesn’t keep a charge longer than 2 days and sometimes doesn’t ring when calls come in.

We live in a state of constant anxiety, making a good night’s sleep tough to come by. It’s well-established that prevention is cheaper than crisis care. But if your state refuses to adopt Medicaid expansion—even after the people vote for it—a lot of people are S.O.L. That’s the boat we were in, and the boat some of our friends are still in. We have Medicare but it doesn’t cover hearing, eye care, and oral care. All luxuries. My husband went without glasses for three years after the ones he’d patched with duct tape had a lens fall out and shatter. We found you could get prescription glasses online fairly cheap, but first you had to have a prescription. As far as I know hearing aids aren’t available online cheaper. Luckily, that’s not an issue for us.

So, we make do. We feel grateful for fairly good health (‘cept for the arthritis). We try to save more—although it’s the time of year when a cord of wood at $260 is my two-week paycheck, nearly. We’ve hit a cold spell—forty-six below with the wind chill. The trip to the outhouse becomes less pleasant each morning it goes below zero. And I hope it doesn’t snow too soon, because I haven’t found a pair of winter boots in a thrift store that fits.

And we have to save for that car.

I learned what it meant, piece by piece. It meant that my uncle couldn’t volunteer as a chaperone for an elementary school field trip, because a routine background check might give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) information it could use to deport him. It meant that when my fifth-grade teacher taught us about Social Security, I learned that our family didn’t have it. It meant introducing myself as “Caesar” rather than “Cesar,” and telling people I was born in Los Angeles. It meant working for a construction company that used my immigration status as leverage to pay me less, and demand that I work more.

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One experience after another reminded me that our family could not expect safety or support in this country. We were not citizens, so we had no rights.

Nevertheless, my mother took it upon herself to ensure that we had what we needed. She’d work long hours cleaning houses, and sought out any resources she could find to provide us with school supplies, health services, and food. She could not always show physical love, because she was often absent, living out her love through the sacrifices that she made for us.

*          *          *

Like hundreds of thousands of other undocumented mothers, my mother came to the United States from Mexico in search of a better life for herself and her children. She didn’t come to this country to engage in sabotage, terrorism, or criminal activities. She was running from domestic violence, finally fed up with false promises of change. To survive, she left behind everything that she had ever known.

My mother had hope and resilience, stemming from a faith in God that the way things were could not possibly be the way things were meant to be. It’s what led her to make the dangerous trek into the United States. It’s what kept her going even when she and my brother got separated from me and my sister in a sudden sprint past the alambrado. It’s how she found the strength to swim out of sinking mud near the California border. It’s how she stayed calm when my brother pleaded for her to carry him, when she knew it would make them both drown. It’s how she urged him on, yelling “Tu puedes!” until they both reached the shore.

She walked for seven hours that night, without knowing the dangerous terrain or where they were heading. Eventually they came to a street with a few houses, and my mother picked one to knock on. A tall man answered, and—seeing how muddy and weary they were—he took them inside and gave them refuge for the night. The next morning, he fed them and let my mother use the phone to call my uncle and the coyote. Later that day, they reunited with me and my sister.

Before we could reach Santa Ana to meet up with my uncle, ICE detained our family and sent us back to Tijuana. But my mother tried again, and we finally made it to Santa Ana in 1994.

*          *          *

My mother has expected that I show the same effort and make the same sacrifices that come with seeking a better life. She was not going to let me take a year off between high school and college. I went to Texas Wesleyan University to study criminal justice, despite not knowing how we would pay for it—most scholarships require citizenship, so I was instantly disqualified.

I graduated in 2013, but even with DACA—which helped me work while I was an undergrad—I could not follow my desired career path. I wanted to serve as a police officer for my community—I wanted to be a homicide detective, and perhaps work for the FBI. I was denied all those possibilities. Instead, I worked for a few months in Loss Prevention for a Trader Joe’s warehouse through a temp agency.

At the same time, I was volunteering at the church I attended. Through that work, I realized that there were other ways of serving my community that many institutions in the United States were denying me. I applied to the Boston University School of Theology. I was accepted and received a full-tuition scholarship for the three-year Master of Divinity program. I graduated in May 2017, and now I serve my community in Washington state with the United Methodist Church—the same church that helped me apply for DACA half a decade ago.

*          *          *

The actions and rhetoric of the Trump administration have demonstrated that programs like DACA are not enough. There is no assurance against persecution; only the temporary illusion of safety with minimal benefits for our families and our communities.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to end DACA, some legislators have reintroduced the DREAM Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for people like me who came to this country as children. Legislation like this must be passed if the United States wishes to fight for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. There are already plentiful economic benefits for the United States—we pay taxes and boost profits, and private businesses still find ways to exploit undocumented workers for their benefit.

But we are more than currency. We are human beings. Even the DREAM Act promises too little for too small a group. It excludes people like my mother and uncle because arbitrary and racist laws have made immigration an illegal act. We must do more.

Like most people in my family, he didn’t have life insurance. He also didn’t have a bank account or assets of any kind (we don’t use the word “estate” in my clan). We made all our decisions about his memorial solely by financial cost. Direct cremation—with no casket or funeral—is the cheapest option, so that was our default choice. Even that was beyond the budget for my mother, who doesn’t have a checking account and whose sole income is a meager Social Security check. A few family members somehow managed to scrape together $1,000. I’m not sure how they did it, but my family handles money with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

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Then we moved on to the obituary. In our town, as in many places, obituaries aren’t free. Our local newspaper charges by the column line, with a minimum charge of $30. Photos cost extra, and large pictures and color come at a premium.

It was my job to write the obituary, and I had to weigh every word and sentence carefully. Including a photo was out of the question, and listing grandchildren by individual name was a luxury we couldn’t afford. His obituary mostly contained just the basic facts: my mother’s name, and those of his children, along with the number of grandkids. We did manage to squeeze in a dozen words to mention that he loved Elvis and left behind his beloved dog—but up until we ran the numbers at the last minute, we weren’t sure if even that brief sentence would make the cut.

When every dollar counts, so does every word.

The cost of a printed obituary can vary widely, depending on the pricing structure and location. Some newspapers charge by word count, while others calculate a price based on column inch. Funeral directors quoted by National Cremation say an average obituary can easily run between $200 and $500. Alan Mutter, who teaches media economics at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, called obituaries “among the most highly profitable advertising format in a newspaper.” Even online, self-service obituary platforms, such as Legacy.com, come at a cost. The expense catches many grieving families, including ours, off-guard. The Print Obituary Pricing Study conducted by AdPay and Legacy.com found that the actual cost of an obituary was considerably more than what consumers expected to pay, especially in large cities.

That’s partially because we don’t think of obituaries as an ad—we think of them as a public record. They’re a distillation of the most important things about someone’s life, stripped of its flaws until the only thing left is a gleaming statement of value. So we automatically assume that the longer the obituary, the more meaningful the person’s life must have been.

The most significant and impactful contributions in a person’s life can often be summed up in a few short yet powerful words: “He earned a Purple Heart for his valiant bravery in saving fellow soldiers,” “She dedicated herself to her work as a hospice nurse, providing comfort to patients in their final hours,” or even something as simple as, “She worked as a kindergarten teacher for 30 years.”

The longer obituaries, more often than not, don’t show more worth. But they allow for depth. They are filled with amusing yet not-quite-essential tidbits—the woman who could never balance her checkbook because her husband kept helping people pay their bills, or the man who went to trampoline class three times a week when he was 96. These are the things that help the reader feel like they truly knew the deceased person, that capture their personality and commemorate their quirks.

There weren’t many colorful bits in my stepfather’s obituary, which follows a family tradition. My grandmother lived to her mid-80s and had seven children, but her obituary contained just 40 words—less than half a word for each of her years. The tiny notice listed the number of children and grandchildren she had, but there was no room to mention how much she enjoyed watching ice skating on television, or her addiction to National Enquirer (even though she didn’t know who most of the celebrities were).

But that’s how it goes. That final recognition is a luxury reserved only for those lucky enough to be able to afford it.

By the time I learned I was pregnant, I knew abstinence didn’t work. I also knew I had to do something if I wanted to have a healthy baby. So, I enrolled in methadone maintenance treatment. My doctor insisted on it—he told me it would keep my body from going through withdrawal, which could have caused a miscarriage. But I almost couldn’t afford it. I was in Colorado, one of 17 states that did not cover methadone through Medicaid or state funds. Luckily, I was able to get my treatment paid for through grant money specifically designated for pregnant methadone patients.

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Because of that grant, I never had to worry about the cost of my treatment. I was able to stand to the side and watch while other patients came into the clinic, begging for an extra couple days to come up with their fee, only to receive the same response from the receptionist: “You could get together money for your drugs, why are you having a problem getting money for treatment?”

I lost count of how many times I heard her say that.

Approximately 2 million people in the United States are addicted to pharmaceutical opiates, and half a million to heroin. The latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates more than 60,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year. Opioids are now more fatal than car crashes and gun violence. And those numbers don’t include the many people who survive but live with complications such as brain damage for the rest of their lives.

Despite the broad scope of the crisis, data compiled by Rockefeller University’s Addictive Diseases lab show that there are only about 350,000 Americans in methadone treatment, a long-acting opioid agonist An agonist is a chemical that binds to receptors and causes a biological response (in the case of opioids, that response is pain relief). Methadone is an opioid agonist that causes a similar biological reaction to opioids without the euphoric high, preventing the severe physical symptoms of withdrawal. that has historically been the gold standard of care for opioid addiction. Only about 75,000 are in buprenorphine treatment, a newer alternative that is similar to methadone in function and purpose.

There are some basic reasons that so few people receive treatment: More than 30 million people live in counties without a licensed provider of buprenorphine, and the daily process of receiving methadone maintenance treatment at a specialized clinic is incredibly time consuming.

And it’s expensive.

In addition to the limits on Medicaid funding, opioid treatment providers can decide whether or not to accept private insurance. Many decide against it, or contract with just one or two providers, because methadone treatment is difficult to translate into insurance billing terms. Every state provides coverage for buprenorphine/naloxone (naloxone is an additive that prevents abuse of the drug), but patients often have to find cash for treatment regardless of whether the medication itself is covered.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that the per-patient cost of methadone for providers is $4,700 yearly, but for-profit opioid treatment programs get to decide what they charge their patients. This means the actual cost to patients varies by clinic. Methadone patients I interviewed reported rates that ranged from $350 per month to $200 per week. Buprenorphine patients reported clinic costs between $100 and $300 per month, with medication costs broaching the thousands for those without insurance.

Zac Talbott owns two opioid treatment programs—one in Georgia and one in North Carolina—and is also a methadone patient (through a different provider). He explains to me over the phone that just because Medicaid covers methadone in a certain state, that does not mean the clinics actually accept it. Take Georgia, for example: Although Medicaid has covered methadone for several years, programs that were not directly affiliated with behavioral health entities could not bill Medicaid prior to 2016. Only two clinics met that standard, out of 62 in the state. The rules recently changed, and Talbott’s Georgia clinic, Counseling Solutions Treatment Centers, is now six months into the process of setting up Medicaid billing. He’s unsure how many other area clinics will actually take on the new insurance option.

“[Opioid treatment programs] don’t speak in insurance terms the way the rest of health care does. Insurance bills based on codes. There’s no code for a daily bundled rate,” he explains, referring to the daily or weekly flat-rate most clinics charge their patients.

“For a lot of the bigger corporate entities, it’s easier and more profitable to just take that cash, baby,” Talbott adds, punctuating his point with a morose chuckle.

Patients who struggle to find the money for treatment may live with the threat of an administrative detox hanging over their heads. This is a common technique practiced by many methadone clinics, in which a patient who is no longer able to pay is placed on a rapidly tapering dose to wean him off the medication. The length of these tapers varies by clinic, but they often mean going down by 10mg a day, usually with one- or two-month limits. That’s a far cry from the slow, medically supervised taper recommended for patients choosing to withdraw from treatment.

Medication-assisted treatment is designed for long-term use—sometimes even lifelong. Mary Jeanne Kreek, who was part of the team that developed methadone treatment, explains that methadone and buprenorphine help correct brain changes that may require years of maintenance.

“It’s just like treating depressive disorders. Most people on chronic antidepressants need those for a long time or life,” says Kreek.  “I think they’re very analogous.”

But even these administrative detoxes are less harsh than what patients face at clinics that simply cut them off. Because methadone is designed to remain stable in the body for long periods of time, withdrawal from a therapeutic dose may take up to a week to begin. Once it does, however, it is nearly unbearable. It’s not necessarily the sweats and cold chills, aching bones, diarrhea, racing heart, nausea, and restless legs that make it so difficult. It’s the fact that your brain thinks it’s dying without the drug. That is part of the reason relapse rates after opioid detoxification are so high—some estimates say 88 percent within three years, and up to 70 percent within six months.

Liz Hock Clark, a 59-year-old woman who has been on methadone for 34 years, says her clinic is one of many that simply ceases to dose patients who come in without payment in hand. She isn’t sure if it’s legal, but she’s seen it done, and she’s terrified it will happen to her.

Clark lives in a small apartment in West Virginia. She doesn’t have much furniture, and there’s no internet connection. If she needs to go online, she hops into her beat up 2000 Chevrolet Cavalier and drives to her cousin’s house. She picks up odd jobs, like house cleaning and dog walking, in order to pay for her medication. She does janitorial maintenance for her building in exchange for rent on the apartment. It’s tough on her body, but it allows her to put every penny she makes into methadone. Her clinic charges $15.50 a day. She says when she started methadone 34 years ago in Texas, it was $2 a day. She is terrified of the day when she doesn’t have the money for her clinic, which she fears will be soon.

“I’m not afraid of relapse,” she explains in her soft Southern drawl. “I’m afraid of dying. For someone my age, going cold turkey off 118 milligrams, I don’t know if I’d survive.”

Death from opioid withdrawal is rare, but because of her age, complications like cardiac arrest from a harsh detox are a credible fear.

“The thing is,” she adds wistfully, “I don’t want to get off methadone. I want to stay on it my whole life.”

How do we help patients like Clark access these essential medications without becoming enslaved by the exploitative tactics of some providers? For starters, the burden of methadone and buprenorphine regulations needs to fall on providers rather than patients. And we need to have a lot more payment options for low-income people, who are already more vulnerable to addiction in the first place.

The preliminary report offered by the White House opioid commission asks for expansion of access to medication-assisted treatment. It does not, however, express the need for a mandate on clinics to accept Medicaid, or for any kind of internal restructuring that will make accepting Medicaid and other forms of insurance more attractive to clinics. Trump’s attitude during his recent public health emergency declaration does not leave much hope that the commission’s advice will be followed—his $57,000 allocation will not come close to covering the cost gap. We’ll need to do a lot more if we are going to serve Clark and other patients like her—or like me—before it’s too late.

I was scared. I worried that other things might go wrong with her after I learned about her medical condition. I started to look for resources, anything that would help me learn to be a good mother. I started a “baby and me” class at the hospital, and I was eventually referred to Parents as Teachers, an evidence-based home visiting program where a trained professional visited my home every week.

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My home visitor helped with every aspect of parenting—connecting me to a dietitian who could treat my daughter’s disorder, helping me access WIC so that my baby and I could afford to eat, and helping me learn about my baby’s development.

My baby’s metabolic disorder required her to be fed specific macronutrients every 2 hours. She required breast feeding until she was 16 months, and as she grew older I had to count calories, plan her diet, and account for every gram of fat she ate to keep her blood sugar balanced. It was a lot for me, as a young mother with a husband in the military. But my home visitor was there for me in a way that no one else was—she had time to listen to my feelings, and to talk through everything that was going on with my daughter.

I participated in Parents as Teachers for four months until my husband went back into the military and our little family moved from Idaho to Kansas. Even in that short period of time, I felt like I had learned so much about parenting.

Not long after we moved to Kansas, my husband was injured in combat during Operation Iraqi freedom. Then, in the spring of 2006, our second child was born. That pregnancy had a lot of complications that put me on bed rest, until I went into preterm labor 11 weeks before my son’s due date. There were a lot of shots, appointments, and a couple of hospital stays. But this time, I was able to participate in a local health district home visiting program during my pregnancy. I learned a lot about fetal development, and felt much more prepared for baby number two than I was for baby number one.

2007 brought baby number three, my second son, into our lives. He had a lot of age delays; he was hardly talking when he started Head Start at age 4. One day, his home visitor showed me that he was tongue tied. No doctor had mentioned that before—they’d all missed it. But she spent enough time with him to notice it, and she had the experience to know what it was. When he got his tonsils removed, they clipped his tongue to fix the problem, and his language development came quickly after that.

The thing about home visiting is that it’s not just about children. My home visitors made sure my kids were developing, but they helped me grow, too. We made family goals, and I found myself on the path to higher education. I knew that going to school was my only chance at a future where I could make enough money to support our little family.

So in 2010, when baby number four graced us with his presence, I went to college. I was accepted to the University of Idaho and granted an Operation Education Scholarship, which paid for the rest of my college education as well as living expenses so I would be able to focus on school and raising my children.

When I graduated, I became an Early Head Start teacher. Now I’m a home visitor with Parents as Teachers.

I’ve had 11 different home visitors as a mother. Being able to do the same work that I’d found so valuable makes me feel accomplished. But now, funding for home visiting—Maternal Infant Early Childhood Home Visitation grants (MIECHV)—is about to run out, and Congress’s plan to renew it would come at the expense of hundreds of thousands of people who depend on Social Security.  That violates the entire spirit of the program, which is designed to support families and communities.

The bottom line is, we know home visiting works. It makes sense for taxpayers, since research shows that every taxpayer dollar invested in home visiting programs can return up to $5.70. And as a mother who relied on home visiting, and a home visitor myself, I know how impactful it can be. It changed my life and my children’s lives, and if home visiting is expanded the right way, it has the ability to uplift an entire generation of American families.

This mindset is also reflected in our national politics and apparent in the rhetoric employed by the Trump administration and the GOP in their 2018 budget proposals, which would severely cut safety-net programs.

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“There’s a dignity to work, and there’s a necessity to work to help the country succeed,” White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told CNN at the end of May. Mulvaney added that the United States should measure its success “by the number of people we help get off of those programs and get back in charge of their own lives.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has used the same rhetoric to justify specific attacks on Medicaid. Only hours after she was sworn into her post, Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and her boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, sent out letters to all the nation’s governors urging them to impose insurance premiums on Medicaid recipients and provide work incentives.

Statements like these—and other calls to add work requirements to Medicaid eligibility guidelines—ignore the realities of who the program serves and its actual impacts. For those able-bodied people on Medicaid, the majority are already working. And for the 7 million nonelderly adults with disabilities for whom Medicaid offers primary or supplemental coverage, expanded access to Medicaid contributes to higher employment rates.

I’m one of those people. Eight years ago, I completed my master’s degree with one plan in mind: to launch a successful multi-decade career in environmental policy that would require regular overtime, frequent travel, and at least eight hours a day sitting at a desk and staring into a computer. I made this plan despite a history of sporadic health issues that tended to lay me out completely for several days every month, and debilitating headaches a few evenings every week. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when new diagnoses explained my daily struggle with overwhelming pain and fatigue, that I finally admitted to myself that my health status would prevent me from pursuing full-time work. Since then, I have survived by working a patchwork of part-time positions and freelance gigs, which has lowered my income and made me eligible for Medicaid.

And I am not alone.

According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 34 percent of workers with a disability were employed part-time in 2016, compared with only 18 percent of workers with no disability. Part-time jobs in the United States usually pay low hourly wages and tend not to offer crucial benefits such as health insurance: only 19 percent of part-time workers have access to medical care benefits.

For millions of disabled people in this position, the Affordable Care Act has filled a crucial need by expanding Medicaid coverage. Medicaid expansion significantly raised income requirements (by more than double) for approximately 11 million people living in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that adopted it. It also opened up enrollment to some childless adults, and dropped stringent asset limits. This meant that many more disabled people were now able to work—or work more hours and make higher wages, as well as have more savings—than prior to the expansion.

This was confirmed by a collaborative study released earlier this year that found that working-age adults who identify as having disabilities were much more likely to be employed in Medicaid expansion states than in non-expansion states.

“Having access to comprehensive insurance without having to go through a lengthy and demoralizing disability determination process is very important,” says Jean Hall, Director of the Institute for Health and Disability Policy Studies at the University of Kansas and lead author of the study. “Medicaid expansion allows people with disabilities to work more, and accumulate assets, without fear of losing their eligibility for Medicaid coverage.”

The recently-won expansion has been under continuous threat as Trump and Congressional Republicans have tried to follow through on years of promises to repeal and replace the ACA. The most recent effort, the Graham-Cassidy bill, would slash Medicaid funding and allow insurers to charge higher premiums for those with pre-existing conditions. These changes could have particularly severe consequences for people with chronic health conditions who have Medicaid through the expansion.

Kelly O’Brien of Sandusky, Ohio, has myalgic encephalomyelitis, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and peripheral neuropathy. She works part-time in a bridal shop that offers her flexible scheduling and other accommodations while she builds up a freelance writing business on the side.

“My medications would cost more than I make in a month,” says O’Brien. “Yet without my medication, I wouldn’t be able to work at all and thus wouldn’t have any income.”

Even for those who can work full time and have access to so-called comprehensive health insurance through their jobs, the price of their co-pays and deductibles for treatments to manage their conditions can erase most—if not all—of their income gains.

Take the case of 38-year-old Valéria Souza, who recently moved from Missouri back to her home state of Massachusetts. Souza has multiple sclerosis and was spending an average of $6,000 to $10,000 annually out of pocket on co-pays and deductibles to manage her illness. This was despite having what was considered a “good” health insurance plan with her former position in academia. These expenses comprised between 30 to 50 percent of her yearly income, eventually forcing her to work several part-time jobs in addition to her full-time career and forcing her to work in excess of 60 hours a week to compensate for her financial losses.

“This situation is not sustainable for someone with MS as a long-term life plan,” says Souza. “At some point, I won’t be able to work this much.”

This is one of the main reasons why Souza moved back to her home state: Massachusetts expanded Medicaid, while Missouri did not.

“I would like to know that Medicaid is available to me if and when I need it,” she says. Though, if Graham-Cassidy becomes law, that would threaten Souza’s plans.

For those of us with medical conditions that limit our ability to work full time, Medicaid is often our only option. If our government officials want more of us to have jobs, maintaining and building on Medicaid expansion is one proven way to do that. But if they cut it or scale it back in any way, the consequences for us will be severe.

For 22 years, I did what many Americans do: I worked, I attended college, and I worked some more. I paid my taxes, I voted with my heart just as much as with my mind, and I obtained a career. I did everything right.

Then, on June 30, 2016, my fiancé shot me in the back of my head at point blank range.

As I lay dying, I watched the man I loved turn his gun on himself and take his own life. I was left for dead, but I fought for my life through unimaginable darkness, hurt, and pain. I survived. I am broken, but alive.

I think about that night a lot. I think about it because it shapes everything about my life now, and not just because the bullet fragments in the back of my head and neck leave me in pain. I think about it because the disability I have now, that I acquired with a one-second pull of a trigger, turned my life upside down.

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I used to be a senior court clerk within the New York State Unified Court System. My fiancé was a New York State Court Officer-Lieutenant. Together we earned well over $150,000 per year. My career offered great benefits, a pension, and health insurance—and I was privileged enough to take them for granted.

I lost everything because my fiancé decided my life was not worth living. For the past 14 months, I fought to prove that it is: first by surviving, then by working to regain my dignity, self-worth, and independence.

Now, I find myself fighting the same battle with a different opponent. Once again, someone is deciding my life is not worth living. Except this time, it’s my president, and it’s the senators and representatives of my country telling me I have no worth.

Right now, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are working to pass a budget that takes desperately needed resources from the people who need them the most. In his 2018 budget, Trump proposed cutting $70 billion from Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which would take away income from up to 1 million Americans with disabilities like me. The House budget, which lawmakers are trying to pass this fall, isn’t as specific but the effects could be the same.

Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, justified these cuts by calling SSDI “very wasteful” and suggesting that not everyone on it is “truly disabled” and people need to “go back to work.” The thing is, I’d love to. This is not a life I wanted, this is not the life I worked for. It is the life that was forced upon me. But I’m at the mercy of those who think this was a choice.

There are a lot of things about what happened to me that I won’t ever understand. I don’t understand why my fiancé got his service weapon back after he’d struggled with his mental health, or why he decided to shoot the person he said he loved. And I don’t understand why any intelligent, self-aware individual would think that my life was a choice—a choice to live a life where food is not a guarantee, where I am never quite sure if I’ll be able to visit the doctor for life-saving treatment or if I’ll have to suffer in pain forever, until the pain paralyzes me.

I live in fear every single day that the people I elected to help me, to help America, will take my life and the lives of millions of other Americans. We are failing as a nation if we continue down this path, if we take from the weakest to feed the strong.

There are events morning and night: People have staged die-ins, blocked intersections, and marched for miles every day in the sweltering Missouri heat. There is always someone with water or sandwiches or voter registration forms nearby, and a volunteer medic every few hundred feet. There are legal observers and a drum line, but no hint of reconciliation in the air.

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Annie Smith, the mother of Anthony Lamar Smith, gave a press conference on Friday at the site of her son’s death. “I didn’t get justice, so I can’t have any peace,” she said.

The weekend has been split, as it usually is in St. Louis, between massive demonstrations that are angry but peaceful and smaller nighttime protests that devolve into broken windows and tear gas. The property damage has been in a different section of the city every night, led by younger and angrier protesters, and there is tension between people who think breaking windows is violence and people who argue that it’s not as violent as killing people. The chant “you kill us, we kill your economy” is a two-edged sword, and in the daytime it sounds like thousands of people making commerce inconvenient and at night it sounds like dozens of people making commerce disappear.

On Sunday morning, people gathered in the Delmar Loop, which had seen the worst of the damage, to help clean up and board up storefronts and paint murals on the plywood. Then they went to protest. That’s how St. Louis has been since 2014 at least, when this cycle ingrained itself into the city.

By Sunday night a fully militarized police force had seized control again. They chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!” after arresting dozens of people—media, legal observers, and protesters alike. An undercover police car reversed through a crowd marching through a street in downtown St. Louis on Sunday, after which a line of riot police protected the car while protesters de-escalated the situation.

A funny thing about new normals is how easily people accept them; most people seemed upset but not shocked by these incidents. They expected the not guilty verdict and were ready for it—and for the police response. Journalists have been arrested at St. Louis protests before, the most famous example being Wesley Lowery and Ryan Reilly while they worked from a Ferguson McDonald’s in 2014. And on Saturday, a woman named Pat Washington was hit by a truck during a protest, though her injuries were minor and she finished the march. Two other times this weekend I’ve seen cars simply keep driving through the crowd.

If you are looking for a 2017 dystopia, it’s in St. Louis. It is entirely usual and patently unacceptable for the police force to do many of the things they’ve been doing on video over the last few days: firing projectiles toward residents at random, macing people who came out of a bathroom, knocking over and kicking elderly women before arresting them on spurious charges, running cars into crowds, using strobe lights on crowds of protesters at night knowing there were epileptics in the area, and putting a synagogue under siege on Shabbat. It is messy and complex here. There are shades of 2014, with the same protesters demanding the same changes and the same authorities quelling the unrest. But is it also three years later, and as a nation we are debating whether it’s appropriate to have Sean Spicer on the Emmys or whether it’s okay for the president to tweet a video of himself hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball.

On Monday morning, protesters arrived downtown by 7:00 a.m. Protests are expected to continue into Tuesday evening. Police and news helicopters circle above, and people wonder aloud why they don’t just admit a cop was guilty for once instead of putting everyone through all this again.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series on the trial over the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith. Read part one.

Now, in some ways, I’m her big sister. I do my best to take care of her.

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Lynn—a 62-year-old army veteran—cannot walk. Her dementia makes it impossible for her to remember to take her medicine. Her forgetfulness has life-or-death implications, since she has diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. As a result, Lynn has been in a nursing home for the past four years. Medicaid pays the bills for that—just like it does for most people who need nursing home care—and I’m terrified of what would happen without it.

Lynn joined the army right out of high school. When she was in boot camp, she had a traumatic head injury during basic training. The military doctors held her for observation, diagnosed her with a concussion, and then released her. She served her time as a private, then was honorably discharged and got married.

A few years later, she was struck by a car. She was at a crosswalk, and the car in front of her stopped to let her cross. But the car behind it was impatient, so it swerved around the first car, plowing into the crosswalk and hitting my sister. That left her with another traumatic head injury, as well as the beginning of hip problems that will plague her for the rest of her life.

Over time the hip problems worsened, until she finally had a hip replacement in her mid-50s. She was able to walk without pain for a while, but she then contracted a MRSA infection in her new hip joint. That can happen with artificial joints—it’s rare, but once you have the infection it’s hard to remove. Lynn’s infection spread quickly, and it almost killed her. Doctors tried to treat her with some very powerful drugs at first, which made her thoughts so fuzzy that she said her brain was buzzing.

Eventually, doctors had to remove her hip bone to control the MRSA. Medicaid paid for this surgery, too—otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

Just four years ago, Lynn was working multiple jobs to put her daughter through college: in the cafeteria at her daughter’s school, at Walmart, and at a deli. Now Lynn can no longer walk, or work. The doctors say the drugs impaired her brain and made her dementia onset much more quickly.

But this isn’t a sob story. I don’t want you to feel badly for her, or take pity on her. Lynn is still the same person I’ve always known, full of life and warmth. She can break the tension in a moment better than anyone I know. I still remember a moment a few years ago, when she was recovering from her first hip surgery. She flew into Washington, D.C., to visit us, and we were trying to get her out of baggage claim and into the elevator in her wheelchair. The doors started to close, and nobody wanted to hold them—she was far away, and she was moving so slowly. But she shouted, “I’m coming as fast as I can!” across the airport. They actually held the door for her. In the elevator, she chatted with them amicably, asking how their Christmas was going. Strangers were smiling and talking to her—that’s a rare sight in D.C.

Lynn would be lost without Medicaid. She served her country and worked hard to provide for her family. She’s not trying to take more than her fair share of the pie. She’s just somebody who needs care—and she didn’t expect to need the care that she needs as young as she is.

When our elected representatives decide to cut Medicaid—whether through repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act or a budget that cuts $3.6 trillion from services such as Medicare and Medicaid—they should think about what this means to people like me and my family. They should think about Lynn, and the millions of other veterans who have turned to Medicaid.

St. Louis residents are used to being told to wait for justice, and this all feels familiar. In 2014, it took months to get the grand jury’s decision not to charge Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown.

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Now, any time something big happens in St. Louis—like a verdict or an important anniversary—people converge on the city. Activists, journalists, residents, and protesters head back to the same street corners and the same cafes, and everybody speculates, though there’s no telling what might happen next.

This year’s unseasonably early cold snap makes it feel like that November when we all waited for Wilson’s verdict. Again, the waiting has stretched into months, and there’s an edgy monotony of checking the news and reporting on local events, and wondering how long tension can build before it bursts.

On September 1, two officers were shot and a woman was killed by a stray bullet near the downtown area. A few hours later, residents who’d gathered in the area spotted heavily armed officers a few blocks away. It turned out to be a search of nearby abandoned buildings, presumably for a suspect in the shooting. Five cruisers and at least as many undercover units gathered and milled about, while residents speculated that it was a raid of someplace nearby.

“I saw the cops converge behind this building for something or somebody,” said Megan Macarey, a yoga teacher at a nearby charity. “Police are militarizing the neighborhood.”

Macarey had been calling her friends, telling everyone they might have to come outside and keep an eye on things. Most neighborhoods that are the target of police in St. Louis are like that, with informal networks and a practiced sequence of events. Cops show up, everyone comes out and videos everything. Macarey said, “Tensions are high, and we know police are putting up the barricades,” which the city had erected earlier that day in anticipation of the verdict’s release.

That is how policing is done in St. Louis: opaquely and usually with a show of force. There are times when the police can be perfectly lovely, such as at the Labor Day parade when they were playing with children. But policing of protests is decidedly less friendly in many instances, and given that two officers have just been shot, few people in the activist community expect the police to be in a conciliatory mood any time soon.

Over Labor Day weekend, there were protests going on at nearly any hour. Sunday night, local activists marched through a bar district, gaining a fair amount of support from patrons who joined them to chant, “Out of the bars and into the streets!” Monday morning, Fight for $15 shut down a local McDonald’s before joining the Labor Day parade, which featured thousands of union workers alongside ads for Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Monday evening was the vigil for Smith, which was supposed to be candlelit until a storm roiled above us and forced everyone to use their cell phone lights instead. Annie Smith, Anthony Smith’s mother, gave a statement: “Why has it taken so long for the verdict?” Smith is, like many people, tired of waiting for justice. “I lost my voice yelling, and I’m tired of yelling,” she said.

The verdict could feasibly come back guilty. But although roughly 11,000 people were shot and killed by police officers from 2005 to 2016, only 77 officers were charged—and only 26 were eventually convicted. It’s more likely that Stockley will be found not guilty. When that happens, the people here will be reacting to not just this verdict, but to every verdict this feels like, each piling on top of one another.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series on the trial over the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith.

The argument against myRA’s expense is hard to swallow, since the next item on President Donald Trump’s agenda is a tax reform plan that could cost as much as $7 trillion over the next decade. The myRA program would be 0.001 percent of the cost. The claim that enrollment has been unenthusiastic isn’t much easier to stomach, since the program was so new. Publicity efforts, such as partnerships with Volunteer Income Tax Assistance programs and promotions through government websites and TurboTax, have not yet been executed.

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In reality, it was a deeply practical, badly needed program. I spent this past tax season working with United Way of King County to expand the savings options available to low-income taxpayers in Seattle. Tax time is one of the only times a year that saving is a real possibility for low-income earners—their tax refunds are often the largest lump-sum payment they receive all year. Asking clients a question as simple as, “Are you considering saving a portion of your refund today?” was enough to spark a meaningful conversation about budgeting, savings, and overall financial stability. Tax clients had the option of splitting their refund into a savings account, savings bond, or myRA, which was piloted at United Way’s tax sites for the first time this season.

myRA was a great fit for clients who were new to saving. The accounts had no minimum balance required, no fees, and no risk of losing money. Account holders could withdraw contributions in case of an emergency, and had the option to automatically contribute from their paycheck. And since almost 1 in 6 King County households are underbanked or unbanked, myRA’s accessibility without a formal relationship with a bank or other financial institution is a major asset. Of course, myRA was not perfect: It was hard to access without a Social Security number, and it counted against people enrolled in other safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP) in states with public assistance asset limits.

Imperfections aside, myRA provided a straightforward and flexible savings platform unlike any other. For middle- and upper-income earners, primarily white collar workers, retirement programs are an assumed benefit. There is no comparable alternative for workers whose employers don’t offer such benefits. And with the increasing necessity of “side hustles” in the gig economy, many workers don’t even have an employer to fill that role. Five states are moving forward with state-sponsored retirement plans called “Secure Choice,” which provides some hope, despite congressional efforts to block them.

After I left Seattle, I worked with a think tank in Washington, D.C. I passed by the Treasury building on my way to the office every morning, which gave me plenty of time to reflect on the thousands of taxpayers all the way across the country in the “other” Washington.

The label “taxpayer” is one Americans on both sides of the country (and the states in between) wear with honor, regardless of their political ideology. The structure of our tax code, the loopholes and deductions we permit, and whether or not we feel our tax burden is fair should be reflective of our values. If we value financial stability, for ourselves and our neighbors, we need to support programs like myRA. Without it, there aren’t many safe and accessible retirement savings options for lower-income workers. Innovative programs that could level the playing field deserve a chance to prove that they work, instead of being shut down.

Right now, we are looking for a story that lets us assign blame for terror and racism. The uprising in Charlottesville has knocked the wind out of us, and it is only natural to hope that the blame can be placed on something impersonal, to believe that no human being might simply be addicted to hate.

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That’s likely how it came to be that former congressman and mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to say this:

Most of the issues that we’re dealing with now are related to poverty. But we still want to put everything in a racial context. The problem with the—and the reason I feel uncomfortable condemning the Klan types is—they are almost the poorest of the poor.

They are the forgotten Americans. And, um, they have been used and abused and neglected. Instead of giving them affordable health care, they give them black lung jobs, and they’re happy.

And that just doesn’t make sense in today’s world. And they see progress in the black community and on television and everywhere and they don’t share it.

It is a good impulse to look for structural reasons for social ills. But it goes too far when it removes agency from human beings. Poverty, even the crushing sort that has you rolling pennies to buy milk, does not cause bigotry. One does not conceive a love of genocide because the economy tanks. We choose what we say, and whom we hurt.

If poverty were a causal effect for racism, then you would not expect to see quite so many virulent racists in the upper classes. David Duke and Richard Spencer were both children of some privilege. Stephen Miller didn’t grow up in straitened circumstances. These are the men who stoke the fears and resentments of the lower classes, who manipulate and misinform.

Lyndon Johnson famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” He wasn’t wrong, and that strategy has been used to great effect over the centuries. It’s why we have de facto segregation, it’s why we pushed through welfare reform using the boogeyman of the “welfare queen,” and it’s why the same crime gets you a different sentence depending on what color you are. Find a bit of structural racism, and behind it you’ll find a white politician pandering to the worst parts of human nature to gain or hold power.

But there is a difference between misinformation and hate. I know many good people who support bad policies; they are well-intentioned but misinformed. I don’t know many good people who take pleasure in terrorizing others, who would join hate groups and call it a fight for utopia. We live under crushing poverty and manage to not kill our horrible bosses or the uncaring bill collectors; we can surely manage to not join the Klan.

There is no excuse for willful evil, even if someone’s life is filled with pain and desperation. Someone who is very poor has few choices, but the things you can choose are all about what sort of person you want to be. It’s the one thing you can control, the one thing you can’t lose and nobody can take from you. Those choices are intentional, adult decisions. To explain them away is to say that the poor are incapable of moral reasoning. In our quest to be reasonable and kind to the less fortunate, we risk making them not human at all.

One day we will have a conversation about race in the upper classes, about the people who make the laws and set the narratives and peddle these lies. Today is not that day, and sometimes it seems like that day might never come. For now, it is enough to say: The poor cannot afford illusions about themselves or their lives. At least give them respect that any autonomous human deserves, and call evil “evil” without equivocation.

Poverty does not cause bigotry, no matter how comforting it might be to tell ourselves it does.

I have been reading about Sessions with a kind of perverse fascination—but I have not read anything that makes me feel sorry for him. The things he stands for—the things he has stood for over the course of his decades-long career—are abhorrent. The President’s mean tweets haven’t made Sessions’s brand of law enforcement any kinder to poor and black and brown people.

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Sessions has bought into Trump’s false narrative about rising crime rates (which are actually near historic lows), and has proposed solutions founded on harsh punishment that’s meted out with impunity. He wants to reinstate lengthy, mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenses, and plans to undermine Department of Justice mandates designed to reign in abusive arrest patterns in communities of color. He believes racism in policing is a fact of life, but believes that being called a racist is the worst thing that can ever happen to a person.

His policy goals reflect a characteristically Southern paternalism towards black people, imbuing him with the air of a Great White Disciplinarian. He maintains an impersonal distance from the concerns of underserved black communities, such as Charleston’s Eastside, where I lived long enough to know that Sessions’s stances reflect the attitudes of many white Southerners.

The impoverished Eastside community was judged harshly. Passersby pointed at the trash on the street and the homes in disrepair as they drove through town, and shook their heads at the teenage drug dealers who idled on street corners looking bored or depressed.

I remember one young dealer—tall and lanky, without a wrinkle on his face—that I used to pass by almost every day. I assumed he was new to the trade when he appeared on my street in between my apartment and the local corner grocery, and I had no intention of speaking to him. Nope. I wasn’t giving encouragement.

Eventually, I noticed that he tended to frown and mutter at me when I passed by. I ignored him at first, but eventually his persistence made me curious. One day I stopped and listened. His hurried, garbled words astonished me.

“Teach me something,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say. So, we talked. He did not need me to lecture him or tell him he was wasting his life. He knew that he was on a dead-end track, and that he was barely literate. He told me he had dropped out of high school. He had applied for jobs as a dishwasher, but never got called back. So he did the one thing he could do to make money.

At the end of our first conversation, I promised that I would “educate him” by telling him a new fact every day when I saw him on the corner.

This isn’t a cheesy Hollywood movie, so I’m not going to tell you that I changed his life by teaching him when the Constitution was ratified. No matter how many facts I shared, I could not give this young man what he really needed. I could not counteract the notoriously unequal South Carolina school system. I could not provide a decent summer job, a community energized by economic development, or a society committed to easing the plight of the people in poverty.

I knew I couldn’t do that when I started. And by the time he disappeared from the street corner a few months later, I was sure I hadn’t. He needed too much. The Eastside needed too much.

If Jeff Sessions’ got his way, that young man would have been promptly arrested and given the harshest possible sentence. For him, that’s the end of the problem. Put the criminal behind bars, and move on.

I would love to see that teenager teach Jeff Sessions a few facts. I would love to see him tell the Attorney General what it’s like to be young, black, and full of hope for a better life and opportunities, but facing bleak options.

Maybe Sessions would learn that the law enforcement policies he favors will only perpetuate a vicious cycle of wasted lives. Maybe Sessions would learn that educational programs, substance abuse counseling, and economic opportunity accomplish more than harsh sentences.

Maybe.

Or maybe Sessions will at least soon learn what it’s like to be unemployed—after the Donald fires Sessions during one of his tweetstorms.

Growing up, I didn’t have video games or cable TV, but I had a yard where I could make mud pies. To my parents’ dismay, I once tried to dig a hole in that yard that went all the way to China. To my parents’ joy, I used that same yard to pick white daisies to demonstrate capillary action of water in plants. My project—adding color to the white flowers by sticking them in empty spaghetti sauce jars of food dye and water—won a blue ribbon in my fifth-grade science fair.

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There were times when I wished my Pro Wings shoes from Payless were Nikes, or my dollar store dolls were Barbies. But most of the time, I was happy. My childhood was filled with laughter, family dinners, and library books. I couldn’t afford to buy tickets to summer blockbusters, so I borrowed every Shirley Temple, Nancy Kwan, Rita Moreno, and Sidney Poitier VHS tape I could find at the public library. While other kids saw movies about mutants and robots, I reveled in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers routines.

All of that fell away when I started writing admissions essays. I only had one thousand words to describe who I was and where I came from to the outside world, and it was not enough space for nuance. So, I simplified. I truncated the complexities of my existence into compound words. My neighborhood, with its cul-de-sacs of homes and organic gardens (before organic was a thing), became a “low-income community.” My friends and our families, with our love for weekend barbecues and 35-cent Thrifty Ice Cream cones, belonged to a “working class.” I tried as well as I could to reconcile how I saw myself—a B-average student with dreams to make a difference in this world—with how society labeled me—a statistic, a member of the free-lunch population, a poor child. It was an early exercise in translating poverty into terms people with economic privilege could understand.

The complexities of who I am, and where I am from, got lost in the translation. I am the daughter of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees. My mom worked in sweatshops and my dad was a day laborer. Even with all their love for books and knowledge, my parents never had the chance to finish high school. Their academic dreams were dashed by poverty and war. They couldn’t help me navigate the school system or study for the SAT because it was new for them, too. But that doesn’t mean their histories were an obstacle I had to overcome. They were a source of strength: They sheltered me, nurtured me, motivated me, and loved me.

My family and community may not have been financially wealthy, but that doesn’t mean we were less than. I didn’t feel downtrodden. I was not Oliver Twist.

We make a mistake when we assume poor children think of themselves as poor. Poverty as a label perpetuates false notions of identity—for those being labeled and for those making decisions on their behalf. It also flattens kids into stereotypes: Some are burdens to the society who aren’t expected to amount to anything, and others are grit-filled diamonds in the rough who only have luck to thank. People are tokenized, otherized, commercialized, criminalized, and even romanticized. We’re reduced to an “us” versus “them” and categorized as good or bad apples.

When it comes to poverty, there’s no such thing as “us” or “them.” Most Americans—4 out of 5 of us—will experience some kind of economic hardship in our lifetimes. But when that happens, we probably won’t think of ourselves as poor. We’ll be “down on our luck.” We’ll be “having a tough time.” That makes it harder for people to ask for the help they need—after all, food stamps are for “poor” people. And it makes it harder to admit it when you accept support, because we treat the narratives of “taxpayer” and “social service recipient” as if they’re mutually exclusive.

Those lines are designed to be blurred. I’m proof—a Head Start student that became an Ivy League graduate. Thanks to public schools and the National School Lunch Act, I received an education and never went hungry. Thanks to Medicaid, I had the dental and health care that I needed to thrive as a child. Thanks to Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and Work-Study, I went to and finished college. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I was insured when I was unemployed.

I didn’t realize I was poor for 18 years. Perhaps it was because of the combination of support I received from my family, our community, and the effective policies and programs that were in place when I needed them the most. Every library book, free lunch, and after-school activity I had mattered. With them, a curious kid became a public school teacher, now doctoral candidate. Without them, you wouldn’t be reading this today.

Under the Senate’s latest health care bill, my caregivers are at risk of losing their jobs. And if they lose their jobs, my life will be at risk.

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Six years ago, I was diagnosed with a multi-system disease—myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome—that inhibits my body’s metabolic system. Although the disease differs from person to person, my condition has been degenerative over the years; for more than a year starting in 2015, it left me unable to speak, eat, or lift my head higher than a pillow.

This is the type of physical debilitation that requires a caregiver.

For the past two years I’ve been completely bedridden, and I’ve hired numerous caregivers to perform myriad tasks for me. They have administered my daily oral medications and flushed my IV with syringes full of saline and heparin. They bring me my toothbrush every morning, and they help me go to “the bathroom” by emptying a plastic urinal beside my bed. They help me bathe by placing a flattened inflatable bathtub on my bed, which I scoot onto so they can inflate it around my body. They fill the tub with water so I can clean myself, then they drain it, I towel off, and they deflate the tub so I can crawl out.

These tasks are essential to my health, and I depend on my caregivers to help me perform them. But the stark reality is that I simply couldn’t afford to employ caregivers without Medicaid.

I receive around 48 hours of paid caregiving every week through California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), which gets half its funding from the federal government. For the 48 hours a week they cumulatively work, my caregivers are paid California’s minimum wage: $10.50 per hour. Because I believe that is an unfair wage for such a demanding job, I supplement their pay as much as I can —usually an extra two dollars an hour.

Under the Senate health care bill, Medicaid would face massive cuts—up to $772 billion by 2026. Combined with the House budget, which was released earlier this week, those cuts would jump to $1.5 trillion. That would almost certainly cause dramatic reductions to caregiving services in California, as well as every other state in the country. But these cuts will not only impact patients; they will take a toll on the caregiving field and other industries related to health care.

“Caregiver” is an umbrella term that includes several job titles, such as personal care aides and home health aides. These positions account for millions of jobs, and past projections have estimated as much as 38 percent growth in some fields by 2024. But since Medicaid is the largest public payer of long-term caregiving services, the cuts outlined in the BCRA could end up eliminating their jobs, along with others in health care and the broader economy. The Center for American Progress has estimated that the House version of the health care bill—which is substantially similar to the Senate bill—would cost the American workforce 1.8 million jobs by 2022.

Each one of those jobs has dozens of lives attached to it and is part of a vital social equation that nobody should reduce. Not only are jobs and livelihoods at stake, but so is the health of millions of people. Cuts to vital services like Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, and IHSS will tear down decades of efforts to protect and nurture the working poor, sick people, the elderly, and the disabled.

Instead of giving me the help I need to live and potentially improve my health enough that I can once again contribute to the economy, this bill would put my life in an incredibly vulnerable position. It would also take jobs away from health care professionals like my caregivers. This may be acceptable to some, but to the many millions of people whose fates hang in the balance, it’s entirely unacceptable.

The problem is, I’m a product of that “wasteful spending.” So is my dad. He was a character, and deeply embarrassing in the way that only dads can be. He was known around our small town as the chatty Starbucks regular who would talk to complete strangers for hours or as the old man riding a unicycle (on special occasions, he also juggled and wore a clown suit). At movie theaters, he would stand up and dance during the ending credits, while I quickly walked away so people wouldn’t see us together. He brought a camera with him everywhere, and took pictures constantly, while I attempted to hide my face behind napkins, or my hands, or anything else within arms’ reach. He still framed those pictures, whether or not I was visible—there was one in his bedroom where a volleyball eclipsed my entire head.

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My dad was complicated. He was terrible with money. He ran his law practice on a barter system, trading legal advice and representation for furniture or housecleaning services or—in one particularly memorable instance—three swords.

He was also an addict. This was a surprise to virtually every person he met—myself included. I knew he spent time in rehab when I was five, but I still couldn’t quite believe it when—after ten years of sobriety—he relapsed and disappeared for two days during my sophomore year of high school. He came back, filled with guilt and shame, promising that it would never happen again. But it did happen again, so his wife left him. And then it happened again, and he lost his law practice. And again, and we lost our house. And eventually, it led to a new job working for Mexican drug cartels.

My dad’s story ended the way these stories tend to—he died. But not right away. First he was arrested, under drug charges that would have imprisoned him for 15 years. But after six months, the prison doctors ran some tests on a lump on top of his head. It turned out to be stage 4 melanoma. He was only supposed to live another three to six months, so he was granted a compassionate release from prison.

My dad lived for another 22 months after that—about four times longer than the doctors predicted. He died in the comfort of our home on the evening of October 25, 2010.

Those two years brought my father back to me. He and I became closer than ever—reflecting on the days when his criminal nickname was “el abogado,” when the months he spent in solitary confinement briefly drew out aspirations of priesthood, when he convinced his high school principal to let him grow out a beastly-looking beard to take on the role of Jesus in the annual play, and when we both realized that forgiveness can be the most powerful experience in your life.

His epitaph reads, “Love wins.” Ultimately, it did.

I have always attributed the additional 16 months I had with him to a sense of hope and love brought about by my community. Distantly familiar faces came out of the woodwork to offer emotional support, to help cook his meals, to sit with him to make sure he didn’t fall, to help him shower, and even to pay for his funeral when my mom realized we couldn’t afford it. But I also owe those 16 months to Medicaid, which covered chemotherapy early in his illness and a home nurse when he was too weak to walk. I owe them to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which helped pay for our biweekly trips to Kerrville, Texas, for clinical trials of Ipilimumab. I owe them to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which helped my mother—who was working day in and day out to support her ex-husband and their three children—put food on the table. Even after he died, Social Security helped my family stay afloat with modest survivors benefits that my dad paid into over the course of his career.

Medicaid, SSDI, and SSI were as much a part of the community that gave my dad a chance to die with dignity as the Starbuck employees who closed down the shop to go to his funeral. You have all paid into them during your lives, so that when my family needed them, they were there. Thank you for that.

I can never explain how much this support meant to me. But I can say I hope that it’s there for you when you need it. Because it is not wasteful spending. I was not wasteful spending. My dad was not wasteful spending. And you are not wasteful spending.

We are running into this problem with the word “elitism.” Editors who normally love my pitches won’t publish an article about it. If I use the word online, I will immediately be deluged with people arguing that there is no such thing at all, or that it’s a figment of the GOP’s imagination. Elitism is hard to prove, because it’s not an event. It’s a mood and a tone. It is an undercurrent, oft-mentioned and never examined. It is a thing that I know because I am myself elite these days, though I never was before.

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Most people become elites after going to universities and putting in time in the trenches of D.C. or some media outlet; their status takes years to build. I hacked the system; I was a second-shift cook who wrote a cri de coeur that garnered worldwide attention, and just like that I was a critically-acclaimed author who is invited to lecture all over the world. It’s possible that many elites don’t understand just how set apart they are because they have never seen the juxtaposition. They might not understand what things look like to those who aren’t so lucky.

To be an elite is to be listened to and respected, to have autonomy, to think that your life and your work might be remembered by history. For me, it was obvious when I tipped over that line: I count national politicians in three countries amongst my friends, and if I am curious about something I can simply dial up an expert and know that my call will be taken.

That’s what power looks like now. Power is social capital that I trade on to build the networks that I need to get more social capital that I can trade for more power. That is the nature of the game, and you need an invitation to play.

Progressive circles are still not equipped to wrestle with imbalances of political power. If you ask someone on the left to explain racism or sexism or homophobia, they will be able to expound at length about how we must listen to the people who are impacted, and how those with the upper hand in any given situation must try to identify and mitigate systemic imbalances. Ask about elitism—about inequality in access and cultural power—and people have a harder time articulating it.

Consider it through the lens of the disruption that I had in my life. There are my old friends, the ones I swapped shifts with: low-income, disabled, unemployed, high-school graduates struggling to make ends meet. Then there are my new friends, the ones I made when I was elevated: politicians, household-name pundits and writers, deans of upscale schools, Hollywood stars. For me, the question of social capital is really that stark. There is Before, and After.

When I talk to my old friends about the problems of the nation, it is always personal and immediate. Will needed services like heating assistance or low-income health insurance be cut? Will I be able to keep my job if I don’t have a child care credit? Will we still have the home health nurse that takes care of my mom when I can’t be there? With my new friends, these problems are real but also somehow theoretical. Millions of people are at risk of losing these things, which everyone agrees is awful. We talk about who we might call to lobby, or what organizations are good soldiers in the fight.

It boggles the mind that people cannot see a difference in those two kinds of conversations, even as they bemoan the terrifying increases in inequality in America. I still feel an ancient rage building in my chest when I see someone on TV telling the viewing audience—most of whom will never be invited to be a pundit—that any cultural divide is the sole fault of nefarious right-wing populists.

I’m calling bullshit. I hear the jokes and the asides and I am here to tell you, there absolutely is such a thing as toxic elitism. It’s in the comments about how people need to be told how to vote in their own best interest, without questioning why so many people don’t have the information to judge for themselves. It’s in the constant draining refrain of “why don’t people get more involved in the process?” as though we’ve designed a process and system that would allow for that.

My complaint isn’t that elitism exists. It’s that we’re pretending it doesn’t, and defending the instances that we can’t ignore as meritocratic. People tell me that I am an embodiment of the American Dream, having been discovered one day and elevated to success beyond my imagining. But a world in which an average bright young person has to wait for a book deal to access social capital or a promising career is more like a nightmare, and our democracy can’t afford it much longer.

In 2010, she went to the eye doctor for difficulties she was having with her vision. She thought she needed a new glasses prescription. Instead, she was admitted to the emergency room because the ophthalmologist thought she was having a stroke or a brain tumor.

Many appointments and tests and anxious weeks later, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the membrane around its own nerve fibers, causing scar tissue. A typical diagnosis requires two to three lesions on the brain; my sister’s brain had eleven. Because MS attacks the central nervous system, symptoms vary widely, ranging from fatigue and vision problems to seizures and paralysis. The worst part about MS is its unpredictability; one day my sister can seem healthy and the next day she can be overwhelmed with nerve pains, muscle spasms, and immobility.

At the time of her diagnosis, my sister was a 25-year-old stay-at-home mom to her 3-year-old daughter. Her husband’s insurance covered her then. But within a year of her diagnosis, they filed for divorce.

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This is not uncommon for women diagnosed with serious illnesses. A 2009 study published in the journal Cancer found that a married woman diagnosed with a serious disease is seven times more likely to be divorced or separated than a man with a similar diagnosis. Among study participants, the divorce rate was 21 percent for seriously ill women and 3 percent for seriously ill men.

After my sister’s diagnosis, her husband withdrew from the family. He engaged in addictive and destructive behaviors. That left my sister in a position where her access to health care was tied to a marriage that was not good for her or her daughter.

The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, made it possible for her to live as a single mom with a chronic illness.

It qualified her for Medicaid coverage in Montana. It ensured that she would not be discriminated against in the health care market because she had a pre-existing condition. And it let her choose which treatment plan would be right for her and her body.

For six years, she experimented with different medications, starting with the cheaper ones (which cost $1,000-$3,000 a month). Her symptoms did not improve: Sometimes she relapsed, sometimes she got sicker, and sometimes she had to take drugs to deal with symptoms caused by other drugs. Still, she felt it was worth it to try to slow the progression of the disease.

Last year, she found a treatment that works: It’s called Rituxan and it would cost her $65,000 a year without insurance. It’s part of a chemotherapy treatment she does every few months. It leaves her feeling sick and unable to work for a few days, but it works.

Last spring, Maggie graduated from Montana State with a degree in social work. She recently got a part-time job at an assisted living facility, which is funded in part by Medicaid.

It’s a good fit for her, because full-time work would be incredibly difficult with both her MS and her current treatment plan. It’s also a good fit for her because Maggie is one of the most caring people I know. She works with some of the most marginalized people in our society—elderly individuals, people with mental illness, those with severe disabilities—all unable to work or care for themselves.

The Congressional Republican health care plan could change all of that.

Under their plan, my sister could lose Medicaid because her part-time, low-wage income would disqualify her.

Under their plan, my sister could lose coverage for Rituxan, the only treatment that has worked for her so far.

Under their plan, my sister’s pre-existing condition could be used as justification to raise costs on her medical insurance.

Under their plan, my sister’s mobility and opportunity would be more limited by her economic insecurity than they are by her MS.

This is what it means to be uninsured. It means you cannot live safely and comfortably in your own body.

It is excruciating to have to determine the trade-offs your family can make to maintain your sister’s health care. It is even worse to make those choices, knowing they would become worse under all the new iterations of the conservatives’ health care plan. But the true hell is having to have to do it all in public: To have to write articles like this with personal testimonies, create heartbreaking GoFundMe campaigns, share that video of Jimmy Kimmel talking about his baby with tears in his eyes, in the hopes that they go viral. Maybe, if one of them is sympathetic enough, someone will look my sister in the eyes and decide her pain, and her life, should be taken seriously.

At the very least, today, I will be calling undecided senators in Congress so that they can understand the impact of their vote. But let it be known that it’s only one among hundreds of efforts my family, like so many others, undertake to get access to health care for the people we love.

The possibility that I could lose my insurance looms over me like a death sentence.  My son was born with a very rare genetic diagnosis, which comes with a half dozen specialists. He’ll need those doctors until he is at least 18 years old, and there is no way that I can pay for all of them myself (I’d have to earn over $100,000 a year).  Then, last December, my daughter got sick, and I was diagnosed with an injury that required possible surgery—plus specialists, appointments and medication.

Now I am racing to schedule as many appointments as I can, while I still have that option.

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In January and February, my kids and I had 20 appointments between the three of us. That takes time, energy, and money. It impacts my children’s education—it decides when they attend school, and when they miss it. It also impacts when and how much I work, since I’m spending hours driving to appointments, talking with providers on the phone, and communicating with Medicaid about what is covered and what is not. At any given time, I may need to take my son to an appointment. And to deal with my injury, I have had to spend a lot of time resting.  This translates to an odd work schedule that touches 6-7 days per week, somewhere between the hours of 6:30 AM – 11:00 PM.

My family isn’t the only one like this.  At least 23 million people would lose their health care if the House health care bill becomes law. I know those people. I have close friends with children on the autism spectrum.  I have a sibling with Down syndrome who nearly died last year.  I have two parents whose health care needs increase every year—including a father who has battled cancer four times in the past four years.  We are not just a number that can be reviewed or dismissed.

And then there’s the issue of pre-existing condition exclusions that will drive up the prices for the care we do have. If my son is no longer able to see his specialists, it will severely impact his life. If he doesn’t receive the surgery he needs in a few years, it will affect his entire body.

As legislators debate the fate of healthcare for Americans, there are millions of families like mine—with mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who deserve basic, daily, necessary care—from vitamins and supplements to cancer treatments.  No child deserves to live while another dies, just because their family has more money to afford treatment.

I beseech the legislators to consider what they would do for their families if they were suddenly faced to choose healthcare for their loved ones, or none at all.  May wisdom—not profit—prevail.

But the pregnancy was unplanned, too. So was the abuse from the father. So was him kicking us out in the middle of a particularly snowy winter in northwest Washington.

A few months before my daughter Mia’s first birthday, I worked with a friend, eagerly taking up the slack in his landscaping business. I crawled through flowerbeds and junipers and pulled weeds. By the time the season ended, Mia and I had an apartment paid for mostly by a housing grant. But I knew if I expected anyone to hire me for a job with benefits, I needed a degree.

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My parents didn’t raise me with an expectation that I would go to college. When I approached my dad with a list of schools I wanted to apply to during my junior year of high school, he said, “Who do you think’s gonna pay for that?” So I moved out of my parents’ house and went to work full-time for over a decade. That had seemed all right. Respectable, even. But now I needed a job that would do more than just barely pay the rent.

I was able to go to college, and get the degree I knew I needed, because of a grant the federal government provides to low-income students—the Pell Grant. It covered my entire tuition at my local community college, leaving me a few hundred bucks to live off of. I crept along that way. I found full-time work as a maid. I worked late at night, often past midnight, and through the weekends when my daughter was with her dad.

Transferring to a four-year college, for me, meant moving to a different state. I moved to the place I’d intended to go before I became a mom. I moved because, when I visited, I found a progressive community that’d be supportive of a single mom working her way through college. I moved because I needed to hold myself accountable to my dream of being a writer that I’d had since I was ten. I needed my daughter to see me pursue that dream, and not settle for anything less, because I never wanted her to think life wouldn’t afford her the same opportunity.

By that time, I paid for books and tuition with the Pell Grant and a scholarship created for survivors of domestic violence. I also took out the maximum amount of student loans to cover living expenses through the school year when I was only able to work part-time as a maid.  I lived off of a little over $1,000 a month, and my daughter bounced from preschool to the various homes of classmates when I worked or attended class. Neighbors watched her for free, and I rented the other bedroom of our apartment in exchange for help with child care.

Since I was juggling work and child care, I couldn’t take a full course load during the semesters. Instead, I took classes every summer. When the summer courses finished, I worked 10- to 12-hour days doing move-out cleans, landscaping gigs, and any other work I could find until the academic year began again.

A month before my daughter turned seven, she watched me walk across the stage to get my bachelor’s degree.

A year later, I was working full-time as a freelance writer. A year after that, I celebrated my first book deal for a memoir about my time in college, when I worked as a maid. We no longer need government assistance, but we only got here because it was there for us when we did need it. Especially the Pell Grant.

In his recent budget, President Trump proposed cutting the Pell Grant’s surplus funds by $3.9 billion.  That surplus was set aside, with bipartisan support, so that recipients can attend summer school like I did. Trump also wants to cut funds for the work study program and TRIO, which mentors, tutors, and finds resources for students in need—including low-income single moms.

Trump’s plan to cut this funding will diminish opportunities for first generation students, single parents, disabled students, and low-income populations to get an education.  All that does is keep the cycle of poverty spinning. It keeps people shut behind closed doors, with the belief that opportunities just aren’t available to them.  It hurts students who can’t get the support they need through their families—because their family has no money, or no one has ever gone to college, or no one expected them to go, either.

I write today as a success story, heartbroken that others won’t have the same opportunity I did. Decreasing funds for these programs puts up road blocks that stop people in poverty from ever setting foot on a college campus, all for the sake of tax breaks for the wealthy that leave the path of the privileged pristine.

Nevertheless, 96 percent of the people who voted for Trump say they’d make the same decision today.

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When I was growing up—in the 1970s, in the deep South—I struggled to understand why some low-income white Southerners voted against their own interests. They dismissed unions, and supported politicians that let their states lag behind the rest of the country in every indices of health, livelihood, and employment.  They routinely supported candidates who opposed everything from access to affordable childcare, to unemployment benefits and investing in good jobs, to Medicaid expansion today.

But now I realize they’re not voting for policy. They’re voting for white privilege.

White privilege runs deep in America, and it still shapes white concepts of social standing and entitlement. Those entitlements can be symbolic—for example, the power that whites have in the South to maintain Confederate emblems with public prominence and high esteem. They can also be very literal, as with public policies that help whites build and sustain wealth while keeping doors of opportunity closed to blacks (think redlining, predatory lending, unequal access to higher education, and lack of investment in communities of color). That helps explain why black people in poverty have higher death rates than white people in poverty.

Perhaps because it plays such a central role in life in America, “white privilege” is not a comfortable phrase to say—not now, and certainly not in my childhood. Back then, Southerners only used this term—or its counterpart, “white supremacy”—to indicate that someone supported the Ku Klux Klan.

Most white Americans still prefer to define racism in those overt terms. It’s a convenient approach that limits discussion of racism to bygone “whites only” signs and burning crosses, and that argues inequality in our schools ended in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Few people—and even fewer white people—ever spoke the way famed basketball coach Greg Popovich did recently when he called out white privilege for what it really is:

If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally in this society and all the systemic roadblocks that exist, whether it’s in a judicial sense, a neighborhood sense with laws, zoning, education.  We have huge problems… that are very complicated, but take leadership, time, and real concern to try to solve… People don’t really want to face it.

Our most pernicious social ills—the ones that create the privilege that Popovich described, and that many of Trump’s voters cling to—are rooted in policies that were designed to target people of color. We can measure racism by the impact of redlining and toxic mortgages. We can see it in the justice system, where black defendants receive twice as severe sentences as whites convicted of the same crimes. We can find it in classrooms that are still highly segregated, leaving children of color in schools that receive dramatically fewer resources.

America is essentially a racist nation—riddled by racial markers—that is levying its harshest economic and psychological toll on the 1 in 3 African American children and more than 1 in 4 Hispanic children who live in poverty.

Trump appeals to a strain of American racism every time he calls for a border wall, or calls inner cities “a disaster,” or swears he’ll ban Muslims from entering the country. That is what many of his voters—who are disproportionately likely to hold dehumanizing views of black people—want.

By backing Trump, conservatives have coalesced around maintaining a racially divided nation, and so progressives must now coalesce against it. Decisively.

Unfortunately, liberal politicians hoping to woo white voters have also skirted acknowledging white privilege, out of fear that talk about race will strain coalitions. Even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders was slow to talk about racial disparities in America  at the beginning of his presidential campaign—before Black Lives Matter activists protested at his rallies. Silence concerning white privilege is a form of complicity.  It’s the hypocritical denial of reality experienced by blacks that fosters disunity between minorities and white progressives, and discourages minority voters.

The time has come for whites who understand what white privilege means—and who know in their hearts that they want no part of it—to join people of color in a way which is neither compromised nor complicit. Then, through shared power, people of color and white progressives can grow our political strength.

As a young mother, this meant no play groups or coffee meet-ups with other moms. My children rarely experienced playgrounds or library story time. Instead, they caught chickens and climbed tractors. They played with sticks and covered themselves in mud down in the river.

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But once a month, the library bookmobile would park at the end of our property, on the shoulder of the road where the pavement turned to dirt. On those days, I would strap the baby to my chest and take my stepson’s hand, and we would walk down the road to the bookmobile. The converted bus was filled with books, DVDs, magazines, even a pillow in the children’s section for kids to prop on their elbows and read. It felt like a secret special world, curated just for us.

***

In the article “The Bookmobile: Defining the Information Poor,” MSU Philosophy writer Joshua Finnell notes that, while public libraries were created in the mid-1800s to offer equal access to information, they were primarily operated by the white, educated middle class. “Whether intentionally or not, library holdings, furnishings, programs, and even hours of operation all sent a powerful message about who controlled access to information in our society and provided the basis for defining the information rich and the information poor,” writes Finnell.

The non-white and the working poor were systemically left out of the public library structure, and due to the location of most libraries, rural residents also had limited access. In an effort to reach those communities, librarian Mary Titcomb created a horse-drawn wagon to haul books to post offices and stores at the beginning of the 20^th century—the first bookmobile.

By 1912, the horse-drawn library wagon was replaced by a motorized bookmobile. Bookmobiles became part of the larger literacy effort, transporting reading materials to rural communities, schools, and senior centers. In the 1950s and ’60s, bookmobiles reached over 30 million Americans living in rural communities, before fuel shortages in the 1970s and ’80s triggered a decline.

A little over a decade ago, the number of bookmobiles started growing again—according to the American Library Association, they increased by more than 10 percent between 2003 and 2005. Today there are approximately 660 bookmobiles in operation, according to the latest data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services survey.

Ann Plazek, president of the Association for Bookmobile and Outreach Services, says bookmobile numbers fell slightly in 2014 (with a loss of ten nationwide), but she expects that 2015 statistics, which have not yet been released, will reflect an increase.

“There were numerous library systems adding bookmobiles for the first time,” she says. “I think we’re going to see a turnaround —especially as they’re becoming greener and more economical. Some bookmobiles are installing solar panels, which cuts down on the need for generators, and that’s been a huge change.”

***

Judy Calhoun grew up 18 miles from town in rural Arkansas. Once a month, the bookmobile visited her community. “Everyone would come over,” she remembers. “I was a huge reader, and even though they had a rule that you could only check out five books at a time, the librarian would let me check out 30 books. In the summer, I could read one book a day.”

Calhoun grew up to become a librarian herself, managing a branch for 14 years, and currently serves as the president of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. As the Director of the Southeast Arkansas Regional Library System, she oversees nine libraries in five counties in southeast Arkansas. “Eighty percent of libraries in the United States are small or rural,” she says. “So we’re actually the majority.”

Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the country—ranked 48th in 2016—with an overall poverty rate of 19.1%.  Most of the counties served by Calhoun’s library system have poverty rates more than double the state average, and she says libraries in these areas are especially linked to the well-being of their patrons.

“People are leaving these little communities,” she says. “They’re moving away to seek jobs. Once they lose their school, we see a decline in population. As a result, small and rural libraries are continually battling declining revenues. But there are still people here who can’t afford to move, or who won’t move away, because this is their home. So we keep working to serve those people.”

Recently, three of the smaller branch libraries in southeast Arkansas were forced to close. One was shut down completely because the building was in disrepair, and the other two were donated to the towns and are now being run by volunteers. “We even left the computers for them,” says Calhoun.

“For a lot of these little towns, they can’t afford the permanent site. You’ve got to pay the building fees, electricity, internet, phone. In a lot of these places, the buildings are getting unusable, and there aren’t resources to keep them safe. So we’re seeing a resurgence of bookmobiles,” says Calhoun. “As we should.”

***

Even though bookmobiles are regaining popularity, Plazek says she encounters people shocked that they still exist. “Some people think bookmobiles are these antiquated things,” she says, “But we still exist, and we’re still relevant.”

That’s because mobile and rural library services have adapted to serve as community hubs. My neighbors and I used to lean against our bookmobile’s counter to talk about all strides of our lives—pecan harvests and rainfall predictions, mountain lion sightings, an elderly neighbor in search of large-print mystery novels. We discussed lost dogs, the price of alfalfa, and the latest in the opposition to the high-voltage power lines slated to be built through our valley. The bookmobile was a place of gathering, of communion over the complexities and the intricacies of our lives, for passing time with one another in a tiny air-conditioned bus on the side of a dusty road.

Calhoun acknowledged this personal connection, too. “People love to tell us about their troubles, what’s going on in their lives, what they need. We’re kind of like a bartender. We get to know the people we’re serving in a different way.”

Part of that bond is because bookmobiles, and rural libraries more broadly, meet very real needs. Calhoun’s system doubles as a voter registration site, provides tax form assistance, maintains copy and computer centers, and even has an initiative to help combat hunger in the community. And Plazek notes that bookmobiles are often adjusted so they can cater to day cares, Amish populations, or seniors.

Even so, Calhoun admits: “We’re kind of modest. We don’t toot our own horns, and we’ve got to change that.” She says her job is to advocate for small and rural libraries, so she visits legislators at the state capitol, attends conferences, and talks to donors. “People will ask, ‘Are rural libraries really needed?’ And I just keep saying, ‘Come and see what we’re doing. We’re needed. We’re still so needed.’”

Days after the meeting, Morehouse College President John Wilson described its tone as “troubling.” He noted that President Trump’s promises to “do more for HBCUs than any other president has done before” were impossible to measure, and Secretary DeVos’s reference to HBCUs as “pioneers of school choice” showed willful ignorance of Jim Crow and segregation.

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It was just the latest insult in a month that began with Trump using the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. to attack the media—rather than mention any of King’s accomplishments—saying:

Last month, we celebrated the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history. You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. It turned out that that was fake news. Fake news. […] I think it was a disgrace, but that’s the way the press is. Very unfortunate.

These examples highlight a persistent moral awkwardness afflicting the Trump administration.  The yawning gap between President Trump and the leader he was almost honoring (who was a graduate of an Atlanta HBCU, Morehouse College), doesn’t just make the two men seem at odds. It calls for a reassessment of the road that lies ahead.

In 1967, King delivered a powerful speech calling racism, economic exploitation, and militarism “triple evils.” He said a society where machines, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people required a revolutionary shift in values—one that questioned past and present policies, and looked glaringly at the contrasts between poverty and wealth.

During his campaign for the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump stood on the platform of the “triple evils” that King condemned. Trump espoused populist contempt for traditional political elites, promoted authoritarian views of crime and justice, and launched xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic attacks that the media amplified. Trump’s statements are not pithy one-offs—they are rank hallmarks of his deeply-held views.

As a private businessman, Trump was responsible for a laundry list of highly-public positions that are both racist and dangerous. In 1973, the Department of Justice filed a civil rights case against Trump charging him with discriminating against African Americans who applied to rent apartments in buildings Trump owned. In 1989, Trump spent $85,000 for a full-page ad calling for “murderers and muggers to be forced to suffer and to be executed when they kill” after five black and Hispanic teenagers were accused of raping and beating a white woman in Central Park. Though all five men they were proven innocent, Trump has never apologized and has maintained that the five men must be guilty. Then in 1991, Trump’s Plaza casino and hotel was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission because the casino’s manager regularly removed African-American card dealers at the request of certain affluent gamblers, and ordered all black staff off the floor when Trump and came into the casino.

Now, after just one month in office, we are witnessing the policy implications of a demagogue who becomes commander-in-chief.

Trump has already attempted to sever health care access for millions of Americans, cleared the path for the Dakota Access Pipelines, ordered the construction of a border wall with Mexico, vowed to punish “sanctuary cities,”  issued two executive orders to temporarily ban travel from several majority Muslim countries, and issued three other executive orders granting more authority to local and federal police. These early policies are reflective of the profit-driven, racist, militaristic ideals that characterize oppression.

King would not have been complicit or sanguine about this.

In 1961, King declined an invitation to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, even though Kennedy had lobbied for King’s release from an Atlanta jail months prior.  King’s self-imposed absence from Kennedy’s inauguration was strategic—he was unwilling to let Kennedy (or anyone else) paternalistically set or dictate the tone and timetable for civil rights.

Many so-called leaders, who have rushed to sit at the table Trump has laid, could take a lesson from Dr. King.

King used his absence to help nudge Kennedy to take a firmer stance on civil rights. Weeks after the inauguration, King wrote to Kennedy outlining how the new president could use the power of his office to end racial discrimination.  King’s stance is critical for us as women, men, workers, mothers, fathers, and LGBTQ people reckoning with our lives in Trumpland.

By example, King showed us what it looks like to preach, march, teach, sit-in, and push the media to tell the truth.

King’s dream did not envision accepting status quo militarism, racism, violence, or economic exploitation. King’s dream did not envision handing out socks, food, and toiletries as the endgame. King’s dream showed us what is possible, if we forge ahead with mutuality, community, respect, and love.

King’s dream gave us a roadmap through Trumpland.

Correction: This article originally misstated the crime that the Central Park Five were charged with. 

Her symptoms first appeared a little after she turned one. She still wasn’t walking or crawling, but otherwise she was healthy and was hitting her milestones—she could say about a dozen words, feed herself, and play with her toys. But when she was around 14 months old, we noticed that Caroline was making repetitive movements with her hands that didn’t seem voluntary. Within a couple of weeks, she started losing her words and choking on her food. Eventually, she started losing her ability to hold things with her hands. We finally got her diagnosis when she was 17 months old.

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Now Caroline takes about ten different medications, multiple times a day. She takes 4 different types of medication for her seizures, which she has about 90 times a year. Without them, she would probably seize all throughout the day, every day. She undergoes a couple of hours total of lung treatment every day to avoid pneumonia,  and takes other medications to relax her stiff body, make sure she doesn’t vomit all the time,  and help her sleep. Her involuntary movements keep her up at night, and if she didn’t take medication she would only get a couple of hours of sleep every night.

Without Medicaid, I don’t know if we’d be able to afford this treatment. For Caroline, this is a matter of life and death.

Medicaid also offers several hours of skilled nursing care, which allows me and my husband to hold jobs. Without that coverage, one of us would have to quit our jobs—then we would not be able to afford all of the medical care that Caroline needs. That alone would put her life at risk.

I never imagined that I would have a child who would be dependent on us for every aspect of daily living for the rest of her life—from changing her diapers, to repositioning her to make sure she is comfortable throughout the day. And I never imagined that we would depend so much on a program like Medicaid.

But I also never imagined that I could love someone this much.

I want Caroline to live. I want her to feel safe, I want her to feel loved, and I want her to live in our home so that I can take care of her for as long as she is alive. Medicaid is the only way for us to be able to do that.

I would like to invite President Trump to meet Caroline and spend time with her, or with other kids like her. I think he would see first-hand how Medicaid helps us function as a family.

For more than a year I was unable to speak, sit up, or eat solid food. In June 2015, first responders wheeled me into the emergency room, too weak to eat, drink, or elevate my head. I had been, essentially, waiting to die of dehydration. Besides administering some much-needed fluids, doctors offered little help.

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I have among the most severe cases of chronic fatigue syndrome (sometimes known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME). It’s a devastating multi-system disease that’s been given a patronizing name. The cause is still unknown, which makes getting a proper diagnosis—often necessary for insurance and disability coverage—near impossible.

When I was released from the hospital in 2015, my family learned that California’s state-administered Medicaid health care program, Medi-Cal, would not cover the ambulance ride to transport me home because none of my conditions were considered “legitimate.” I took the ambulance anyway, and paid around $1,500 for the ride out-of-pocket.

Several months later, I became so dehydrated that my family decided to pay more than $150 a day for a nurse to come to our house to administer intravenous saline to keep me alive. Large doses of intravenous saline were, and still are, the only way to keep my body functioning.

My medical care has become a privilege that costs me more than $1,200 a month. In the last year, I spent roughly $73,000 on my health care—more than double my annual income when I was healthy and working full-time.

Historically, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has allotted only a paltry amount of attention and funding—$6 million—to ME research. Some headway has been made in recent years, at least in part because advocacy through the #MillionsMissing campaign has brought the lack of funding to legislators’ attention. In November 2016, the NIH tentatively announced plans to increase research funding for ME to roughly $15 million for fiscal year 2017. But now, with Republicans controlling both Congress and the White House, there has been a change in what was promised. In January the NIH said it will actually decrease funding, allotting $1 million less than in 2016.

The amount is minuscule compared to the funds that the government has at its disposal. The ME community has needed a substantial increase in government funding for decades. More funding would mean more research; more research would mean more biomarkers; and more biomarkers would mean the potential for a diagnostic test. These scientific breakthroughs would mean medical professionals would be able to better understand the disease—and therein lies the solution. This path has potential for the medical establishment and government to compensate for decades of belittling patients who suffer from a devastating disease, finally bringing widespread legitimacy to ME—and relief to millions of patients. That would be real progress.

But it may never happen at all.

Before Donald Trump shocked the world by winning the election, I was hopeful that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would, in time, be expanded so that more of my medical needs would be covered by insurance. But now, barring a radical turn of events, that seems—at best—highly unlikely.

If the Trump Administration repeals the ACA, even simple treatments—like saline infusions and in-home nurse and doctor visits—will cost egregious amounts of money. My savings account has been zeroed-out, and I receive less than $900 in monthly disability checks. For the past year, my medical expenses alone have been more than $6,000 a month.

The plans that have been floated to replace the ACA do little for people with disabilities or low incomes. A replacement would likely offer a flat credit based on age, and it wouldn’t cover the care I need.  It would also dramatically weaken Medicaid, decimating services for people with disabilities and serious illnesses.

It would be unfair to say that the ACA has no room for improvement. But for me—and I imagine for most poor, chronically ill people—it is something to build on, not something to dismantle.

Because what happens next, for us, could be a matter of life or death.

It got so cold that winter that my daughter and I slept in the living room, because I couldn’t afford to heat the entire apartment. So instead we kept the doors to the room closed tight, and huddled together on the small pull-out couch I’d found for free.

It snowed quite a bit—more than my 1983 Honda Civic could handle. For an entire week, I tried to will the snow plows to come down the steep little alley where we lived. Every day that I missed work meant another bill I wouldn’t be able to pay: first electric, then rent.

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I was in this situation because, two years earlier, I fled from my daughter’s father after he punched out a window in our home in the middle of January. He’d left, then called to say he wanted to return with the landlord (who’d always been a source of fuel for his anger) to fix it. I called the police for safety.

With that decision, I found myself homeless with a 6-month-old. I worked as a landscaper while we moved from a homeless shelter, to transitional housing, and finally to our own apartment. We couldn’t have made it out of the shelter without help from an elusive grant called Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, which helped close the gap between what we could afford and what an apartment actually cost.

Eventually, I found a full-time job that also allowed me to go to school full-time. But the job only paid $8 an hour—not enough to provide for a family. Even working full-time, we had to go without basics. I had to budget for when I could purchase a new sponge or paper towels. I needed food stamps to help feed myself and my daughter, because, after paying rent, gas, and utilities, most months I only had 50 dollars left for things like toilet paper, soap, and tampons.

At the end of that winter, I got money back from the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. I was able to buy tooth brushes, curtains, a desk to do homework on, blankets, and a bed I still sleep on today. I bought a heated mattress pad, so I didn’t have to heat the whole apartment at night. My daughter Mia and I went to sleep at night, cozy and warm, but I still lived in a fog of hopelessness, anxiety, and doubt.

I didn’t have a family who could financially or even emotionally support me. My daughter’s father still tried to cut me down every chance he could. I worked my way through school, but I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t had help meeting basic living standards. Food stamps, rental assistance, and tax credits were the things that kept us afloat. I received utility assistance, and sometimes a voucher for gas so I could get to work. I used WIC (Women, Infants and Children) coupons for milk, bread, eggs, and peanut butter, which became the staples of our diet.

A month after I graduated college, I gave birth to a second little girl. Eventually we were able to move into safe and secure housing I could afford, and it meant I could focus on my chosen career as a writer. Within eighteen months, I’d published pieces in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and secured a book deal with Hachette Books after an essay at Vox about my years working as a maid went viral.

Now all of the programs that helped me and my daughter get ahead are under attack.

The ACA repeal would roll back access to Medicaid, and federal funds for child care, food stamps, rental assistance, and more face the chopping block. They’re at the mercy of an administration and conservative politicians who don’t have to worry about what would happen if they worked full-time and still didn’t have enough to give their children the basics in life.

These plans would just kick people when they are already down. We need good quality food, not whatever has the most calories at the cheapest price. We need regular check-ups and to be able to afford prescription medications. We need treatment for our backs that ache from long hours working jobs that no one else wants to do—like scrubbing your floors, or caring for an elderly person you love. These are jobs that are vital to keep our society running smoothly.

Maybe folks like Donald Trump and Paul Ryan need to work one of those jobs. Maybe they need to stand out in the cold of December, ringing a bell in a Santa suit. Maybe they need to go home to an unheated house with bare cupboards, still hungry from their one meal a day at the soup kitchen. They need to go home to children who won’t have dinner. Children who had to sit in an office during recess because their family couldn’t afford to get them a coat that year.

Maybe Donald Trump and Paul Ryan need to spend a night on a pull-out couch, snuggled up next to their children for warmth, only to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

Dear Senator Toomey,

You don’t know me. You have never met me, or answered any of my calls. But you have power and influence over my life—and my children’s well-being—and that scares me.

So Senator Toomey, let me introduce myself:  My name is Myra Young. I’m a mother, an advocate, and I live in poverty.

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I work hard to take care of my family. For the last 22 years I worked as a certified nursing assistant, but I still lived in poverty and needed government assistance to put food on the table and to keep my kids healthy. Two months ago, the company I worked for closed and I was laid off. Now without my job, my struggle is even more difficult.  I only receive $33 a month in food stamps—barely enough to get my family through one healthy meal. My kids need fruit and vegetables, but I simply cannot afford them.

Last week, my 10-year-old son asked, “Mom, why do you cry so much?”

I told him, “Because I want to take care of you and your sister, but it’s so hard.”

But why is it so hard, Senator?

It’s hard because wages are too low.
It’s hard because we have to beg for scraps when we need help.
And it’s hard because of politicians like you, Senator Toomey.

You have everything I want: a safe home to go to, a job that pays a good wage, and a family in good health.  But you want to take away the little bit I have by cutting programs that help me—and people like me—feed my family.  That hurts us.  That keeps us down. And that makes me angry.

You are wrong, Senator Toomey.
You are wrong if you don’t protect these programs.
You are wrong if you don’t care about my family.

Would you be able to survive one week in my shoes?  Would you be able to manage the daily struggle of trying to feed your family? Manage the stress of not knowing if you will be able to pay rent for the month? Manage the fear that your child may need health care that you cannot afford?

If I were in your shoes, and had the power to help a mother with two disabled children, I would do it.  I would make sure she has the services she needs to care for her family.  I would take care of the more than 1.6 million people in Pennsylvania who live paycheck to paycheck.

Senator Toomey, as a member of Witnesses to Hunger, my sisters and I will continue to speak out and fight for the needs of our children, families, and communities.

It’s your responsibility to do the same.

I am a black woman, a mother of two beautiful black boys, and I live in Northeast Philadelphia.
I have lived in poverty, in Philadelphia, my whole life.

Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate of any large American city. The face of that poverty is most likely a black mother, like me.

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For me, being a woman has always meant being strong and never showing weakness.
I have always had to be superwoman, and the women around me have had to be the same.
As a single mother of two boys, I have to play both roles and every day, I do what I have to in order to take care of my boys the best way I know how.

I, too, am a woman.

I am the woman you don’t see when you walk down the street sipping your Starbucks coffee.
I am the woman you don’t see standing in line at the local food pantry.
I am the woman who remains invisible in spaces and at events like the Women’s March.

But I am here.

You must see me.
You must acknowledge me.
You must include me.

Because I am the woman who fights every day.
I am the woman who understands inequality.
I am the woman who advocates for the rights of women and children living in poverty.
I am the woman who wants a better life.

The new administration scares me, but I know I have to continue to fight.
Not just for me, but for the others who come after me.
For our children.
For our future.

We can’t accept what we are given.
We must continue the fight—and that means all of us.
Let’s hold each other accountable and unite.

Sonia Sanchez said, “in order to be a true revolutionary, you must understand love.”
I do what I do out of love.
We will win because of love.

But first you need to see me.

On the surface, I don’t have much in common with its residents. I’m a black American. I’m pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, and a feminist. I’m a lifelong progressive. According to multiple media outlets, Owsley’s residents see my beliefs as a direct threat. But we also have deep a bond.

Poverty.

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The median household income in Owsley is just $19,146 per year. The unemployment rate is double the national average, the majority of children live below the poverty line, and in 2011 more than half the county’s residents received food stamps. When Medicaid was expanded under the Affordable Care Act, a whopping 66 percent of residents became eligible. And if you ask them about it, they express deep appreciation. Again and again.

“It’s been a godsend to me,” said a school custodian who suffered from a thyroid condition that practically immobilized her. Medicaid let her get treatment—and it paid for her cataract and carpal tunnel surgery.

Another resident lamented that without Medicaid, she couldn’t pay for the doctor’s visits to keep her hyperthyroidism in check. “If anything changed to make our insurance more expensive for us that would be a big problem,” she said.

Resident after resident in news article after news article acknowledged the price they would pay if these services disappeared. But in the past two years, the residents of Owsley overwhelmingly voted for a governor, and then for a president, who want to eliminate the Affordable Care Act.

Now that the heat of the election has passed, they are anxious. And I understand why.

I’m on Medicaid—a new recipient since the expansion. I have a feeling that several thousand poor white Kentuckians—like this black American—still suffer a twitch of anxiety when they hear the words “payment is due at the time of service,” at the doctor’s office. If you are uninsured and facing a health crisis, those are the scariest words you can hear.

I remember that feeling.

I used to save the change from every purchase I made. I called it “health clinic money,” and I’d collect it for weeks so I could pay for my next $50 doctor’s visit. For more than a decade, my blood pressure readings were at heart attack levels. The doctors at my clinic wanted to see me every month, but I couldn’t always afford it. So I skipped my appointments.

In 2011, I learned my high blood pressure was due to kidney cancer. I was still uninsured, so getting the treatment that could save my life entailed a maze of forms that delayed my surgery for months. I eventually got help from a program in my state called “the Indigent Health Care Fund,” but the funding was spotty before Medicaid was expanded. When I applied, I was told the program was no longer accepting new clients—which happened often, once money for the year ran out—so I didn’t know my surgery had been given the green light until three weeks before it happened.

That’s what life was like for millions of us (and what it has remained like for Americans living in the states that stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA). We languished in fear, and said prayers instead of visiting a physician. That’s inhumane. Free or low-cost health care for those who can’t afford it is a matter of basic decency.

If you don’t believe me, ask my friends in Owsley, Kentucky.

The incoming Republican Senate, House, and the new president are determined to repeal Obamacare, and it’s still a mystery when—or if—it will be replaced. Undoing Medicaid expansion and replacing it with a fee paying system will return millions to the days of saving their change before seeking help. Preventative care (the kind that could have caught my cancer earlier) or regular monthly appointments (the kind that could protect me from a cancer recurrence) will be curtailed or gone.

Instead, the poor everywhere will see the familiar front desk sign that reads “Payment is Due at the Time of Service.” And we’ll go home.

“Momma, I’m hungry.”

My chest tightens, a visceral reaction to these words, because I know I cannot feed them what they need.

“Okay, baby.”

I leave the bedroom, making sure to quickly close the door behind me, and I’m hit with an icy chill. Shivering from the lack of heat, I walk into the kitchen knowing exactly what I would—and would not—find there.

Pancakes it is.

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While I’m preparing the last of the mix, I realize that there is only enough for one person. I split the pancakes between two little napkins while my own stomach growls ferociously. I walk back into the bedroom. The food is gone almost as soon as I hand it to them.

“I’m still hungry, Momma.”

But I already know. I tickle them in hopes that they forget the churning feeling within their little bellies. My heart breaks.

Getting them ready for the doctor is more ritualistic than the everyday grind. I’m careful to part their hair perfectly, placing the curls into well-groomed styles. Then I pull out two brand new outfits—Christmas gifts from Grandma—that I was saving for a doctor’s appointment or a food pantry visit (whichever came first). I did not qualify for the local food pantry this month, so the doctor’s visit it is. Once my children look as perfect as possible—as normal as possible—we set out in the Volkswagen my sister gifted us. The gas is just about gone.

It is hard to miss the luxury vehicles in the doctor’s office parking lot, or the families tossing half-eaten breakfast sandwiches and lattes into the trash. Once we’re inside I watch a woman at the front desk rummage through crisp dollar bills, searching for one small enough for her co-pay. I think about the $70 I lost by missing work that day.

I’m anxious for the visit to be quick and painless. I know that the doctor will ask questions that I would rather leave unanswered. My children move sluggishly beside me.

“Momma, I’m hungry.”

With weak arms, I lift my smallest child and hold her close while I check in at the desk. After telling the nurse my children’s names and appointment time, I hurry to find a seat—trembling from the weight of my two-year-old child.

The nurse comes to take their weights and measurements, then shows us into Examination Room Three. I change them into the office robes without messing up their hair, and fold their new outfits with precision. As the doctor approaches, I start to worry about what he would say about their progress—or lack thereof—on the growth scale. Are they underweight? Am I a bad mother because I do not have more to give?

The doctor enters the room.

He is always polite, clean, and empathetic. He cares about the children he sees daily, and wants them all to grow healthily. Yet he is ignorant to the realities that the families face—or at least, to the one that my family is facing.

“All seems great,” the doctor says. “Is everything alright at home?”

“I’m just tired and hungry.”

“Me, too! Be sure to eat breakfast next time,” he says, blithely.

As we leave to go home, I listen to the music of my dwindling gas tank. There are 69 cents on my debit card, $12 on my food stamp card, and a week left in the month. My kids have fallen asleep, and I am already thinking about what I will feed them when they wake—singing an all-too-familiar song of hunger.

You probably aren’t familiar with the Eastside of Charleston, but you know a place like it: It’s segregated by race, and associated with poverty, crime, and violence—derogatively called “the ghetto” or “the ‘hood.” It’s the part of town that you have been cautioned to avoid.

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More and more Americans who struggle to get by are living in these marginalized, disinvested communities where jobs and educational opportunities are scarce, and an increasingly militarized police force is the primary contact residents have with government. But for two years, Americans have been expressing confusion as one neighborhood after another—from Milwaukee to Baltimore to Ferguson to Charlotte—are rocked by protests, looting, and riots after the police shootings of unarmed black men.

Is it really a surprise that many of the renewed outbreaks of civil unrest have taken place in these communities?

Although the impact of living in high-poverty neighborhoods has been well documented, it’s hard to fully explain the toll it takes on a person’s body and soul. Frustration over high prices, high bills, and high unemployment rates is worsened by the bane of many a poor community—the local drug economy.

The vast majority of my neighbors, young and old, did their best to avoid the drug trade. My next-door neighbor was so overprotective of his two daughters that he refused to let them leave the house after 7 p.m. I knew many teenagers who resisted it for years, but faced with no prospects for their future, or for good jobs with good pay, they decided “to go to work”—usually in the summer when they were out of school. Dealing drugs was the neighborhood summer job program. And for many young neighbors who were expelled from school (because administrators are more likely to punish black students than provide more holistic help), the drug trade was less an alternative than an inevitability.

Outsiders often criticized Eastside residents for not taking care of their own community, or not doing enough to stymie the drug trafficking. This victim-blaming ignored the roots of the drug problem—the lack of opportunity, racism, and economic forces outside of residents’ control—and it ignored the role that outsiders played. It was common to see long lines of cars that clearly belonged to nonresidents (that is, mostly whites) trolling every night to the wee hours of the morning, looking to score drugs with no concern over the consequences for families, mothers, or children trying to sleep.

I eventually saved enough money to leave the Eastside, but not much has changed since I left. The kinds of investment in the community that would have convinced me to stay didn’t exist (and still don’t). It was no wonder that those of us who lived there believed the city, state, and even the nation did not respect—or even consider—our humanity.

The Eastside is hardly unique. If you look at the statistics associated with any of the marginalized, predominantly black communities in cities that have erupted in civil unrest, a pattern becomes clear. In Baltimore, an overwhelming majority of public school students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches (which are often used as a proxy for students’ socioeconomic status). The median income in Freddie Gray’s own neighborhood is just $24,006 a year.  A Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri confirmed that the municipal police department engaged in poverty exploitation by targeting blacks for traffic violations, singling them out in a city where 53% of blacks live in poor neighborhoods. Milwaukee has been called one of the most segregated cities in America.

There’s an obvious solution for these communities (and it isn’t gentrification, which simply displaces generational residents). The solution lies in more targeted investments—for example, in jobs or education programs—that give people a chance to succeed. The bleak situation for the 13.5 million people in high-poverty neighborhoods must be ameliorated, or else somewhere, sometime soon, civil unrest will break out again.

I decided I wanted to do more than just survive, so I did the things that people do when they embrace their lives. I took a spontaneous girls’ trip. I went to a Jill Scott concert. I bought myself a fancy pair of shoes, and I cut my hair short.

For a while, I felt like everything would be OK. Then, a few weeks after my 35^th birthday, I lost my job.

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The morning that I was laid off, I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked into my boss’s office. There was a woman in the room I’d never met before, from Human Resources. She said all the things she is trained to say to soften the blow—“it’s not you, it’s the budget,” and “there are ways to deal with a ‘Reduction in Force’”—but there was no amount of wordsmithing that could change the facts.

I was unemployed.

That night, I sat down with my husband to figure out how we were going to make ends meet. We made a lot of deep cuts in our budget, including taking our seven-year-old daughter out of the aftercare program she loved. We tried to explain it to her the best we could and she seemed to take it in stride—but her sleep terrors told a different story. One night, in her sleep, she asked: “Mommy, what happens if we run out of money?”  My heart was broken, but I couldn’t tell her how worried I really was.

The truth is, her aftercare wasn’t the only major loss. I also lost my health insurance, which is crucial for managing my symptoms. The medications and appointments are expensive, and without them I could form new lesions on my brain that make the condition worse. Plus, stress alone can exacerbate MS. Treatment for that requires IV steroids—another expense, which leads to more stress, which leads to more symptoms.

The problem is, it’s hard to stay calm when your identity is being called into question. I had been working in public health for a decade, and I’ve kept a steady job of some kind since I was 13 or 14 years old. I was raised to be a “worker bee”—I’ve been staff at daycares, offices, restaurants, and my church’s youth program—and I didn’t know what to do without a job.

I searched for a new position with fervor: I checked with community colleges, health departments, department of human services, and universities. It was important to me to find a job that I loved, and that matched my experience, but they were few and far between—and my family needed an income.

To help us get by, I applied for unemployment benefits. I completed most of the process online, and I was able to call and speak to someone when I had questions. Soon, I was approved and began receiving a weekly stipend.

The benefits certainly didn’t replace my job—they only make up for about one-third of my income—but they’ve given us a little time. We have been able to keep our two-year-old in daycare so that I can go to job interviews, and we can pay the power bill, buy groceries, and put gas in the car. But my benefits are about to run out, and our household expenses are not.

Compared to a lot of Mississippians, I’m truly blessed. Last year, less than 15% of unemployed people in the state received these benefits—the other 85% were left to piece together a living however they could. Still, politicians are talking about cutting the program even further.

I can’t help but wonder if they have ever had to walk a mile in these shoes. Have they had to make the decision to take their children out of school? Or choose between paying the mortgage and buying groceries? If they had, maybe they’d choose differently.

And the driveway, she said, was a rutted, steep rise of dirt, holes, and gravel—a quarter-mile long.  “The first test,” as she put it.

When my 15-year-old Honda and I actually made it to the top, she came out in front of her house and waved at me, impressed.  She lived in a converted garage with piles of empty cans and tools in the yard, a chimney trembling with wood smoke.

“A lot of people,” she said, “just turn back.”

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Rural poverty seems like something out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book—something quaint and distant. Something over. But many of my neighbors and family members in Appalachia grew up—or their parents grew up—in homes without running water or indoor plumbing. That kind of living is not a relic from the past. It’s the life of many people today, some of whom I know and love.

I stopped assuming my friends would have driveways.  Many of them are homesteading in the deep, ridged woods, or squatting in trailers in fields, or just getting by in overcrowded farmhouses. I stopped assuming they would have bathrooms, trash pickup, or even electricity. Not everyone I know has power—either because the bill hasn’t been paid or the house was never on the grid to begin with; wires never reached that far.

And not everyone has the internet.

Not everyone has high-speed or wireless. Not everyone has a computer, or a smart phone. Or a phone phone. The assumption of basic technology, even in the digital age, is just that: an assumption.

I’m fortunate to have internet at home (usually, when I can pay the bill), but living alone with a 5-year-old child means I don’t get to my freelance work at my computer until late at night, after he’s asleep and I’m exhausted.

Until recently, in order to email a W2—which I have to do regularly, to get paid—I had to drive 20 minutes into town to an office store, pay for parking, and pay a few bucks to print out the pages.

Then a friend gave me her old printer so I can print at home.  But I still have to drive across town to the library, which has a free scanner I can use to scan my W2s—and that’s not a process my son will wait patiently through. So I have to pay for a babysitter, and again pay for parking. The privilege of getting paid for my work costs me about $30 in all, and takes up several hours of limited, much-needed, child-free time.

Most people know about the practice of punishing those who are poor with further financial burdens: deposits for utilities, fees on check-cashing and bank accounts, payday loans. All of this is a kind of a poverty tax—it marks you as undesirable and it helps keep you poor.

But there’s a lesser known poverty tax on technology, and it’s paid with your time.

It takes a lot more time and ingenuity to access technology when you’re poor. It takes calling in favors from friends. It takes being at the mercy of parking and babysitters and business hours and irregular internet access at coffee shops and restaurants.

It takes shelling out a few bucks you don’t have for coffee or food for the privilege of sitting at a business with wireless. It takes feeling incredibly nervous that you’ve been there too long, that they’re going to kick you out or make you buy something else, or that the manager at Wendy’s is going to call the cops because you’ve been sitting in the parking lot for hours—as I have done—trying to use their internet for work.

Politicians talk about providing internet to rural, impoverished communities in grand, noble terms. But the reality is simple and harsh: We need the internet to access help.

I need the internet to get help for child support. I need the internet to search for work and apply for more jobs. Once my child starts school, he will need the internet for homework—a common struggle in my community, since children are required to do hours of homework online every night even though over 300 households in my county don’t have any internet access. Public libraries close a few hours after school lets out, and due to budget cuts, they are not open much on the weekend.

Most services for the poor are online. Job ads are online. Housing information is online. Information about food pantries, seed distribution, free meals, parenting classes, job fairs, shelters, health clinics, and free activities to do with children are online. Even accessing my bank account—to make sure I’m not overdrawn, to make sure I’m not racking up a low balance fee—needs to be done online. Every time I ask for a copy of my statement at the bank, I’m told: “Do you know you can do this online?”

Yes, I know. Do you know that not everyone has that luxury?  

Stop assuming that everyone has the same technology, the same new phone, the same fast laptop.

Maybe if you realize that, you will stop assuming everyone has other basics: like a hot shower, like a stove to cook a meal, like a fridge to store fruits and vegetables, like dental care, like money for much-needed medications.

What are taken as givens, including technology, are actually extravagances for many people. When you’re poor, applying for a job online, or finding a doctor, or simply answering an email, often takes extra money, time, and luck that you don’t have.

That steep, rocky climb I had to make to reach my friend’s house? I climb it, in so many ways, every day.

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of welfare reform, which created work requirements and other barriers for families who need the most basic cash assistance.  The legislation was aimed at getting people to become self-sufficient.  As then-President Bill Clinton put it, “No one who can work should be able to stay on welfare forever.”

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Twenty years later, it’s clear that welfare reform has left more families with fewer resources. There has been a 75% drop in the number of Americans receiving cash assistance since 1996, and a sharp rise in the number of households with children with incomes of less than $2 per day.  There are 3 million American children who now live on no money for at least three months out of the year.

Now Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to build on that disastrous legacy.

With his recently released poverty plan, the Speaker called for ending 11 antipoverty programs—including housing assistance, food assistance, and child care—and combining them into a single block grant (the preferred approach under welfare reform).

Ryan claims he is focused on moving people into full-time work—the surest way to get people out of poverty, he says. And it’s true—full-time jobs that pay well and provide benefits are indeed the best path to get out of poverty.

But that’s not what Ryan is promoting, and his solution—like welfare reform before it—would not have helped me. (Nor would his votes—at least 10 times—against raising the minimum wage.)

In my years of receiving government assistance, I worked full-time and went to school full-time. I still needed help to pay for child care, food, utilities, and school. And that’s the problem with both welfare reform and Ryan’s poverty plan: they ignore the fact that people in poverty do work, but they face challenges that people with means do not. When you don’t have money, you can’t pay for car repairs, quality daycare, or work-appropriate attire. It’s harder to overcome criminal records or inadequate educations.

When my college classes began to interfere with my work as a housecleaner, where I barely made $9 an hour, I had to go to part-time.  But because of the work requirements added during the 1996 welfare reform, my part-time work status meant I received fewer benefits. My child care grant only covered the hours I was physically in class, so I ended up paying for child care myself. To make ends meet, I took the maximum allowed in student loans, $10,000 a year, and maxed out my credit cards. By the time I graduated, I was $70,000 in debt.

I am considered a success story because I was able to use my degree to support my family through freelance writing, without government assistance. But if I hadn’t fought for years to get a better education, I would still be working full-time for less than $10 an hour, receiving several forms of government assistance to make ends meet.

Politicians like the phrase “welfare to work.” Maybe they think it’s easy to find a job because they’ve never had to pound the pavement with a dozen resumes, spending days filling out applications, waiting for call backs, then interviews, only to find they start at just four hours a week—at $7.50 an hour.

Do all of that while you’re hungry, sleep-deprived, and experiencing stress of a level that has you in “survival mode.” Do that while you have children clinging to you during a phone interview. Then go out and try to find a daycare with openings that will take your government voucher—while stressing over feeding your children and yourself and caring for the housing you’re scared you might lose.

Then. Then reform welfare, Mr. Ryan.

I had played with the children who lived next door for years, so my father asked me what the inside of the house was like. “I don’t think you want to buy that house,” I told him. He was confused—the house was in perfect condition on the outside, a cute little colonial-style two-story. Yes, it was built in 1921, but it had an immaculately kept lawn and a big tree with a swing in the backyard.

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But the inside of the house looked nothing like the outside. The owners had started renovating the house years before, but stopped midway through when money got tight. There were no walls in the kitchen and dining room, and no flooring. Old nob-and-tube wiring hung, exposed, from the studs. One planned bathroom had barely been started, it was just exposed pipes in the wall. The basement had a dirt floor that got muddy when it rained, and the washing machine was propped on plywood in the corner.

An exposed stud in the kitchen was a sad testimony to the history of the house. The heights of the family’s three children were marked there, starting when the children were two. By the time the family moved, they were in their twenties—proof that the house had been unfinished for decades.  My family thought I was lying until they saw for themselves.

“I can’t believe they lived like that,” my dad said, “all those years.”

The house next door is a symptom of and a metaphor for the larger phenomenon of suburban poverty. Americans have ready-made stereotypes for poverty in urban and rural areas, of crime-filled streets and crumbling housing projects or broken-down farmhouses and beat-up pick-up trucks. But suburban poverty, thanks to its stereotype-defying nature, is often more difficult to understand.

My family bought that house, and the more than two acres of land it sat on, for $20,000. The sale notice in the local paper caused a scandal in my suburban community—housing prices in the region are low, but not that low. Neighbors were unwilling to believe that $20,000 was all that house, with its pleasing exterior, was worth.

As my family worked to renovate the house, we realized that we had much more in common with the family next door than we thought. My father, a cabinet maker, had always gotten along well with the machinist patriarch of the house next door. They bonded over a shared identity as working class men, relating to each other’s long shifts and six-day work weeks. But my dad hadn’t realized how much they struggled. They had seemed so much more prosperous from across the property line.

We were also a working class family that struggled to make ends meet, fighting to finance a slew of large and small expenses—from car insurance to braces to broken household appliances. We did not always juggle these costs well. I went without health insurance for months when the premium swelled and my dad struggled to find a plan he could afford. My parents are divorced and because my mom lived in poverty, we received food stamps and free school lunches. My father, meanwhile, has struggled to scrape together $15,000 in retirement savings despite working full time his entire life.

The neighbors likely didn’t know any of this. To them, the equation was clear: the interior of our home was finished, so we must be better off than them. Was it possible that each of our families had spent years thinking, wrongly, that their neighbors were doing better financially?

Across the country, the phenomenon of suburban poverty is growing. In my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, some 13.9% of suburban residents lived in poverty in 2011. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of suburban people in poverty in the U.S. grew 64%. These trends have been mirrored in rising student participation in the Free and Reduced Price Lunch Program—often used as a measure of families living in poverty–in suburban school districts nationwide. In 2011, 40% of students in suburban districts were eligible for this program.

The suburban poor face a unique set of challenges, because suburbs simply do not have sufficient infrastructure for handling poverty. Those struggling to get by in suburban communities can have a difficult time accessing public transportation to travel to work, reliable childcare for unpredictable work schedules, or even a soup kitchen.

Even as the numbers of suburban poor climb, awareness of their existence is minimal. The suburbs still conjure images straight from a 1950s sitcom, complete with soccer moms, family dinners around a table, and perfectly manicured lawns. And while these things still exist in the suburbs, it is shockingly easy to ignore the rising tide of poverty there.

The suburban poor themselves may help to exacerbate to these stereotypes by hiding behind them. Looking presentable and fitting in are made easier by hand-me-downs and thrift stores that sell nice clothes for cheap. Poor suburban children may be able to attend highly-rated suburban schools alongside the children of affluent families, their classmates and teachers none the wiser. And once proud middle-class citizens, now unable to pay for rent or food, may struggle with guilt or shame and opt not to share their stories or even seek out help.

The family next door succeeded in blending in, but they were not alone in their financial struggles—not in our neighborhood and certainly not in our larger suburban region. I don’t know if they realized that. Life in the suburbs can be isolating, especially when there is pressure to hide your circumstances from friends and acquaintances. If everyone who is experiencing poverty hides it, then all of those people end up thinking they are alone.

My family would have thought the same, if not for the house next door.

My mother’s words suggested that our circumstances were our fault, as if we were being punished for sins of the past. I know now that we were just poor and doing the best we could to survive—and there were many other families in rural America like us, struggling to make ends meet.

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Substandard Housing

Before my family occupied a tent on a campsite, we lived in substandard housing in rural Magnolia, Illinois. The only house we could afford was in disrepair—the plumbing was a patchwork of burst pipes, some rooms did not have insulation, and all eight of us were crammed into three small bedrooms.

My parents were determined, so they persuaded the owner to allow us to live as rent-paying tenants while my father—a carpenter by trade—worked to make the house livable. My parents invested a lot of money, time, and care to make that house our home, rather than some unit of housing stock: they repaired a leaking toilet, brought running water to the bathroom sink, closed the porch to make a new bedroom, and added insulation. The only time the owner paid for maintenance was when the septic system collapsed and flooded our house with waste.

Though substandard housing is often described in terms of urban blight, suburban and rural families are actually twice as likely to face issues with things like “incomplete plumbing,” like my family did. What’s more, minority families in suburban and rural areas are twice as likely as their white, non-Hispanic counterparts to live in substandard housing—a statistical double whammy for my family.

Eviction

After about a year, my family was served with an eviction notice for “refusal to pay.” The landlord was actually refusing to take payment in order to force us out, but the deck was stacked against us—and against tenants in general—in court. Careful documentation of past rental payments and major investments in the property offered no protection from being evicted without cause. My mother recalls, “we went to court to fight [the eviction], but knew we wouldn’t win.” And we didn’t.

The court determined that we had 30 days to vacate the premises. My parents searched desperately for housing options, but the eviction itself tainted our rental applications. One landlord seemed willing to overlook the risks associated with renting to an evicted family with six children, but when he heard our Latino surname—Oquenda—he suddenly struggled to find available space for us. According to a 2012 HUD report on housing discrimination, that’s fairly common: Hispanic renters are both “told about” and “shown” 12.5 percent and 7.5 percent fewer available units, respectively, than equally qualified white, non-Hispanic renters.

That is how we ended up homeless, living at a campsite in Marseilles, Illinois.

Homelessness

During our time at Marseilles’ Glenwood campgrounds, there were daily torrents of rain that flooded our tent and damaged our belongings. At one point, the runoff was so strong that it carried away our food cooler (we didn’t have a refrigerator), spilling our food out over the campsite and destroying the bread and buns we used for peanut butter and jelly and hot dogs.

Eventually the mud seeped through the tent’s openings, covering our clothes and blankets, and the tent became infested with ants and other insects that were seeking cover from the weather. This was a low-point for my family.

Eventually the rain stopped, and we found another site:  Maple Leaf Park.  Some of my fondest memories took place there: learning to swim, living off the crawdads and fish in the ponds, and singing songs around the fire we built from wood we gathered. We had help from food stamps and the grounds had showers, but most importantly our family’s morale rebounded.

After two more weeks at the campsite, someone offered us help. A friend let us stay with his family. Since resources like shelters and food banks are few and far between in rural areas, many homeless families end up in crowded housing or “doubling-up” with extended family or friends. We lived with that family for a few weeks before we found another home in Henry, Illinois.

Though the house in Henry also was substandard—incomplete plumbing, lack of insulation, and faulty electricity—we made it our home. It certainly beat the rain.

What’s Next

My family’s experience isn’t unique. On any given night in 2015, 32,800 Americans in rural families experienced homelessness. What’s more, the practical challenges of counting homeless people in rural areas means we may be underestimating the true size of the rural homeless population.

Structural issues—such as higher poverty rates; inadequate transportation; and limited access to shelters and services like health, mental health, and child care—make people and families who live in rural areas particularly vulnerable. This helps explain why rural homeless families are disproportionately likely to go without shelter: in 2014, rural families accounted for 15.7 percent of all homeless families, but almost 27 percent of all unsheltered homeless families (families without access to service shelters who usually live in cars, in tents, or on the street).

The rural housing crisis is not intractable. Policymakers should start by improving data collection on rural homelessness, so that they have a complete picture of the issue. They should also increase efforts to document and reduce discrimination in renting, and improve access to affordable legal services so that families stand a fighting chance when they risk losing their homes. To support the families who become homeless, policymakers should improve accessibility to shelters and other services in rural areas. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should reinstate Section 515 grants to build more affordable rural rental housing, and increase the direct loan program funding under USDA Section 502 to provide more assistance for rural homeowners.

These reforms are only possible if we choose to accept housing as a meaningful right for all Americans. Then, campgrounds could remain mainstays of family vacations—not crisis centers for homeless families.

My diet is small and not varied compared to what my daughters eat. While I subsist off of eggs, chicken, frozen veggies, hummus, and apples with nut butters, they eat an assortment of fresh fruit. I love waking up and making them pancakes and bacon, cutting up strawberries and plums, and setting the table to watch them eat.

For a long time—about five years while I worked and put myself through college—it was rare that I felt pride in setting the table full of good food. My older daughter was thin, sometimes so thin I worried that our food insecurity was the cause. I hovered over her when she ate, stressing over any food she left that would go to waste.

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Whenever we came into some unexpected money, like a grocery store gift certificate that I won once as a door prize, I asked Mia what we should buy. Mia, age seven at the time, exclaimed “Blueberries!” and “Raspberries!” and other fruits we normally couldn’t afford.

When birthdays came, I used food stamps to buy treats like cupcakes or take-and-bake pizza. This was our life for so long.

But for several months now, despite a recent dip in funds, I have been able to purchase our food without food stamps. Being able to eat good quality food has brought me joy. I love watching my toddler eat to her heart’s content. I love that she has a belly that sticks out. I love that she is visibly well-fed.

So this morning, when a friend of mine shared this blog post with me, I was deeply affected by it. The lead image is of a white man, sitting by a stove with a pot on it. He is dressed in overalls, holding a cigarette, and looks to be from the Depression-era. In the post, Joshua Fields Milburn, one of “The Minimalists,” writes of dropping from 240 to 160 pounds. He suggests that he lost the weight because he no longer looks to food for entertainment: “The difference is I don’t turn to food to entertain me, to comfort me, or to ‘get me through tough times.’”

He writes this below the photograph of the man who looks to be living in dire straits, and most-likely is hungry. That person is not unlike many people in America who live in extreme poverty, who sometimes have to sell their food stamps for cash to pay for utilities and shelter while donating blood plasma for income because they cannot find jobs to support their families. Is Milburn drawing a parallel between the choices he makes about food, and the choices of those who are struggling in poverty?

For me the piece plays right into the hands of politicians, who judge and try to control how people who are struggling spend what little we have. These politicians push for laws to keep the poor from purchasing “luxury items” like high-end meats, seafood, and cakes, as if we are frivolous. They point to unhealthy eating habits as the cause of obesity among those trying to make ends meet, but it is not because people are choosing junk food over fruit. It is because they are walking into a store with $50 to last a family of three an entire week, and looking for the cheapest food, with the highest caloric content, that is easiest to prepare after a day of working long hours at a minimum wage job. It is because they are growing up, like my older daughter did, pressured to eat what is served because there isn’t enough to get through the month. It is because they are gorging on rare sugary treats when they are available.

Milburn’s post spurred in me a deep sadness and anger. For many food insecure people, the ability to serve their family a nice meal is indeed a source of comfort, their only entertainment, and a moment of pride.

Yesterday, when I checked the mail, I found not one, but two paychecks. As soon as those payments were deposited in the bank, I went straight to the grocery store. I bought strawberries and plums. I bought the crackers my daughter loves. When I picked her up from daycare, I told her about my trip to the store, and what I could feed her when we got home. I cut up an apricot, cooked up a package of bacon, and let her eat all the fruit she wanted. She went to sleep sticky with syrup from pancakes, greasy from bacon, and dyed red from strawberries.

It is just the three of us in our little family. In our town, and the nation, it feels as if people are struggling more. The times feel uncertain, unsafe, and sometimes overwhelming. But, despite all that, I can provide my girls a home. I can give them a space where they feel loved, valued, and most importantly, well-fed. Doing that—feeding them the food they love—is what gets me through the really hard times.

And that’s not just entertainment.

The fact is that people generally fail to understand homelessness because they don’t ask homeless people what happened to them—how it is that they ended up in the situation they are in and what their needs are.

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I saw the consequences of this failure recently in Ocean County, NJ, where I now live in subsidized housing.  The Jon Bon Jovi (JBJ) Soul Foundation announced it would open a JBJ Soul Kitchen in the county. They will provide quality meals at whatever price a person can afford, or people can do some volunteer work in the café if they can’t afford to pay. If people prove reliable as volunteers they can then enroll in a training program that will teach them skills in the culinary arts and other professions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of access to good meals when it comes to addressing food insecurity, or underestimate the value of good job training that provides marketable skills.   However, a person living in a tent in the woods—and we have more than 600 people in Ocean County living without permanent indoor shelter—does not even have access to a toilet, shower, or a place to wash clothes. What the chronically homeless in Ocean County need, most immediately and urgently, is secure housing.

The money raised to open the JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurant would have been better spent on building a safe, stable, and affordable housing facility for homeless persons in the community.  If the founders had spoken to community members who have experienced homelessness, we would have made that clear.

This communication gap is widespread.  As someone who has experienced homelessness, and spent more than a few nights in hospital emergency rooms because I didn’t know where else to go, I can tell you that when you try to explain to nurses and doctors that you are there because you fear that the continuous uncertainty and anxiety you are enduring might drive you mad, they generally react by giving you a sedative, letting you sleep, and then sending you on your way with breakfast and a few anti-anxiety pills.

I don’t recall anyone—and I mean anyone—ever asking me about my life, and what happened to me that brought me to this moment.

So I was delighted to see a sign of change recently when a professor at New Jersey State College asked me to speak to a graduating class of nursing students so that they could better understand the treatment needs of the increasing number of Americans experiencing homelessness.

I told the class that I originally started thinking about the importance of simply asking people what they are experiencing after reading Healing Neen by Tonier Cain.  Cain experienced severe and extensive abuse during her life: abandonment, rape, physical and emotional violence, and numerous incarcerations. At every turn she was treated in various behavioral modification programs with de rigueur psycho-active medications.  But according to Cain, she did not really begin to heal until someone—a trauma therapist—simply asked, “What happened to you, girl?”

So this is the point I tried to convey to the students: if a person comes to you who has experienced prolonged periods of time without housing, don’t treat their symptoms without asking what happened. Trauma gets resolved by confronting the events that caused it. That takes time and artfulness.

Whether we want to understand the crisis of homelessness in the Bay Area or Ocean County, or a healthcare professional needs to treat a vulnerable patient, it starts with a simple question: what happened?

Within a few weeks, I was sexually harassed again by an officer. During evening rounds, two officers came by with flashlights, stopping at a number of beds. When they stopped at mine, one officer picked up my panties that I had hung on a towel over the metal bars of my bunk bed. At first I thought he had stopped to discipline me for washing my panties by hand instead of sending them to the laundry. Instead, he sniffed them and said, “I wonder if she would be good in bed.”

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This treatment contrasted drastically with what was outlined as acceptable in the sexual abuse, harassment and violence orientation—presented by prison officers—that newly incarcerated women are obligated to attend. What’s more, signage all over the prison walls reminded us that officers are strictly forbidden from having sex with inmates, as mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). You couldn’t walk far without seeing the words “ZERO TOLERANCE.”

But as subsequent events in the prison would demonstrate, the signage should have read, “ZERO ATTENTION TO PREA.” In one incident in April 2014, my entire unit, which comprised more than 100 women, awoke to the evening officer having sex with a woman from my unit. The officer came in to fetch the woman after lights out, but in his rush to have sex, he forgot to lock the door separating the sleeping unit from his office.

A half-dozen curious women left the unit to watch the officer have sex with the woman and ran back into the unit to tell everyone about it in graphic detail. The resulting chatter kept the entire unit up for over an hour. But when the next officer to come on duty was told of what had happened, she ordered that the desk be wiped down and the office mopped—rather than closing the office as a crime scene. The next morning, all the women who had witnessed the incident were put into solitary confinement. The following evening, a second female officer, unhappy that her fellow officer was in trouble, threatened to withhold from our unit the only two luxuries incarcerated women have in their sleeping units: television and microwave use. As for the abusive officer, he was placed under investigation by the FBI and temporarily sent to work at the men’s side of the prison down the road.

This was hardly the first incident at the prison. My bunkee informed me that, back in 2006, the prison was on lockdown for months when an FBI agent came to arrest six officers for sexual violence. One officer, determined not to be arrested, shot and killed the agent. The correctional officer was killed too. The remaining five were arrested and prosecuted. With this history, I would have expected serious oversight by the region and the federal government to ensure enforcement of PREA. But that night, I realized most of the male officers could, with the full knowledge of prison leadership, hold incarcerated women hostage to their sexual appetites without consequence.

And when I returned from prison and spoke with other formerly incarcerated women, I learned the problem wasn’t limited to my facility. Sexual violence toward incarcerated women is a problem at the federal, state, and local levels. Statistics vary widely, but a 2006 report by Stop Prisoner Rape estimates that as many as 1 in 4 women are victimized while incarcerated.  

Unfortunately, government officials have been relying on strategies that fail to address the primary problem: the power dynamics between officers and incarcerated women make it nearly impossible to report abuse. Since returning home, I’ve sat in meetings with well-meaning government officials and activists who want to end sexual violence. But their solution is a repeat of the old one: it includes new and improved manuals, more training for officers, more supervision, cameras, and a redefinition of the problem.

No manual, training, or camera will prevent an officer from whispering, “If you want to see your child this weekend, I want a blow job.” “Do you want that cushy job?” “Do you want that corner bed?” Do you want me to put money on your commissary account?” Whether it’s a threat or a bribe, incarcerated people cannot prove the conversation happened, even with cameras. No one will believe an inmate over an officer because the culture of prison is one in which officers protect and cover for each other—and incarcerated women are treated as though they are less than human.

Those who do come forward or refuse the advances of an officer risk a great deal. A vindictive officer could have an incarcerated mother put in solitary or transferred thousands of miles from her children. Even if there is no sex, but an officer feels threatened or wants to demonstrate his authority, a woman can be sent anywhere. This threat of retaliation undermines reporting rates – women will suffer the sexual violence rather than see themselves lose what little privilege they have.

Instead of doubling down on training manuals as a solution to this crisis, we should open new avenues for identifying violence and reporting it.

One way to do this is to hire formerly incarcerated people to work in our prisons and jails to help identify abusive behaviors. Due to our experiences within the system, formerly incarcerated women know what to look for—like spikes in commissary accounts, unusual job transfers, and repeated use of solitary confinement.

Trust and support are necessary for incarcerated people to come forward—and those who have spent time in prison are most able to provide it. Our shared experience of incarceration builds a powerful bond. It is that bond—along with robust protections against retaliation and accountability for officers who perpetrate violence—that will help survivors come forward in safety.

I read that you will roll out your new poverty task force’s proposal tomorrow, and I wonder if you remember me. I testified at one of the hearings you hosted on the War on Poverty two years ago. Of the 17 expert witnesses who participated in the series, I was the only one who actually lived in poverty.

At the time I felt like I had the weight of so many people on my shoulders—people who don’t normally have a voice in Congress.  How would Congress ever know what they should do to address poverty if they don’t ever speak to us?

I did my best to share my story and those of others in my community, and then I had the opportunity to meet you.  As you reached to shake my hand, I said I wanted a hug. It was my way of trying to make our connection more personal—a reflection of my hope that we would begin to work together to make change around hunger and poverty.

As important as you said the issue was to you, I was sure that you would make a place in your work for me, my Witnesses to Hunger brothers and sisters, and many others who are living in poverty.  Since 2008, we have used our photographs and testimonials to show the world what the experience of poverty is like and to advocate for serious change at the local, state, and national level.

So in the past two years, I reached out to your office numerous times.  So did the people at Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities, where Witnesses to Hunger is based.  Your office never responded to us.  Unfortunately, people such as me and my husband, and many others who are struggling, continue to be shut out of your conversation in Washington.

As you may remember from my testimony, my husband and I work hard to provide for our family.  I work at a community recreation center on afterschool programming for children. In recent years, my husband has worked the deli at a grocery store, overnight at a meat-packing plant, and as a security guard.  He has endured two-hour commutes, worked night shifts, held multiple jobs at the same time—made the kinds of sacrifices a parent makes to try to lift up a family.

Yet despite our hard work, we’ve remained in poverty. Our three children suffer from epilepsy and asthma and take life-sustaining medication.  We’ve rarely had benefits like paid leave that allow us to miss work without taking a hit to a paycheck. In 2008, our son was having seizures, and I had to leave my job to take care of him.  Because of the lost income, we eventually lost our home and were homeless.

Should any person in America end up homeless for taking care of a sick child?

It’s clear as we look at how many people are struggling on low wages, forced to make impossible choices between basic necessities, that we still have plenty of work to do.  It’s also clear that you could still learn a lot from me and many others who are experiencing poverty.

In your first speech as Speaker you called for combining many safety net programs into a single block grant. But I know you realize that poverty would be twice as high without the safety net, with nearly 30 percent of Americans living below the poverty line.  What would our nation look like with 30 percent poverty?  We can thank the safety net for the fact that we don’t know the answer to that question.

You and I also both know that more than half of people in America will be poor or near poor for at least a year during their working years, so the safety net is there for all of us. But it needs to be strengthened. We are already cutting poverty in half with our current safety net.  Now, let’s set our sights on cutting poverty in half again.  And let’s do it without messing up what is already working.

I hope your task force’s proposal builds on the things that we already know work—for example, we know the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reduces food insecurity and prevents hospitalizations, housing assistance helps young children stay healthy, and preschool helps kids reach their full potential. But I’m pretty sure we will see the same old dangerous ideas like block granting wrapped up in new pretty packaging.

Mr. Speaker, the cameras have long moved on since I had the opportunity to introduce myself to you.  I continue to live in the struggle with my Witness sisters and brothers and millions of others in poverty, and we continue to be shut out of your conversation in Washington.

Meet with us.  Let us show you what’s going on in our neighborhoods and our homes, and share our ideas about solutions and change.

Your friend,

Tianna Gaines-Turner
Philadelphia, PA

“You buy art supplies,” my son says. And I’m stumped.

Because of course he’s right.

I live in Appalachia, in the poorest county in my state. I often make less in a month than some people spend on cable, though my son and I don’t have cable. We don’t always have trash collection. I drive a 15-year-old car with dents in the back and a scrape on the side that will never get fixed, and I’m behind on medical bills.

But I do buy art supplies.

One of my first memories is of drawing. I’m sitting below the table while my parents have dinner; I’m drawing their portraits. Outside, rural Indiana is flat and abandoned. Our road is gravel. Our neighbors have trailers. But in the warmth of the kitchen, I draw and dream.

I don’t remember being specifically encouraged in art as a child, but I was encouraged to be creative. I was encouraged to occupy myself. I was told, when I complained to my mother that I was bored, “Is your imagination broken?”

When I became a mother—and then, a solo mother—I found myself saying the same words to my son. I filled an old suitcase with art supplies, and put the suitcase in the living room. Mostly, I did it to distract him, to gain a few minutes so I could fold laundry, or start dinner.

But something happened: my child came to love art.

A few years ago, I took him to a “First Friday” event, a street fair when the stores—those that are still in business—stay open late, and there are hot dogs and a high school band. Kids were playing in a fountain, but my kid started sobbing. Because he wanted to see paintings. He had heard me mention an art gallery—and he had to see the paintings there.

My son became enamored with paintings after seeing the art I make at night after he’s asleep. Most nights I fall asleep working as a freelance reporter, drifting off over my laptop, but some mornings, it’s paper and paint pens that litter the quilt when he wanders into my room. He holds the images up. He has questions. He has favorites, and constructive criticism.

Not long ago, in the midst of making what I thought was a couch fort, he made his own art gallery. He turned the biggest cushion on its side and taped up his creations to the fabric. He’s also done an “installation” in which he taped greeting cards, string, an odd piece of paper from a grocery bag he cut out himself, and small toys to the wall. He did this after seeing me arrange my own postcards on the wall of our rented place, to cover a water stain.

Why is it important to have art even in poverty? Why is it important to make it? Why spend time trying to make things look nice?

My child is observant—he knows we struggle—and is prone to worry. It’s just clothes, I tell him when he has a play date that will end in mud and wet grass. It’s okay if they get dirty. That means you’re having fun.

Fun is okay, I tell myself. It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay not to spend every second working. It’s okay not to spend every second worrying. It’s okay to forget sometimes—briefly—the creditors on the answering machine, the possibility that we might have to move again, my cough that I can’t afford to get checked out.

Why do I bother making things?

One of my jobs as a poor mother is to make things, to stretch the laundry detergent with water, to fit the screws back in the car door with wire. What is living in poverty if not constantly being creative? Continually making it work? Making the unbearable, bearable. Making the money last. Making the unlivable not just livable, but survivable.

So I cover up scuffs in shoes with marker. I use baking soda to wash my face. Every leftover portion from dinner, I carefully wrap and freeze.

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Self-sufficiency is a hallmark of Appalachian life, as is DIY ingenuity. Everything is jerry-rigged, slapped or duct-taped together. One Christmas, my friend helped me chop a tiny evergreen, but when I got it home, I realized I had nothing to put it in. So I filled a pot with water, propped the tree in it, and secured it to the pot handles with rubber bands. Appalachian tree stand.

That’s the descriptor for what we do—and it’s a brand of honor. Appalachian tanning bed: a blanket in the sun. Appalachian recycling bin: throw your empties out the window.

There is more to this life than struggle; there is also great love. I learned that when my son was a newborn, and the knocks on the door began: strangers with mason jars of soup and trays of rice and beans. I learned it when my son was a toddler, and a friend’s father gave him a bicycle and spent hours helping me teach him to ride.

Living in Appalachia, being surrounded by people who are the kindest, most generous I have ever met, even though they have the least, has allowed me to find a way when it seemed there was no way. It has made me feel strong and capable at the hardest points of my life. It has also allowed me to give. When I feel like I have nothing, I can give my son the gift of creativity, the gift of imagination, the gift of spending a happy hour painting cardboard on the porch.

Yes, the porch is splintered, and it doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t own the land—we don’t own any land, not yet—but the paint is bright, the colors are true, and my son smiles.

As one of millions in this country struggling to make ends meet, I am weary of inequality and poverty—not only from my own personal hardship and the financial hurdles that exhaust me each day, but also because of the differences in treatment I experience compared to the more affluent.

Case in point: Denver, my hometown—one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. In Denver, the poor and the well-off are practically on each other’s doorsteps. On the 16^th Street Mall in Downtown Denver, young professionals walk past homeless individuals daily. Recent college graduates hit the bar scenes in posh Cherry Creek or the exploding RiNo District as minimum wage workers prepare customers’ food and clean their homes—just one of the two or three jobs they likely juggle. At the King Soopers in Stapleton, one customer pays for groceries with a Platinum MasterCard and the next with an EBT card. And in areas like Park Hill, while the majority-black side of the neighborhood struggles with poverty and gang violence, middle and upper class families—mostly non-minorities—live in architecturally ornate homes valued at over a half-million dollars.

These inequalities are more than visual—they add to the huge burden that already weighs on those of us who face economic hardship. Research has demonstrated that inequalities in the housing market drive up rents, and Denver is no exception. While I am grateful that my children and I have been able to live in a two-bedroom apartment for eight years, my rent went up by 11 percent this year and it has been a struggle to meet that increase every month. At this point, I cannot afford a three-bedroom rental (which would be helpful to accommodate my growing children), let alone secure the money to put down a deposit.

And there are also psychological impacts that arise from these inequalities. A 2010 study highlighted this phenomenon when it revealed that countries with high levels of income inequality face high rates of mental illness. In no country was this more evident than in the United States, where income inequality is associated with heightened risk of depressive symptoms and anxiety disorders. This also applies to Denver—I’ve seen firsthand that where there is stark hardship in close proximity to wealth, there will be unrest and desperation.

There are times when I struggle with envy, wishing that I could simply afford a bigger place to live that was closer to the kids’ schools, my evening and weekend jobs, and our friends. My children and I are frugal and enjoy everything we can on a minimal budget—which means not going to full-price movies more than two to three times a year, rarely visiting museums or attending events that cost money, and avoiding vacations. In fact, last summer my kids and I took our first vacation in years—and it was 48 hours long. While we appreciate all that we are able to do and what we do have, it only exacerbates our hardship when we struggle to make rent month after month, and then look across the street to see a manicured lawn, two nice cars, and a double- or triple-sized garage attached to the five bedroom house that holds a family of four.

To make matters worse, my daughter’s friends started excluding her from their plans, saying, “There wouldn’t be a problem if you just had an iPhone.” My child was distraught, telling me, “They don’t understand because their parents haven’t lost their jobs, they’re not on food stamps, and they live in nice homes and drive nice cars.”

The inequalities don’t stop there. We can’t afford to live close to school so my kids spend a significant chunk of their after-school time in the car and with me at work. When other kids are benefiting from enrichment activities outside of the classroom (and have nannies to facilitate the process), my kids go without because I am not always able to be there at drop-off or pick-up time due to my unusual work schedule, and I cannot always afford the fees. It’s these kind of income-based differences in afterschool participation that fuel the widening achievement gap between rich and poor.

And then there are health issues. I haven’t been to a dentist in years because it has been a major challenge to find one who still accepts Medicaid—it’s generally more cost-effective for doctors’ offices to accept private insurance, which more and more Denver residents are able to afford. Unfortunately, the same principle applies to mental health care. And when those in poverty or on the brink of it cannot afford care, mental health needs often go untreated. Meanwhile, those who can afford a therapist or psychologist get the help that they need and it positively impacts their health.

The fact is that how much money you have relative to others matters: from the level of health care you can afford, to the quality of your kids’ education, to where you can live. And as the gap widens between those who have enough and those who are barely making it, it threatens to divide us as a country and as a society.

Back in 2006, I was convicted of disorderly conduct (a third-degree misdemeanor) after a run-in with law enforcement. While I was recording an incident in my neighborhood where a cop was beating up a person on his corner, the officers saw me taping them and told me to stop. They also tried to take my camera phone. I pulled away and a group of cops started running after me and assaulted me. I was hurt pretty badly and sustained multiple injuries, including a fractured hand and bruises all over my body. I still have scars to this day.

And so even though I had done nothing wrong, I was convicted of “disorderly conduct” and sentenced to 6 months of probation. I didn’t do any jail time, but I was left with a criminal record.

That was hardly the end of my punishment. At the time, I was making enough to support my family as a customer service representative for a health insurance company. I needed to take medical leave after the assault and was told I could come back when I was ready. But when I tried to go back to my job, I was forced to “re-apply.” I had to fill out a job application that asked if I had ever been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor. I had to check yes, and they refused to take me back.

Even with just a third-degree misdemeanor on my record, I haven’t been able to find a steady job since. I’ve tried to find work in customer service, but I have been told over and over that I need a “clean background” to be hired. And so, to try to make ends meet, I am currently doing part-time work for my brother who owns a small trucking business. The company doesn’t have enough business to pay me even a fraction of what I was earning before. I make just $150 per week, which means I need to turn to food stamps to keep my family afloat.

It’s been almost 10 years since I paid my debt to society, but I’m still being punished. My whole family is still being punished. All I want is to be able to move on and to support my family so that my kids have a chance at a better life.

And I’m far from alone. According to a new study by the Center for American Progress, nearly half of kids in the United States now have a parent with a criminal record.

As policymakers debate fixing the criminal justice system, I hope they hear my story. People like me should be able to earn a clean slate once we’ve paid our debt to society so we can support our families.

And instead of having our resumes thrown in the trash just because we checked the box, we deserve a chance to show employers that we’re worth hiring.

I’m not asking for much—just that people like me get a second chance so that we can be the parents we want to be.

My mother had Martha Stewart on her mind too. Not realizing that Martha had actually gone to trial and lost, she said, “Martha Stewart pled guilty and went to prison for six months. Why don’t you plead guilty, go to prison, and get this nightmare over with. You can’t beat city hall.” My mother also used my love of watching 24/7 TV news in her efforts to persuade me. She said, “At least you will get cable TV in prison. I didn’t get that in Auschwitz.” I had no words.

Ultimately, my mother was right: I couldn’t beat the government’s charges of tax evasion and mail fraud, even though I was innocent. And so, eight years after Martha went to prison, my case went to trial and I was convicted. But from the moment I entered Alderson, I realized it was no country club. After being fingerprinted and having my mug shot taken, I was given “newbie” clothes, that is, the clothes inmates wear for the first day only. The slip-on sneakers were two sizes too large; the bra had as little material as a G-string and didn’t hold my breasts in place. The oversized outfit could have fit two women.

After this initial intake, I waited with three other new arrivals in a freezing cell in the Receiving and Discharge (R & D) building. We got the prison bag lunch of a bologna sandwich, cookies, an apple, and a water. When we missed dinner, we got another bag of bologna sandwiches.

Soon after our arrival, R & D officers gave each of us a large laundry bag which contained a blanket, two sheets, soap, shampoo, a comb, a toothbrush, and, most importantly, “Maximum Security” deodorant.

The R & D building was separated from the sleeping quarters (the “units”) by a long stretch known as “Hallelujah Hill.” For some, this nickname was a reference to its proximity to the prison chapel, but for the older crowd, making it to the top merited a shout of “Hallelujah.” During my first trek to the Admissions and Orientation (A & O) units, I was forced to stop several times to catch my breath while carrying the heavy laundry bag. I lagged far behind the younger women.

During my first two weeks in prison, I went through orientation with thirty other women. Correctional officers showed us a film on the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and emphasized there was to be no lesbian sex. I understood that to mean lesbian sex was the only kind of sex that merited punishment, as opposed to some of the contractors’ well-known proclivity for sexually abusing prisoners. They also lectured us on the rules of the compound, the different facilities, and told us we had to work.

In Alderson, everyone was required to work in the kitchen for their first 90 days. That is, everyone but Martha Stewart, who requested but was denied kitchen duty. I suspect she was refused because this chore might have given her an inkling of pleasure within the miserable prison environment. She was instead assigned instead to the humiliating task of mopping the floors and cleaning the toilets of the warden and other higher-ups.

My first job at the Alderson kitchen was cleaning floors after the lunch and dinner shift. Although I worked seven or eight hours a day, I earned only $5.25 during my first month. There were also few accommodations based on age—elderly women were given the exact same jobs as younger women; even older women who could barely walk had to endure the long work hours. And after our work was done, we were not permitted to go back to the unit between lunch and dinner. We were not allowed to read, do crossword puzzles, knit, play cards, or sleep. Instead, everyone had to spend long hours in plastic seats attached to the table. As an older woman, this took a real toll on me physically.

After my days of kitchen duty were up, I got transferred to the landscaping department, which meant that, at the age of 60, I was charged with the backbreaking work of mowing the lawns in the hot summer and shoveling snow in the winter. Once, I was assigned a heavy 1950s-style lawnmower but could not get it started without assistance. When I went to push it, I couldn’t even move it an inch.

After I went to landscaper and asked for a different assignment, he gave me a broom and instructed me to sweep the streets. I cleaned the road of rocks but quickly realized that the area would be filled again as soon as a truck came by. And so, I asked the officer if I could remove the stones and put them far from the road. He replied, “But then you would have nothing to do.”

At an age where working a physically demanding job for seven- and eight-hour days was grueling, I served as the Sisyphus of Alderson, sweeping rocks off the streets only to see my work undone by passing vehicles. My experience is far from unique. While there are 75,000 prisoners over the age of 60 that are under the jurisdiction of correctional authorities, accommodations that take into account the reality of aging behind bars are all too rare.

What I’ve come to realize is that although older people do commit crimes that warrant punishment, there are few reasons, public safety or otherwise, to incarcerate elders. Certainly, any basis for incarceration is outweighed by the negative consequences we experience behind bars. Instead, we need alternatives to incarceration that acknowledge that older people are too vulnerable a population to be held in our prisons and jails.

As for Martha Stewart, well, Martha was lucky. She went home to a billion dollar company. But as for me, I’m homeless, broke, and living proof that Alderson is no “Camp Cupcake.”

I have been in prison twice. The first time, I was 60 years old, and I was convicted on three felony counts of tax evasion and one count of mail fraud. I was released when my case was overturned as two of the tax charges were deemed legally insufficient based upon the evidence presented by the government. I then went to prison a second time at age 63 when one of the tax evasion charges was retried. Prior to both trials, I was offered plea bargains with no jail time, but I was innocent so I fought the charges.

Prior to my arrest, I worked for decades. I had a home, family, extended family, and friends. And while I was awaiting trial—a period that lasted 12 years—my father was my greatest supporter. He wanted me to be close to family so he offered me an apartment in New Jersey. He supported me financially by covering my health insurance, electric bills, phone, and car payments. But after I moved there, he passed away unexpectedly.

After my father died, I had my apartment but no money. I lost my attorney. I was hungry and would go to Sam’s Club to eat their samples for dinner. And, after I was convicted and went to prison, my apartment was rented out. I had lived there for more than ten years while I awaited trial following my arrest.

Incarceration

After I lost my first trial, I was sent to a federal prison camp that was difficult for an older person. The prison camp was divided into an upper compound, which contained the housing units, health center, library, chapel, and recreation buildings; and a lower compound, which consisted of the dining hall, laundry, education center, and commissary. The return trip from the lower compound to the housing unit was over a mile and up a steep hill. I had balance problems—on rainy or snowy days I walked slowly because I feared falling. I had to stop every ten feet or so to catch my breath. The weather—severe heat in the summer and arctic cold in the winter—the terrain, and the physically tough environment of the prison were hard for older women. The stress of surviving was added pressure.

The second time I lost at trial I was sent to a higher security prison in Florida. One Physician’s Assistant (PA) there was notorious for telling every woman he examined that aches and pains were due to fat. He told me the same thing he told the others, “You are fat. You need to walk on the track and drink water.” Once, one Latina woman went to him complaining of severe stomach pains. He gave her the fat speech and several weeks later she died when her gallbladder burst. When I heard this story, I wrote about it. I sent the story via email for a friend to post on my website. Correctional officers read our emails and when they saw an officer was mentioned, I was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to solitary—the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU). The officers told me I was being punished for writing about an officer.

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I was held in solitary for seven weeks. Immediately I started suffering migraines, which were soon joined by vertigo and high blood pressure. I requested medical attention but was denied. The freezing temperatures added to my physical suffering; I asked for and did not receive an extra blanket.

I also repeatedly asked the prison staff to check my blood pressure—my family had a history of heart disease. Two weeks went by before they checked it. It was 200 over 100—stroke territory. I asked the PA, “Are you going to take me to the hospital to be checked?” No, he said, and I knew my life was in jeopardy. The migraines, vertigo and high blood pressure conditions are still a problem today, and I believe the stress—the physical and mental challenge of being in solitary—caused me permanent damage.

Finally, at an age when most of my friends were preparing for retirement, I was released from the higher-security prison as a homeless, financially broke, convicted, and aging woman. I had nothing to call my own and my legal bills had consumed a lifetime of savings. I was full of fear and anxiety. I came home an orphan with a living family.

Reentry

After I arrived back in New York, I had to report to a residential reentry center (RRC aka a halfway house). Under current law, RRC placements can last up to one year. However, I was permitted to stay only six weeks—a very short amount of time for reentry, especially given that I was 63, homeless, and penniless.

On top of that, this halfway house’s rules were borderline Kafkaesque. Phones were prohibited within the house. There was no Internet. Permission to leave the house was limited and often unattainable. If you managed to get permission to go somewhere that had a computer, you could apply for a job online. However, since there was no way for an employer to call you, the effort was futile. Even if you got an email response, you might not get permission to go to the job site for an interview.

Because I couldn’t demonstrate proof of employment on an application for housing or pass a background check, the only choice I had after the halfway house was a homeless shelter, aka the last place I wanted to live. And so, I arranged to join a three-quarter house, which are unlicensed facilities that rent shared rooms to people leaving mental hospitals, drug treatment programs, and prisons or jails. It’s a profitable business. This one was run by a purported feminist who claimed to care about the women she was housing.

It was a frightening sight. Eleven women were crowded into a few rooms. One working bathroom was available. I lived in a space half the size of my prison cell. My roommate and I could not stand in the room at the same time. One of us had to stay on the bed for the other to get her clothes.

I worked a $9.00 an hour job at Old Navy for the Christmas season. Standing on my feet seven hours a day was painful, and I couldn’t straighten out my back and needed to sleep to endure the next full day of work. And, although I was assigned evening hours, the house curfew was at 11:00. Women who didn’t get home on time found their belongings in garbage bags on the street. The so-called-feminist found it easy to throw women out, and I had to call her when I arrived at the house from work each night to get back in after hours.

My struggles to obtain housing in New York City haven’t ended as I don’t have credit or a job. In one telling instance, I had three in-person interviews in one week with an agency whose work focused on the formerly incarcerated. Although I was hired, the job offer was retracted only two days later. I was—and I still am—stunned by the lack of interest in employing formerly incarcerated returning citizens.

In short, I’m writing this story because I believe in coming out as a convicted felon. I believe in disclosing my history to employers, friends, and practically everyone. And as there are as many as 100 million Americans with a criminal record, if everyone “came out as a criminal,” most people would know someone. We would see increased momentum for reform on jobs, housing, and criminal justice reform more broadly. And we could build an elder justice movement that works for alternatives to incarceration for the elderly; the release of incarcerated elders; and responsible reentry specifically focused on the needs of the elderly who are returning home.

But right now I have no job and no housing. I am 64 years old and fearful I will end up in a shelter. I have fought every day to jumpstart my life, but I feel I am losing the battle.

Editor’s Note: The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to TalkPoverty’s request for comment at the time of publication.

Three of these advocates share their stories here.

Editor’s note: Tell Congress to Protect and Strengthen Vital Nutrition Assistance Programs Now.

You’re angry with me, I can tell. Not because I did anything wrong, but because of the way I make you feel. I make you feel helpless. You know that there is nothing that you can do to make me not homeless. I make you feel afraid that this might be you someday. I make you feel disgusted that anyone could live this way, and none of that is your fault.

You’re angry with me. I can tell. Not because of what I’m doing, but because of what I’m not doing. You’re angry that I’m not trying to change. You’re angry that I’m sleeping on the streets; that I spend all day begging for change and not trying to change. You’re angry with me because now I have somehow made this your problem.

I’m sorry you see me sitting on the sidewalk counting change and looking up at the door to a McDonald’s. I’m sorry I’m dirty and I smell, and nothing about that is your fault. I’m sorry – not because I did anything wrong, but because of the way I make you feel. I’m sorry I make you feel helpless. I’m sorry that you know that there is nothing that you can do to make me not homeless. I’m sorry I make you feel afraid that this might be you someday. I’m sorry I make you feel disgusted that anyone could live this way, and none of that is your fault. I’m sorry that I’m sleeping on the streets, that I spend all day begging for change. I’m sorry that now I have somehow made this your problem.

I forgive you for being angry with me. Please forgive me for being homeless.

***

He’s not there again today. He has been there every day for years. You’re actually worried. Why? He is just a homeless guy. He’s not there again today. For months you passed him by without a thought. One day you figured, what the heck I’ll give him a buck. He smiles and says thank you and god bless you, and he means it. He’s not there again today.

You started carrying a couple of extra bucks just for him. A couple of times you even brought him coffee. Just a routine, barely a second thought. Doing something nice, giving back, helping out. He’s not there again today.

Do you ask around? Do you put up flyers? Do you call the hospitals or the police? Where did he go? Is he okay? He’s not there again today.

Does he know that you’re worried? Does he know that you care? Before he was gone you had no clue how much he meant to you. He’s no longer just some homeless guy. He’s not there again today.

You knew his face, his smile, his way. His dirty coat, old and frayed. You never even knew his name. Why is he not there? Why did he go away? All you know is, he’s not there again today…

***

We must stand together and speak as one. Let our message spread through the streets like a flood, so that every ear shall hear and every mouth shall speak: We will not be ignored any longer.

“Are you aware your payment is late?” they always ask.

“Yes,” I say. “Are you aware the payment you want is a fourth of my income?”

I can hear them shrug through the phone.

At this point in my life, I can compute rates and payments with the skill of a Wall Street day trader. I use an available balance of one credit card to make a payment on another card. I make $50 payments to two different store cards that have 26 percent interest rates. The phone and internet bill is $50. Electric is $53. Car and life insurance bills are $62. I have two more credit accounts with 20 percent interest rates that have the largest balances, the largest payments, and close out my month with payments due on the 22nd and 24th. I immediately use the available credit on these cards to get gas and toiletries.

For the past six years of putting myself through college, I’ve had lists posted in my home by my desk or on the fridge. They would list my fixed expenses, which usually hovered around $1,100, and my income from work, which usually came in between $300 and $1,300 depending on the time of the year. During school, I received grants and a scholarship but I still came out with $50,000 in debt, a chunk of that due to student loans.

Federal poverty data released in September show I’m not alone as I juggle to make ends meet. While the unemployment rate is dropping, and parts of the economy show signs of improvement, not everyone is benefiting. According to the latest data, I am one of 46.7 million Americans who live in poverty. Factoring in the government assistance we receive for food, housing, health insurance, and child support, my total annual income hovers around $20,000. The current federal poverty level for a family of four is almost $24,000.

Over the last year, I’ve struggled to launch a freelance writing career while caring for my 8-year-old and 15-month-old daughters, and the dog we somehow acquired from the local shelter. Finding full-time work is difficult when you can’t afford daycare. And when money is so tight, even the smallest of wrenches thrown in the sputtering machine can set me back for months.

A wrench can be something as simple as my daughter’s after-school activities. I recently had to tell my older daughter that I didn’t think she could do the Nutcracker try-outs because of the $150 we have to pay upfront, and the make-up and costumes we’d have to pay for. I tried to convince her to do gymnastics again, since the gym gives us a scholarship. These are the conversations I hate the most.

I find myself asking how people in poverty are supposed to work their way out. We work so we won’t need assistance for food or health insurance, but even still, we’re not earning enough to sustain ourselves. Meanwhile, legislators are always looking for ways to pass laws that compromise our eligibility for help. Then there are always the other mishaps of life that can send your ledger spiraling. A broken transmission or a sick child can mean the loss of a hard-earned job.

The possibilities to upend the ledger are endless, real, and exhausting. For most of the last year, I sent my rent check in on time, knowing it wouldn’t be deposited until the 10^th. I needed that extra time for child support payments and paychecks from the end of the previous month to go through in order for the rent check to clear. Paying the bills is like walking on rotted floorboards in your own house; at any moment an unexpected expense will cause you to fall through a hole. What’s worse, I have no back-up. No emergency credit card, no savings, and no family to help us out of a bind.

The recent poverty statistics are evidence that the economy may be improving, but not for those of us struggling the hardest to make ends meet. And every month, the scramble to pay the bills starts all over again.

Funds for Head Start were restored by Congress in 2014, but tensions during recent budget negotiations have left Head Start families bracing themselves once again. The temporary solution reached by Congress would maintain funding at current levels through December 11. But if Congress doesn’t reach an agreement on the budget before then, Head Start programs could be subject to massive sequestration cuts, and vulnerable families may be without access to services.    

Victoria Hilt of Bremerton, WA was homeless and six months pregnant when she turned to Head Start. She describes her family’s experience with the program and the impact sequestration had on her community.

When I was six-months pregnant I left an unsafe living situation and became homeless. I went to my local WIC office, where I received information on prenatal care and nursing and was directed to an Early Head Start program. The WIC office told me the program would help me learn how to best care for myself in order to have a safe pregnancy and prepare to be my child’s first teacher. In the end, Early Head Start and Head Start would do that for me and so much more.

Since birth, my daughter, now age four, has grown up in the Head Start buildings with exposure to the same staff over that time period. The program has taught me about many aspects of healthy child development—from routine visits with the pediatrician and dentists, to positive father-daughter relationships, to social-emotional and cognitive development. My daughter and I have learned not only in the classroom, but also through home visits, parent-child activities, policy council meetings, board meetings, and everyday interactions with staff. Early Head Start also connected me to the Kitsap Community Resources Housing Solutions Center, where I was able to find temporary housing and, ultimately, the home where my daughter and I have now lived for four years.

I’m hardly alone. Throughout the nation, Head Start and Early Head Start are helping struggling families—and the communities where they live—build a better future.

When sequestration hit my hometown of Bremerton, Washington, Head Start had to cut the number of slots available for children. Many of these families had no other options for high quality care. The staff also took a cut to their benefits in order to maintain the high quality of services provided to the families who were still able to attend. These cuts disrupted the continuity of care for the children. Some “non-essential” personnel such as kitchen aids and training aids were let go. Other employees were asked to take on more tasks without a pay increase. Job insecurity made some staff members seek employment elsewhere—who could blame them? Federally-funded jobs were on shaky ground to say the least. The agency has now reduced staff down to the bare bones needed to meet the existing performance standards. If the sequester hits again, the program will have no other option than to further reduce the number of slots available. This bad policy is a disservice to the future of our community and many others: When a family’s foundation or a community’s assets are weakened or cut, progress is slowed or even halted.

I can’t even imagine where my daughter and I would be had we not had this incredible resource available to us.

Prior to Head Start, I was struggling to find my voice and my direction—homeless, pregnant, and sometimes hopeless. Through the program, I not only found a home, but I also attended finance classes and learned how to provide for my family on a budget. I learned the importance of self-care, and how this sets an example for my daughter. Using the skills we learned through the program, I am successfully co-parenting with my daughter’s father. Engaging in Head Start has also reignited my passion for learning, helping others, and advocating for policies that help people build a better life just like I have. I am back in school, working on completing a degree in political science so that I can pursue a career in grant and policy writing. I’m very involved in early learning and welfare policy in my community, and am interested in perhaps running for elected office someday so that I may continue contributing to my community in a positive, powerful way.

But that’s down the road. Right now I’m concerned about this: Head Start might not be available to me and my daughter and too many other families if Congress doesn’t act soon. If my daughter can’t attend Head Start, I worry that she will fall behind developmentally, and that I will not have a high quality program to send her to while I pursue my educational and employment goals and forge a path toward financial independence.

Head Start is crucial to families and communities that are most at-risk. Take it away, and you are simply making a life on the brink more precarious.

In anticipation of the Pope’s arrival in Philadelphia, TalkPoverty visited with Tianna Gaines-Turner—a member of Witnesses to Hunger and a leader in the anti-poverty movement—to talk about what the fight against poverty looks like through her eyes.

This is what she had to say.

I am a devout Catholic so I will want to talk about religion. And there are other issues near and dear to me such as immigration and worker’s rights. But since my time with the Pope will be brief, I will focus on one issue—poverty.  Pope Francis is a champion of the poor, and this is a subject I know well. I am among the one million people in New Jersey living in poverty.

For more than a decade, I have worked as a cabin cleaner at Newark Liberty International Airport. I can barely afford to pay the rent for a modest apartment I share with a roommate in Newark, much less buy a ticket to fly on any of the airplanes I clean every day. Meanwhile, airline profits and CEO pay are soaring.

As a Catholic, I believe that “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” I know that we need to fight for just wages. So even after working a night shift of labor-intensive work, with aches and pains in my body, I’ve participated in marches and rallies with my union brothers and sisters. I also testify regularly at public meetings to call on NY/NJ Port Authority officials to follow through on their promise to raise the wage. We are still waiting. In the meantime, airport workers must work two or even three jobs to pay the bills because the $10.10 per hour we earn still leaves us below the federal poverty level for a family of four. And it’s not just airport workers—it’s fast-food workers, retail workers, and home care workers. That’s why the Fight for $15 movement has inspired so many of us to stand and fight together. Because “those who mourn, will be comforted.”

On the train, I am wearing a beautiful traditional dress from Peru, my native country. This dress reminds of me of that bittersweet moment when, tearfully, I said goodbye to my family and friends so that I could come to America and give my five children a better life. I will tell the Pope about this arduous journey and how my faith has carried me through difficult times—times when I went without food so my children could eat. I will tell him that despite hunger pains, faith has nourished my heart and soul. My faith in God gives me the strength to carry on and fight not just for myself, but for all low-wage workers who clock-in and out of work every day but still don’t earn enough to make ends meet. As the Pope said, “the poor shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of money.”

“Poverty in the world is a scandal,” Pope Francis said. “In a world where there is so much wealth, so many resources to feed everyone, it is unfathomable that there are so many hungry children, that there are so many children without an education, so many poor persons. Poverty today is a cry.”

Does the Port Authority hear our cries? Does America?

I’m one of those Americans who committed a crime and have a criminal conviction. At one point, I was just like the two-thirds of people who are released from prison or jail only to commit a crime again, be rearrested and convicted.

I know some people may say that I deserve to live in poverty because of my mistakes. But they don’t know my story. They don’t know that I was born to an abusive father and a mother with severe mental illness; or that I was given narcotics as a young child by a relative who was supposed to care for me, but instead molested me and sold my pictures through a child pornography ring. They don’t know that by the time I was 12, I was on the streets, on my way to a life of crime and addiction, and—with no adult to care for me or advocate for me—I was in and out of the juvenile justice system, never receiving the mental health care I needed.

Truth is, I don’t care if people know these things about me or not, because I love myself now and that is what matters. But I do care that people have another chance after their arrest or conviction.

I’m on the right track now, doing right by myself, my god, my family and my community. One of the ways I’m giving back to my community is by working to create an economy that includes me and others who have served our time and are following the rules of probation or parole.  A study released by the Vera Institute of Justice found that states across the country are giving people like me a second chance not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it will reduce crime and prison costs by preventing recidivism.

One obstacle to opportunity that many states are addressing is the lifetime ban on receiving public benefits and job assistance through Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for people who have a prior drug-related felony conviction. Research has shown that this policy increases recidivism and crime and is also harmful to children as well as adults who are trying to start over.  In addition to causing hunger and hardship, it can also prevent people from getting the mental health or substance abuse treatment they need, as many of these programs rely on public assistance funding to pay individuals’ room and board. Repeal of this harmful policy has been supported by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and is included in the REDEEM Act, bipartisan legislation co-sponsored by U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul.

Federal law already allows states to waive or modify the ban, and many have done so. For example, this April, California lifted the lifetime ban on TANF and SNAP so that people with a felony drug conviction who are complying with their probation or parole are now eligible for nutrition assistance, income support, and job training. Approximately 6,000 families in the state now experience hunger less often, have access to job training and employment services, and their children are no longer denied child care. For me, the biggest change is the child care help that I am able to receive for the first time. After my release and getting sober, it was hard to build a new life with my son when he was denied childcare because of my conviction. Not only was it hard for me to find work—he missed out on the great opportunities offered through childcare programs.

In June, Texas modified its lifetime ban so that people with a felony drug conviction are now eligible for SNAP (although a parole violation would lead to a “two-year disqualification”, and a second felony drug conviction would result in a lifetime ban).  Last year, Missourians took similar action so that people with felony drug convictions are able to receive nutrition assistance while participating in substance abuse treatment, as long as they are following the rules of probation or parole.  While fourteen states including California have opted out of the lifetime ban entirely, two-thirds of states continue to enforce the ban—or a modified version of it, as in Texas and Missouri.

In my opinion, no one should go hungry for a crime that they have served time for, especially if they are following the rules now. I’ve gone hungry and it is an experience no human should have to go through—especially not in America, since we have the resources to prevent hunger. Being hungry also doesn’t help people who have had an addiction stay straight, or stay away from crime.

This is why I have worked with a whole bunch of people and organizations over the past couple of years to end this unfair and unsafe lifetime ban on assistance. It isn’t easy telling my story to others, but it has made a difference. Sometimes I forget how messed up my childhood was and how far I’ve come, but I will never forget this harmful policy, how it made me feel, and how it made me feel to end it.

So, how did I end up homeless? I keep wondering where I went wrong.

In December 2011, I had my first seizure. On top of that, I was having marital problems and losing clients left and right due to the bad economy. Over the next few months, I averaged 2 to 3 seizures a week and was in and out of the hospital. My wife split somewhere around that time. My businesses fell apart while I wasn’t there to run them, and I spent all my savings trying to hang on instead of cutting my losses and saving what I could. By the time I got evicted, I couldn’t even afford a storage unit. I left my house with what I could fit in a red wagon and a suitcase.

I managed to get a job as a maintenance man at the Maui Sunset, a timeshare condo complex, but I was still having seizures. My doctor was convinced that they were caused by heavy metal toxicity (due to a bullet that has been in my leg for twenty years), and he put me through chelation therapy twice a week for three months. But due to the horrible side effects, I wasn’t able to maintain my job. Shortly after that, I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy (heart disease) and I was told that without a transplant I had two years.

Let’s face it – the chances for a homeless man with epilepsy getting on the donor list are pretty slim. My seizures are now followed by 12 hours of sight loss. And I had to wonder – is this what it comes down to? I die alone, on the streets? Nothing to leave behind? Very few people to grieve my passing?

In a weird moment of clarity that you get when you have nothing else to lose, I decided I wanted to take a bucket list tour of the United States with my little dog Savannah to see and do all of the things that I have always wanted to do.

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First off, I had heard of this place in Eugene, Oregon called Opportunity Village—tiny homes for the homeless. It was touted as the city’s unique approach to solving the homeless problem. Originally I thought that I would make that a stop on my trip, pick up the plans, and bring them back to Maui to start a village there. But when I got there my impression was that it was a group of homeless people that kept taking over city property until the city just let them stay. No plans, and nothing to bring back to Maui.

Savannah and I have been on the road for more than a year now. We left Maui on June 19, 2014. We have visited just about all of the things on my bucket list: Disneyland, the Smithsonian museums in D.C. (still missing the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and the National Postal Museum), and Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank, New Jersey. I’m also a huge fan of the show Comic Book Men, and I got to spend time with the stars.

Right now, we are in Washington D.C. We have been harassing Senate staffers in order to find a Senator who will sponsor legislation for a national Homeless Bill of Rights but it’s just really hard to do without an address. I now have cards from the offices of all one hundred Senators. I even put them in alphabetical order by state. Since Rhode Island was the first state to pass a Homeless Bill of Rights, I have been able to get some response from Senator Jack Reed’s staff.

As time passes, I look more and more like just another “crazy homeless guy,” and who knows, maybe I am just another crazy homeless guy. I feel like no one is listening or taking me seriously. I have no resources or backing of any kind, and these people deal with the powerful and wealthy all day long. I wish this were like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” But it feels more like Oliver Twist saying, “Please sir, may I have some rights?”

Ten years ago at the age of 37, Gerald Anderson was evacuated to D.C. after rescuing victims during the flooding in New Orleans. Busses took him and other Katrina victims from the airport to the D.C. Armory and then moved him from one hotel to another. Finally, he was told to leave.

With no place to stay, he moved in with one of his homegirls from New Orleans. His friends were offered apartments, but because of his criminal record, no one would rent to him. He put up signs and did odd jobs to earn money. He also sold drugs, and before long he was back to the cycle of drugs, prison, and homelessness.

Meanwhile, his whole family was in Texas and with the help of the Internet, he was able to find and contact his mother, siblings, and nephews shortly after arriving in D.C. Yet he had no means to visit.

Everything began to change when he learned he could write for and sell Street Sense. He was so beloved by his customers that in 2013 they pooled airline miles to send him back to New Orleans to visit, eight years after Katrina.

But six months later, when he missed two visits to his parole officer, and hence two urine tests, he had to appear in court. His urine tested positive for drugs. The judge could have sent him back to prison; instead she sentenced him to a drug treatment program.

That was in April 2014. Within three months Anderson moved to a recovery home in Arlington, Virginia and has been drug-free ever since. As soon as he received copies of his book, he went right over to the courthouse to visit the judge and sign a copy for her.

Anderson has built a new family in D.C.—his Street Sense customers—and he plans to remain living in the area. In the future he plans to mentor young men, so that they won’t make the mistakes he made.

~Susan Orlins

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It was the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.

While my three friends and I were paddling in a boat that we’d found at an evacuated house in the rich folks’ part of town, we saw another friend Calio screaming for help. His girlfriend, Michelle, was in labor inside their house.

The flooding was so high that there was no way to get her out. So we fought the waves to get tools and a ladder into the living room from a shed out back. And then—with Michelle screaming and writhing the whole time—we pounded at the ceiling until, finally, we broke through to the sky. Calio climbed the ladder and poked his head and arms above the roof. He waved a white sheet as we held tight to the base of the ladder and prayed for help.

Meanwhile, the military had been dropping boxes containing food and water that hit with big splashes and then floated. Inside the boxes we found hot packs of Salisbury steak, peas, mashed potatoes, and Snickers.

I went upstairs to feed Michelle’s two boys, who were eight and twelve. They were huddled together wide-eyed on the bed they shared.

They wanted to know, “What’s happening?”

“The water gonna come in here?”

“Mama gonna be okay?”

I told them, “Mama be fine. Soon y’all have a new baby.”

Like the rest of us, they relieved themselves in a bucket, which we emptied into plastic bags.

After about forty minutes of wondering whether help would ever come, we heard a whirring sound from a helicopter circling right above that made the whole house vibrate.

And then we heard Calio talking to someone.

He yelled down that he’d gotten a helicopter’s attention.

“Tell them to come down quick!” I called.

We heard the brrrrrm of the helicopter getting louder. Calio came down the ladder, and told us, “The helicopter man say move our ladder. They gonna get in here. Now!”

We looked up and saw the guy stepping down this wiggly ladder that was attached to the helicopter, which was hovering above the roof.

Three more guys came down. One asked, “Man, why didn’t she leave?”

They told Michelle to stay calm, to open her legs, to breathe. She was screaming and crying. I could hardly bear to watch.

Next we knew, a slimy infant was oozing out between her legs. A medic stroked the little body, and a squeaky whaaa whaaa came out of its tiny mouth.

Maybe it was an hour later that they put the baby in a sack—like a duffle bag—and hauled him up their ladder and through the roof. One of the guys wrapped Michelle in a big sling and towed her up next to be with her new son and escape the nightmare below.

Calio stayed with us. We tried to get him to go. The helicopter man asked him, “You sure you don’t want to come?”

He answered, “I’m just gonna stay. I know you gonna look after my family.” They had already taken Michelle’s other two boys up in sacks, and they offered to take the rest of us. But I replied, “No can do buddy.”

I still wasn’t believing it. I couldn’t imagine the storm getting any more intense, even though the helicopter man said, “I don’t know why y’all staying here. Ten hours from now it’s gonna hit. I’m telling y’all, get outta here!”

I said, “If it do hit, I know how to survive it. I survived this far. I’m not leaving my hometown.” I thought I was a smartie.

By the time I realized I should have listened, it was too late. I said to my boys, “I’m tellin’ you man, we better get back to the projects where it’s higher ground. We shoulda gone on that helicopter.”

Outside, toppled trees and tangled wires made it impossible to paddle, so we pushed the boat. I pointed to some cats that were mewing on rooftops and shouted, “They got more sense than we got!”

Along the way, we met a man whose roof had fallen in; he told us they were sleeping in the bathtub.  Another family huddled on their porch in prayer. I prayed too, with every move I made.

Beside us, dogs were trying to get help, just like us humans. Some had the mange with scabs and patches of missing fur. They were paddling like crazy, fighting the currents for their lives. Lifeless bloated bodies of little puppies floated by on top of the chin-high water.

That we were in the midst of a terrifying event was further made real by signs scrawled on houses: Please help us! People Dog Cat . . . Need food! . . . GRANDMA INSIDE NEEDS DIALYSIS! . . . Bush get down here right now!

You could hear screams of people trapped in their homes. That’s when I began thinking about those I had left behind when I was released from Orleans Parish Prison only a few weeks earlier. If I were still in a cell, what would be happening to me?

And with this thing getting rougher by the minute, I didn’t even want to imagine what guys were going through in “the hole,” an underground cell where you were sent for fighting or other misbehavior. In addition to unruly inmates, the hole was infested with rats running all over the place. Being below ground, it would surely get flooded.

I thought about my friend Smiley, who was always getting into fights. He’s probably in the hole right now, I thought.

And I thought about friends I had played cards and dominoes with. I even thought about a few deputies I was cool with that I used to talk to at night about the street and what I would do if I beat the charge.

But now I worried that deputies would go home to their families and I wondered what would become of those left locked in their cells. It wasn’t until after the storm that I read accounts about deputies abandoning inmates, who were locked up without food and water. I heard that some prisoners knew how to file down toothbrushes and bush combs to make them into keys, which they used to pop the locks. Some, however, stayed behind trying to help others.

There was nothing anyone could do to rescue those behind steel doors—the guys in solitary. Several inmates suffered from conditions like diabetes and epilepsy and didn’t have their medication. Some never made it out.

Many of the prisoners who were left in the rising sewage waters without food or water were teenagers; many were being held for minor violations, and some had not even been charged. But compared to my battle with Katrina, my time in prison was sweet like Mama’s pecan pie.

Finally we got the boat back to the projects. We told every family that in less than ten hours Katrina would hit. The helicopter rescuers had told us, “When it hits, crouch down on the floor.” I thought this must be what it’s like in a plane that’s about to crash.

Yet I continued to question, Could this storm really get any worse? In ten hours, I would find out that so far, I had seen only the beginning.

My book tells the whole story about all the rescues I did with my homeboys and how we looked after folks in the projects.

After Katrina, I would sit in on myself; it was like I gave up. I got sent to prison for selling drugs and after being released I was homeless. I would pay to sleep on people’s floors. One guy locked me out and stole my clothes.

But now selling Street Sense and writing my stories are like big great activities to me. It rocks my body. It’s like club music, hip-hop, go-go – that’s how this process makes me feel.

Before, I didn’t know there was another way. It wasn’t until the judge sentenced me to drug treatment and I did so well, that I got a key to my own place, a recovery home in Virginia, where I live with nine other men.

Now, I know I’ve got somewhere to go, something to do.

I became homeless in 2009 and out of necessity learned how to make the services administered through the Ocean County New Jersey Board of Social Services work for me. They included housing assistance provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), food assistance (SNAP) through the US Department of Agriculture, and cash assistance through the General Assistance program made available by the State of New Jersey.

I am now in permanent Federal Affordable Housing and no longer need social services myself. So I try to use my own experience to help people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless get the social services they need. Currently, Emergency Housing Assistance offered through the Ocean County Board of Social Services is not easy to qualify for. The bureaucratic process is difficult to comprehend, and negotiating through it when you are facing housing insecurity and are stressed out is exceedingly difficult.

For example, I was contacted by members of a local church in my community after they had encountered a young man who was homeless hanging out in a shopping mall. They had given him some new clothing, and now wanted to arrange for me to meet with him because I have experience in homeless outreach, particularly in Ocean County.

In meeting with the young man, it was immediately clear to me that he was in serious trouble, mentally and emotionally. He could not maintain eye contact, tell me what he did that day, or articulate any plans he had for getting out of his present situation. He was sleeping in the wooded areas at night where he couldn’t be seen, and then wandering around during the day trying not to be seen. In my experience, this isolation is a recipe for serious psychological and emotional damage.

I asked him if he wanted a room in a motel or shelter for the night. He enthusiastically said yes.

I called a 3-digit number for an Ocean County Board of Social Services’ special response unit that is set up to address emergency situations (although the County’s website says, “Funding is limited so assistance is not always available”) . They have teams available to quickly come and pick up people who are homeless, give them shelter, and take them to a social services office in their county the next day to see if they qualify for more permanent assistance.

I called them, but they wanted to talk with the young man, not me.

They ended up turning him down because he told them the truth: he’d been homeless for four months. Special Response “responded” by saying that they only take people who have been homeless for two weeks or less.

So I arranged to pick him up the next day where he was living in the woods and take him to the Ocean County Social Services office myself. There, he applied and qualified for SNAP and General Assistance, which then allowed him to apply for Emergency Housing Assistance.

In order to qualify for Emergency Housing Assistance, however, he was also required to appear once a week at the Ocean County One-Stop Career Center, located on another side of town and outside the reach of public transportation; and a substance abuse counselor who was also located far from the social services office.

I knew that he—and others like him who are chronically homeless—often can’t meet these requirements and therefore don’t receive the emergency housing they desperately need.

This is why we need Housing First.

Housing First uses a simple model that has been proven to work: it first provides people with housing, and then provides supportive wraparound services in mental and physical health, substance abuse, education, and employment. Housing First apartments are scattered throughout a community which helps formerly homeless reintegrate into their communities. Perhaps the most significant innovation is that Housing First doesn’t put preconditions on eligibility. Other approaches exclude people from receiving housing assistance because they suffer from mental illness, including addiction. Finally, Housing First saves taxpayer money over the long haul, reducing costs that are otherwise incurred by the public for stays at shelters, in jail cells, and in hospital emergency rooms.

After our visit to social services, I discussed the young man’s situation with others in my homeless outreach network. We agreed that the best available alternative for him was to enter a 10-day shelter provided by a local faith-based group. From there he would be able to transition into an in-patient behavioral rehabilitation center that would—upon successful completion of their program—hopefully guide him into permanent housing.

The question all of this begs is this: since only one in four low-income renter households receives federal rental assistance—and a lack of affordable housing is a leading cause of homelessness—shouldn’t we be devoting a larger share of our affordable housing dollars towards a nationwide, Housing First model?

It’s the right thing to do and it saves money. What the hell are we waiting for?

Millions of American families are working multiple jobs to make ends meet but are still living paycheck to paycheck.

Millions more who are undocumented can’t plan for their futures because they fear la migra (the immigration police) will haul them and their loved ones away at any time.

And still others, who have served often excessive sentences for past transgressions struggle to find work when they are released from prison.

In total, about 106 million people live on the brink, fighting to overcome the barriers to success that keep them living in marginalized communities or in such chaos that financial stability is out of reach.

Yet what are the chances that their struggles will be addressed in any meaningful way during the first Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News on Thursday?

What are the chances the Fox News moderators will ask candidates about their agenda to address the needs of neighborhoods facing high unemployment and low wages?

What is the likelihood that the candidates will be asked to outline plans to improve the lives of the working families who live in forgotten communities where there is little investment in infrastructure and jobs?

If the most recent presidential elections are any indication, the chances that these issues will be raised are slim to none. While there was plenty of rhetoric about the dwindling middle class, the last presidential election was noticeably devoid of any references to Americans living in poverty. In fact, The Nation reported that from 2008 to 2012, at least five consecutive presidential or vice presidential debates went without a single question about poverty.

This first debate of the 2016 election is an opportunity for the leading Republican candidates to go on the record about the issues that matter most to working families.

So in an effort to help the candidates and the Fox team find their way, here’s a roadmap. We asked four Americans struggling to make ends meet about what they want to hear on Thursday:

Rachael Collyer, 22, Cleveland Heights, Ohio:

Rachael graduated from The Ohio State University with a major in Spanish and English. She works as a bartender with a fluctuating income that on a good day nets up to $14 an hour and on soft days earns her the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

She also has almost $26,000 in student loan debt.

Rachael can’t afford her own apartment, so after she graduated, she moved back home with her parents in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She’s a volunteer organizer now for the Ohio Student Association because mounting debt is holding too many students and their families back. The state has decreased its college grants to students, she says, even though more than half of all jobs in Ohio will require a college education by 2020. It is no wonder then that about 68% of Ohio’s college graduates have an average of $29,000 in debt.

“We are like frogs in boiling water,” she says. “College debt has been going up and going up and suddenly we’ve reached this point where we yell, ‘How did this happen?’ “

Rachael wants the Fox News moderators to ask the candidates: Given the cost of attending college, most students work while they are in school. And, in Ohio, if a student works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job, they won’t earn enough to cover the average cost of attending Ohio State. How do you propose addressing the wage needs of recent college graduates and current students so that paying for their college education is not a barrier to success?

Duane Edwards, 34, Fredericksburg, VA:

Duane’s life changed drastically when he was 14 years old. His father, an Army veteran, was killed in a car crash, leaving behind a wife and three children. At that moment, Duane told himself he had to find a way to earn money so he wouldn’t be a burden on his mother. So he secretly began selling marijuana.

He was eventually caught on a drug charge and sentenced to community-based probation. His mother tried hard to keep him straight, but she had to work to maintain the family and he took advantage of her absence. He says there were few mentors or teachers who looked at him and saw any potential. Without a job and no prospects, Duane eventually landed in prison and served a three-year sentence.

“Being incarcerated made me grow up,” he says. While behind bars, he earned an associate’s degree in childhood education, and he tutored other inmates who were trying to get their GEDs. He wanted to make good on his life when he got out.

So when he was released in December 2006, he had high hopes that he would turn around the troubled life he once lived. But it was dependent on him finding work. In the first six months alone, he applied to more than 40 jobs. None would hire him because of his record. Since he’s been out, Duane has applied to more than 120 jobs and has received call backs for just 15 of them, with most offering low-wage work washing or loading trucks.

Today, the married father of two girls, who are three and four years old, has a bachelor’s degree in theology and is a pastor at a local church. It’s taken him almost nine years since he got out, but he finally has a full-time job driving a truck, making $14.50 an hour. He says he’s grateful for the job, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet.

“I would like an opportunity at a good job so I can take care of my family,” he says.

He wants to ask the candidates: Given that the school to prison pipeline starts early, particularly for young black men, and there is a decided lack of opportunity for young African Americans, what is your plan to invest in schools in marginalized communities made up primarily of people of color so that the outcomes of the students in those schools are the same as in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods?

Patrice Mack, 45, Euclid, Ohio:

Patrice is the single mother of a 24-year-old daughter and three boys, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old twins. She owns her own home and has a college degree in business administration. Earlier this year, she left a job that paid her so little that her sons were eligible for government health insurance because she couldn’t afford the company’s insurance.

“You can have a degree and still struggle to survive,” she says. “I’m a paycheck away from poverty.”

Patrice is tapping into her retirement savings in order to get by until she finds a job. She is looking for work, but opportunities for good jobs have dwindled. And due to unpredictable, constantly shifting schedules, and a lack of paid leave and paid sick days, many jobs make it impossible to balance work and caregiving responsibilities.

She wants to ask the candidates: The minimum wage is at a level where working families can’t survive unless they work multiple jobs. So how do you propose we do a better job of parenting our children and being there for them, while at the same time earning enough income to provide for our families? And how do you think employers can incorporate paid leave or paid sick days?

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Astrid Silva, 27, Las Vegas, NV:

Astrid grew up most of her life under the tinsel and lights of Las Vegas. As a young person, she was a standout student and graduated at the top of her class in her magnet high school. She’s earned associate degrees in arts and political science and is working on a bachelor’s degree. Astrid could be a poster child for today’s diverse and civic-minded millennial generation.

She’s also an undocumented immigrant.

At the age of four, Astrid rode a tire raft with her mother and crossed the Rio Grande. She wore black patent leather shoes and the “biggest poofiest white dress with purple flowers and a purple sash.” Her mother had wanted her to look pretty when they met her father in the States.

“As a young person, you understand,” she says. “I understood there was something different about us.”

She says their status affected her family in big and small ways. Neither she nor her mother were able to drive because they couldn’t get driver’s licenses. They wouldn’t go to certain areas, or leave Nevada, because they were worried they would get picked up by immigration authorities. And unlike other people in their neighborhood, they couldn’t leave the country and visit Mexico. She remembers the pain and sadness that overwhelmed her family when her grandmother died in 2009. Her father couldn’t leave and see his mother one last time because they feared he wouldn’t be able to return.

Their biggest fear came true in 2011. Her father was arrested and given deportation orders. He’s since been granted a stay, which he has to apply for every year, and Astrid says she doesn’t know how long it will last.

Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for immigration reform. President Obama even mentioned her in a speech where he deplored our “broken” immigration system.

Thanks to an executive order signed by President Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country, Astrid has a stay until 2017.

But she says that too may end after Obama’s term ends.

“I’m trying to figure out how to keep my family together here,” she says. “This is not a political strategy. For us, it’s real.”

Her question for the candidates is: Given that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, what kind of concrete plan do you have for immigration reform? Not one that dismantles what the President has done or that focuses only on border security, but that offers real solutions for issues such as family reunification; the ban on re-entry to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants that spans three to ten years; or the rights of asylum for undocumented immigrants?

When I was preparing to move from seventh to eighth grade, I came home with my list of pre-selected classes—we were tracked and I was on the gifted and talented circuit.  I was able to choose two electives. My mother and I had a horrible relationship that was filled with physical, verbal and emotional violence on her part. On my part, it was fueled by reluctance to just “keep my mouf shut,” as my mother put it. However, once in a while I would play nice with her. On this particular evening she was sitting in her black leather recliner chair—it was a part of a pair, but its partner was in another home with my “no count cheatin’’ stepfather—napping before going to her third job.

“Ma, I needa figa out what Ima take fo’ my ‘lectives next year.”  (This was before I learned to assimilate and forget my first language—that would come a little more than two years later). My mother opened her eyes, sat up and responded, “Take typin’, Cupcake. As long as you kin type you neva gonna be outa job or havta clean no White folks home.” Then she fell asleep. Normally, when I asked her these questions, I was just humoring her. But something happened that evening. I looked at her tired, skinny frame. My eyes lingered on her cracked and peeling hands, and I saw a future that scared the shit out of me. I checked off Typing I and Spanish I.

During high school, I was placed in foster care with well-to-do families. I went to college, and I wanted for nothing financially because the money that used to go to my foster parents became my stipend as a young adult in “Independent Living” until I was 21. However, I had no family to return to because my last foster family left me while I was in my senior year of high school. They moved away to another state and did not take me with them.

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I spent my holidays and summers with my college boyfriend’s family. I worked as a Temp and put my typing and computer skills to use. Whenever I would sign up with a temporary employment agency, they would give a typing test and completely flip out that I was Black and smart and could type over a 100wpm with less than four errors. My mother was right. In my adulthood, I was never out of a job because, when times were hard, I could fall back on my typing skills and do Administrative and Executive Assistant work. I have never cleaned anyone’s house for a living. In fact, there was a time when I was financially solvent enough to hire a housekeeper.

My mother was right until now—Post-Prison. I am now as poor as I was before I went into foster care. I am poorer than I have ever been in my entire adulthood, and I am recently homeless. Prison did not just leave me worse off financially; it caused my mental state to deteriorate to how it was when I was in foster care. Throughout my high school years, I attempted suicide several times. I spent years before my first attempt planning my own death.

While incarcerated, everyday was a battle to live. There, I was sexually bullied and physically attacked on two occasions. In my experience, this is what happens when you report your attackers in prison: the administration arranges for you to be sent to a higher security prison. And when you are attacked or threatened at the higher security prison and you report it, they lock you away in the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU). In the SHU, you spend 23 hours a day in a cell for five days a week and the entire weekend. You get one 15-minute call per month.

When I was not locked in the SHU, I was put on suicide watch. There were times when I was put on suicide watch in retaliation for submitting grievances alleging I was being harassed by an officer. Suicide Watch consists of a big blue quilted gown that is accurately named the “Turtle Suit”; a quilted blanket; a cold, cold cell (so cold my fingertips turned blue); and psychiatric help in which the psychologist (if you are lucky to have one instead of an intern) yells questions about your mental well-being through the steel door. I stopped talking and eating for days at a time. Ultimately this punishment would cause me to become suicidal.

While I was not without my mental health woes pre-prison, my suicidal ideation and anxiety had never approached what I felt in prison. No one can survive that environment without internalizing the daily subjugation of dehumanizing treatment. The threat of violence was always present (from officers and inmates). The trauma from prison has caused my self-worth to deteriorate. I suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, and flashbacks daily.

I am employed very part-time with an organization and they know my story, respect me for who I am, and acknowledge my gifts. Yet on my own, I cannot even get an interview with a temp agency. I cannot pass a background check for housing, and even if I could, my income puts me well below the poverty line and I cannot afford my own place.

Prison does not rehabilitate; that propaganda is a lie. I have been home from prison for almost a year, but I am still not free. Prison has impoverished me financially and mentally, and so I cling to the hope of having a life worth living.

Occupy Wall Street was a great moment in the progressive movement. It did a lot to change the national discussion about poverty and inequality. But to people like me – from a small town in rural Utah – it looked like a bunch of confused, disaffected youth. Progressives understand their own language, why you might lead a group of thousands by consensus. I saw a woman who had named herself Ketchup waving jazz hands on national TV and realized that this movement wasn’t for me or my people.

I watched the Tea Party form – a populist movement as far as most of its participants understood it. My family members are Tea Partiers, waving guns and flags and talking about federal overreach. But to people like me – a center-left libertarian sort – it looked like a bunch of angry Baby Boomers trying to regain their glory days and demanding that those of us in the younger generations continue to pick up the tab for their lifelong profligacy. Keep your government hands off my Medicaid, indeed. That movement wasn’t for me either.

A movement that works has to be apartisan. It has to be pragmatic. It has to avoid divisive social issues – there are plenty of programs we can agree on, plenty of problems we can point out. It doesn’t matter whether a McDonald’s worker agrees with abortion or not, they still deserve a higher wage.

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America’s working classes are pragmatic people. It’s the only way to survive. When a cook loans a cashier ten bucks until payday, nobody’s vetting each other for their ideological purity on drones or gay marriage. It’s just workers helping each other out, because one thing you learn in the service industry is that you’re all in it together.

That’s the ethos that will create a real anti-poverty movement. That’s the coalition that can win.

We need a robust debate in America on social issues. But we do ourselves no favors by essentially splitting our potential support in half before we even get started. Two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck – what if we got them all asking about counterproductive welfare regulations, talking about how ridiculous it is to worry about the spending habits of the lower classes when there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around?

What would happen if two-thirds of America decided that partisanship isn’t working out so well in Washington and started demanding better?

We, all of us who spend our lives worrying about making rent and buying our kids new crayons when the old ones have been crushed into wax dust, need better representation. We need officials to worry about what happens when they ignore us as surely as they worry about their donors.

The truth is, there isn’t a millionaire in the world who could craft a coherent welfare policy. Programs that require you to quit your job to attend job training courses to get benefits, because nobody remembered to write in an exception, or misunderstandings about the differences in generational vs. situational poverty – those exist because the wealthy tried to imagine what poverty must be like. And they guessed wrong.

A strong anti-poverty movement will be led by the people who understand what poverty really is, why it happens, how we could create workable solutions. A strong movement will be made up of the people who are poverty experts because they have lived in poverty.  There is no one leader in this movement; there can’t be. It has to be a broad coalition of strange bedfellows, because there are 45 million people living in poverty in America. That many people can’t look like any one thing.

Political leaders also need to remember that flyover country is the vast majority. Plenty of people live in coastal megacities. But less than 40% of Americans live in a coastal county. That’s a lot of inlanders that are only courted during political campaign season. If we want to build a movement that will last, we need to accept that we’re going to have to talk to people like me – people who are disaffected by what works in cosmopolitan cities, people who are actively repelled by those tactics.

We will win when finding solutions to poverty becomes more important to us than any other issue, when we stop condescending to people who hold different beliefs and values and start recognizing that just like a restaurant crew, we’re all in this together.

I think most people will understand that people have firm opinions on things. But strategically speaking, I think it’s a good thing if you can say, for example, that people on either side of a fight as divisive as reproductive healthcare access can agree on raising wages. For now, I want to be able to demand fair treatment at work, where my political and social values are largely irrelevant. I want proper safety equipment. I want to be able to file workers’ comp without fear of retaliation. I want paid sick leave and maternity leave and a schedule that I can count on two weeks in advance. I want a wage that reflects the work I put in.

Those things, you can build a coalition around. And when we put the workers in charge of their own destinies, we’ll find that we can win.

She taught me that you have to work hard for what you need. By age 10, I was pumping gas at a local gas station to make extra money. At 14, I was working as a camp counselor during the summer. At 16, I got a job at Burger King. It was important to my mother that I understood what it was like to work to make money because we had so little of it.

While I was at Burger King, I met other employees, mostly women, who were working there to provide for their children. They too had latch key kids who were instructed to come home, have a snack, and work on homework until their mother came home. While the pay wasn’t that much, it was a job for them. And these mothers also subscribed to the notion that you have to work hard for what you need.

When I think of fixing our broken economy, I recall those mothers, my mother—women who work hard doing whatever they can to provide for their families. They work low paying jobs while also maintaining a household and planning for their own future and the future of their children. So when I attended the “Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All” campaign launch in Washington, D.C., I had these mothers on my mind.

“Making a major investment in areas of concentrated poverty, largely African-American and Latino communities, is necessary to create a level playing field after generations of deliberate disinvestment,” said Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change. He opened the event by talking about the current state of our economy and stressing the need to ensure working people can support their families.

It’s been a long time since I lived in that trailer in Fuquay-Varina. Now I live in Durham where Black and Latino people in my community have long sought affordable housing and better jobs. So I understood when Gloria Walton, President and CEO of Strategic Concepts in Organizing & Policy Education (SCOPE) stated that a shift to “putting families first” meant “that everyone has an opportunity for a good-paying job, jobs that are safe and sustainable, with career paths that can support a family, particularly those that suffer from structural racism and discrimination.”

To achieve this goal, we must invest and empower the communities most impacted, while working one-on-one to get individuals involved in building a movement to change their lives and situations. Indeed, Walton noted, “The people most impacted – people struggling every day trying to make ends meet – have to be at the center of solutions, so local organizing and campaigns are at the heart of building larger movements and transformative victories.”

I remember when organizers I had learned from and fought beside in Durham joined with residents of Lincoln Apartments to fight eviction and bring attention to the lack of options for low-income families in our city. They canvassed residents to talk with them about their concerns, and then met with them individually to train them and support them as they stood up and spoke out at meetings with city officials. Those residents included mothers who worked in retail, at fast food restaurants, or as nursing assistants, making just above minimum wage.

I am thankful for my upbringing. My mother was a model of will and determination. She sometimes apologizes for the challenges we faced, but I let her know there is no reason to apologize. I am grateful for everything she did. She was the first person I called when I got back home because I wanted to let her know that there are people who are dedicated to fighting for change – fighting so that families across the country can be unapologetic in raising their children and living better lives.

Rasheen Aldridge, a young organizer with Missouri Jobs With Justice in St. Louis, spelled it out beautifully when he said our communities are facing “issues that cannot wait no longer. Issues that need to be acted on right now because these are lives that are at stake. These are families that need to be fed; these are people who are asking themselves if it is going to be heat, or electric, or is it going to be food?”

The Unites States Interagency Counsel on Homelessness provides funding to states for programs designed to create permanent housing situations for individuals and families in danger of becoming homeless. All of these programs are administered by local Boards of Social Services—often simply called “social services.” Where I live in Ocean County, New Jersey, the Board provides a motel room for emergency housing through a program called Special Response. Motel owners located on the Jersey Shore subsidize their incomes during the winter months by taking in clients of social services through this program.

So I was in a motel room in a seasonally deserted town I was unfamiliar with and told that I have three months to find permanent housing. I was given a W-9 tax form to present to potential landlords. The W-9 would allow the local housing agency to pay landlords as vendors of the state. However, I soon found out that most apartment owners wouldn’t take me in for three purported reasons: One, the owners claimed that if they took me in then they would be legally obligated to take in any other client that social services sent their way; two, they said that the local Housing Office at social services was unreliable and took forever to pay rents; and three, as I would soon learn myself, they said that the Housing Office was notorious for arbitrarily changing its policy regarding housing assistance.

Most people in a situation like I was in give up and return to whatever it is they were trying to get away from – abusive spouses, dysfunctional families, drug-and crime-infested neighborhoods. And then there are those – such as the survivors of natural disasters, and people who lost jobs and had homes foreclosed during the Great Recession, and veterans who were denied benefits – who have no place to return to and all too frequently end up wandering the streets during the day and setting up tents on public land at night. Because these people are no longer enrolled in any housing program, this is a statistical ‘success’ to local officials administering the program, even as the number of homeless people rises. This cynical manipulation of statistics is a betrayal of the public trust given to the local Board of Social Services to provide financial and housing assistance to members of their communities who need it.

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While I was still in my home and recovering from the loss of my mother, I became a member of a small nondenominational church that administered a community homeless outreach program. Local apartment owners utilized the outreach as a way of ‘screening’ prospective renters. They were willing to rent to people who had rent subsidies, but first they wanted to be assured that they are not opening their doors to former rent truants, violent criminals, drug users, or other problematic tenants.

That’s how I secured ‘permanent’ housing within three months. I’m not sure what I would have done without the involvement of this grassroots program that helped me navigate my local housing office’s byzantine process.

But then I received a letter last year informing me that the “permanent” housing program I was in was being terminated by The Board of Social Services in Ocean County. No explanation was given; no recourse offered. Trying to find alternatives before I became homeless, I applied to several federal affordable housing facilities. Miraculously, it seemed, just a few days after being told I no longer had an affordable, permanent place to live, I received a letter informing me that an affordable housing unit was available.

People assume that my local social services board coordinated this move. They didn’t. If you are fortunate enough to find a case worker who assists you with obtaining Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and other basic necessities, as I was, they are still powerless to influence the outcome of your ‘permanent’ housing situation. These types of practices are not only detrimental to the morale of the clients of social services, but to its workforce as well.

We need the people who administer social services at the state and local levels to do a better job of providing programs and policies that work in people’s lives.

When we hear from people who have experienced poverty, we get better policy. For example, no one who has lived in acute financial distress would have ever come up with a solution as inane as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Can you imagine? “Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll make the process of obtaining assistance more complicated and, in the end, provide fewer people with less assistance for a shorter period of time!” Sure, people flew off “the rolls” – and right into the woods, onto subway platforms and, penultimately, into hospital emergency rooms. So many have had their lives cut short as a result of homelessness.

Someone recently asked me what my first priority would be for policy reform, and this is it: lobby to get a member of the community who has experienced programs such as Emergency Housing Assistance, SNAP, or TANF, onto the Local and State Boards of Social Services. This, I feel, is the only way we can begin to get administrators to better understand the needs of their ‘clients’, and to be held more accountable for their policies and actions.

What we need is a movement that empowers individuals who have experienced acute financial distress with the political wherewithal they need to stand on their own. We’ve done this successfully with immigration and marriage equality, why not poverty?

Good morning, my name is Virgil Pack, I’m 45-years-old and I live in Richmond, Virginia. I’m a father of two kids—a daughter and a son. My daughter’s name is Ashleigh, she’s 21 and attending UDC in her junior year. My son’s name is Sean, he’s 13 and lives in Albany, NY.

I have worked in the restaurant industry for most of my life. I have three jobs and work about 65 hours a week but every month is a struggle to make ends meet. I’m a crew trainer for Wendy’s where I make $7.75 an hour; I’m a shift manager at Sonic’s Drive-In where I make $11.00 an hour and unfortunately they’re cutting my hours; and for my third job, I’m a crewmember at Moe’s Southwest Grill where I make $7.75 an hour.

This means that at the end of each month, I have $915 to pay for rent, utilities, and more. I pay child support for my son, Sean, which is payroll deducted from Wendy’s.  I also help my daughter Ashleigh with college.  I have absolutely no benefits at any of my jobs—no health insurance, no paid sick leave.  I have 2 years of college under my belt and I used to run my own business, but in this economy, this is the only work I can find. God forbid I get seriously ill or injured, I’d probably be homeless.

Like the federal minimum wage, Virginia’s minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, which you can see is just simply not a livable wage. And to make low and inadequate wages even worse, the lack of benefits makes it that much harder to get by: without paid sick days or paid leave, I’m forced to choose between going to work sick or losing needed income to support my family, or possibly even losing my job, and if there’s a family emergency I have to choose between the same impossible choices.

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However, I am excited to say that I have an appointment with a navigator on Thursday of this week to enroll in a health insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act. The idea that I will shortly have health insurance is such a huge weight off my shoulders and an absolute blessing for me and my family.  However, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Without higher wages and better quality jobs, I’ll still be running in place.

In Virginia, raising the wage would affect over 744,000 workers, which is more than 20 percent of the workforce.  And many people like me, work so hard, yet with wages so low and no paid leave or other benefits, we’re stuck or falling behind. Not only would raising the wage enable families like mine to put more food on the table and know that we can pay rent each month, it would make us feel appreciated and respected as workers.

I would like to take the time to say that I’m not up here for sympathy but I would like for people to see that there are Americans trying to live right and would like a fair chance at the American dream, which to me is family and prosperity….

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this opportunity.

SNAP has helped to keep food on the table and in the fridges of families for five decades. It is also a program that helps keep kids and families healthy in times of need.  Yet, despite its success, SNAP often faces political attacks that result in cuts to its funding.

One significant cut occurred almost a year ago on November 1, 2013. Every family participating in SNAP saw their benefits reduced, meaning less food and fewer meals.  The impact of this and other cuts helps to show the importance of SNAP and demonstrates why it should be strengthened and celebrated instead of demonized and diminished.

It is critical that we learn and share more about SNAP—what it really does for families and why it is so important to millions of Americans.  We need to help people understand that the program is a strong anti-poverty measure that helps families thrive.

That’s why on Thursday, October 30 from 2:00-4:00 ET, the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, Witnesses to Hunger, and over 40 other organizations will tweet and post about SNAP using #snap4SNAP.  We will post pictures, information, and stories about SNAP, and we hope you will join us.

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Members of Witnesses to Hunger are kicking off the #snap4SNAP campaign today at TalkPoverty with these reflections on the role of SNAP in their lives:

“My youngest daughter, Prayer, is 5 years old and has severe food allergies – to wheat, eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts. To keep her healthy and safe I need to buy her food from specialty stores, which costs a lot of money. With the cuts to SNAP, it has been even more of a struggle to make sure she gets the food she needs. And in that process, I’ve had to make tough choices, taking away some of the money I allot for food for my other daughter in order to feed Prayer. Taking food away from one mouth to try to feed the other – it’s terrible. And if I can’t get the proper nutrition, I’m of no good to either one of my daughters.”

Juell Frazier, Witnesses to Hunger, Boston

Juell is the mother of two girls. She graduated from medical assistance school, and is working on getting a Bachelor’s degree in human services. Juell wants to see changes in Boston, including holding landlords responsible and creating clean and safe environments for families.

“Families depend on SNAP every month. Any cuts to SNAP were just crazy – they make things harder for families who are already struggling.”

Tiffany Ross, Witnesses to Hunger, Philadelphia

Tiffany is the mother of one daughter, Zaniyah. Zaniyah’s father, Troy, was shot and killed while Tiffany was still pregnant. Tiffany was living in a homeless shelter for young mothers, and is now in an apartment subsidized by the shelter. She completed a community college program on a scholarship and now works as a pharmacy technician.

“I know what it is like to struggle to feed your family.  I have four children and I rely on SNAP to ensure my kids and I have enough to eat.  As the cost of food increases, it gets harder and harder for parents like myself to feed our families.  I already know that I am not giving my children the nutrients they need simply because I cannot afford it.  Like all other SNAP participants, I received a cut in November. And now, since I live in New Jersey, I will face another major cut thanks to “heat and eat” provision cut from this year’s Farm Bill. I cannot tell my children, ‘I’m sorry we don’t have anything for dinner tonight.’  My 14 year old eats 4 or 5 times when he comes home from school because his class eats lunch before 11 o’clock each day.  He is hungry when he gets home and I do my best to try to fill his belly. Any reduction in SNAP benefits will mean I have to take money from paying my bills to use at the grocery store since I don’t have any buffer to help make up for this loss, meaning my son will be hungry.  My SNAP benefits already did not last for the month. I was already struggling to keep food on the table. SNAP needs to be protected, and supported! Not taken away from families who are just trying to do right by their kids.”  

Anisa Davis, Witnesses to Hunger, Camden

Anisa is the mother of four children and grandmother of a 4 year-old. She is helping to raise her grandson while her daughter works two jobs, and she is also supporting her oldest son, a full-time college student.

No parent should have to worry about whether their child will be ok, whether there will be enough food for them to eat

“I already work to stretch my SNAP benefits by shopping around for the best deals and I go to three food pantries – but especially after the November 1^st cuts last year I still don’t have enough to last the month, and it has increased my stress and decreased my food supply.  My son loves bananas and I would love to encourage him to eat more fruits but I can’t afford them and they aren’t available at food pantries.  No parent should have to worry about whether their child will be ok, whether there will be enough food for them to eat, whether you will have dinner for them after school but I do worry.”

Bonita Cuff, Witness to Hunger, Boston

Bonita is a mother of five, ranging in age from 6 to 26. She currently cares for her young niece whose parents both work but cannot afford safe childcare; once her niece goes to pre-k Bonita hopes to return to full-time employment to better the lives of her family members.

“I go to the pantry at the New Haven Salvation Army. I took a picture of the sign outside that says, ‘Emergency Pantry.’ It says it’s an emergency, and before I could use it as an emergency. But since the cuts to SNAP, the pantry is now a part of my monthly budgeting for food.”

Kimberly Hart, Witnesses to Hunger, New Haven

Kim is an advocate for social and economic injustices.  She is also a member of Mothers for Justice, the New Haven Food Policy Council, and the Food Assistance Working Group. 

“It’s a tragedy that we constantly have to prove that we exist.  With the November 1^st cuts we were again pushed further and further away from the assistance we need to provide stability for our families.  We are taught as children to fight for what we believe in and take a stand.  Witnesses to Hunger will continue to do just that.”

Barbie Izquierdo, Witnesses to Hunger, Philadelphia

Barbie is the mother of one son and one daughter. She was featured in the documentary A Place at the Table, sharing her experience of struggling with food insecurity and the cliff effect. Today, Barbie is an honor-roll student at Ezperanza College where she studies criminal justice.

Join us this Thursday as we snap into action to celebrate SNAP.  You can take part by signing up here or simply hop on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram on Thursday from 2:00 – 4:00pm ET and search for #snap4SNAP.

“As time went on, I saw how my own country, the place where I lived, was actually a bad place. I would see people fight and I thought that would be my life. I thought, that’s me–then I turned 4.”

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But in the opinion of Ulises and his parents, the difference in the United States is opportunity.

—Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth

In an essay called Why I Make Terrible Decisions, Linda Tirado explained how behavior that seems irrational or irresponsible might actually be sensible and smart if you are poor and the only options available to you are bad ones. That essay has been expanded into a book, Hand to Mouth, and it’s sharp, funny, and foul-mouthed in a manner entirely appropriate for the subject matter. It’s not “too angry” as one reviewer suggested, nor is it “vindictive.”

Hand to Mouth is, instead, indignant: Tirado is outraged not merely that so many people can work so hard for so long and still have so little to show for it, but that those same struggling people are then blamed for their state — dismissed or demonized by demagogues and hacks as lazy or irresponsible. There is only passing mention of Rep. Paul Ryan, but the book might as well be a long subtweet directed at him and others who insist, against all evidence, that if you are poor in America it is because of your own failure to be sufficiently diligent, chaste, sober, or thrifty.

Tirado’s own experiences with poverty are an eloquent rebuttal to such claims, but don’t conclude that this is merely a memoir or a collection of anecdotes; her story shows us in powerful, personal terms what the evidence reveals to be true for millions of other people too.

Here’s some of what we can confirm about the obstacles to getting by in the United States today, all of which can be gleaned from Tirado’s book:

• Working hard does not mean that you will get ahead: Where you are born, and to whom, is a better predictor of how you’ll do. Mobility rates are lower in the U.S. than in many other rich democracies, and we actually have a fairly rigid class structure.
• Jobs are scarce, wages are often too low to live on, and employers steal income from employees. It’s worse in the service sectors, and especially bad for women.
• This is why so many people can work, even at multiple jobs, and still be poor.
• If low-wage workers get sick, they work anyway, since they’re less likely to have paid sick days.
• Childcare is scarce and expensive, hobbling efforts at steady employment.
• Health insurance, even after the Affordable Care Act, is unaffordable for millions; untreated illness (or disability) can limit your ability to work, making you even poorer. Forget about dental care. Or mental health care. And sick people who cannot access treatment will self-medicate with alcohol, drugs, sex, or cigarettes.
• Most who receive food stamps work (including active duty military families), and almost all who receive means-tested benefits fall into categories historically identified as “deserving” — 90 percent are workers, children, elderly, or disabled.
• Means-tested benefits are low and fraud is uncommon, while badly designed eligibility standards exclude many in need.
• Poor households generally spend their cash grants with care.
• Spending on wealthier households via the tax code dwarfs traditional relief programs, yet this “submerged” welfare state typically goes unremarked when people complain about expenditures.
• Low-income people really are more charitable, and always have been.
• At the same time, they pay more for almost everything, and are exploited by payday lenders, rent-to-own schemes, and check cashers.
• College degrees are held only by a minority of adults, mostly wealthier ones, and higher education remains expensive and especially hard if you must work or care for kids. Meanwhile, many Americans working at minimum wage have a degree.
• Children born into poor neighborhoods begin at an educational disadvantage, and poverty itself is so stressful it alters your cognitive abilities.
• Poor people often have low expectations and avoid risk to shield themselves from the pain of continual disappointment.
• Welfare is hard to get, benefits are low, and women do not make choices about when or whether to have children based on its availability.
• Unintended pregnancy rates are higher among poor women because birth control costs money; abortion is expensive, too. Despite simplistic rhetoric, marriage is not a sure-fire path out of poverty; besides, government renders many men unavailable for marriage with draconian, discriminatory criminal justice policies. Despite that, black fathers are no less involved in the lives of their children than others.
• Insecurity is the condition of modern American life, and 1 in 4 have no savings at all, putting many one crisis away from poverty.
• As a result, spells of poverty are common: over a three-year period, almost one-third of all Americans will be officially poor for at least two months; perhaps half will be poor at some point in their adult life.
• Our political system is utterly unresponsive to the needs of poor and low-income people; they cannot be counted on for campaign contributions, after all, don’t hire lobbyists, and are less likely to vote — not because they are apathetic, but because the U.S. makes voting complicated and time-consuming, and they don’t think it matters anyway.
• It doesn’t have to be this way: other countries do better for their citizens, and we used to, too.

In sum, Tirado is right and Ryan is wrong: The majority of all poverty in the U.S. is the result of forces beyond individual control. This is not ideology or bias but social science, and it is time we stopped humoring ignorance out of misplaced concern for “fairness” or “objectivity”. Just as we dismiss those who deny the evidence of global climate change, so should we mock those who insist that if people only tried harder they wouldn’t be poor. It’s a lie, and Hand to Mouth shows in painstaking human detail how it is a lie and why it is a lie.

Yesterday, Representative Paul Ryan’s unveiling of his new proposal to address poverty offered the opportunity to gather responses from some of the people who might lead such a movement.

Here is what they had to say:
Tianna Gaines-Turner: About Work and People Receiving Public Assistance
Tom Colicchio: ‘Opportunity Grants’ Will Make Hunger Worse
Laffon Brelland, Jr.: ‘My Family Does Not Struggle Because We Lack Work Ethic’
Melissa Boteach: Ryan’s Case Against Himself
Peter Edelman: Compassionate Conservatism Rides Again
Anne Ford: Put Energy into Raising Wages
Deepak Bhargava: Ryan’s Poverty Plan Equals More Attacks on the Poor
Dr. Mariana Chilton: Not a Serious Dialogue

Tianna Gaines-Turner: About Work and People Receiving Public Assistance

Earlier this month, I had the honor of testifying at one of the War on Poverty hearings. I testified as a member of Witnesses to Hunger, and as a representative for millions of Americans like me who are struggling with poverty. I had hoped that by sharing my story, and my ideas for change, Congressman Paul Ryan would have released a poverty plan that listened a little more closely to my recommendations.

I do appreciate some of what he said in yesterday’s event at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m glad he recognizes that the government has an obligation to expand opportunities in America. Many of his ideas are good. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit would help a lot of struggling Americans—although paying for it by eliminating the Social Services Block Grant wouldn’t—and results-driven research is an important part of understanding what works and what doesn’t.

I did not appreciate Mr. Ryan’s comments about work and people on public assistance. He started out by saying that today’s Americans are working harder than ever before, but aren’t getting ahead. This I agree with. My husband and I both work part-time jobs, but we still struggle to make ends meet. Millions of Americans face similar situations as my husband and me.

But Mr. Ryan went on to explain that he wants to incorporate work into the safety net, like they did with welfare reform in 1996. I do not think this is a good idea. I stressed this during my testimony in front of the House Budget Committee. I explained that families are working. We don’t need to be placed in more work programs, we need our jobs to pay living wages, and to offer family-oriented policies like paid sick and paid family leave. This way, we can earn more, save money, and create our own safety net so that we never have to turn to the government for help again.

I am happy that Congressman Ryan ended his speech by encouraging people to send him constructive criticism, and more recommendations for him to consider when developing this poverty plan. He can be sure that I will be writing to him with more of my ideas, and more recommendations from my Witnesses to Hunger brothers and sisters.

Tianna Gaines-Turner is a member of Witnesses to Hunger, a program hosted by the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University featuring the voices and photography of parents and caregivers who have experienced hunger and poverty firsthand. She is a married mother of three children, and works with children at a local recreation facility in Northeast Philadelphia. 

Tom Colicchio: ‘Opportunity Grants’ Will Make Hunger Worse

When Congressman Paul Ryan talks about consolidating means-tested programs like food stamps, child care, welfare and housing into a single grant, he’s talking about a block grant.  And that’s something we already know all too much about.

The TANF block grant created in 1996 made cash assistance much harder to obtain.  In 1996, about 68 percent of families with children living in poverty were able to get TANF cash assistance.  Now about 25 percent can get it.  Plus, the block grant is still funded at 1996 levels so cash benefits have decreased dramatically in terms of their real purchasing power.

We can’t allow the same thing to happen with food assistance.

We already have a hunger crisis in this country.  Nearly 50 million people don’t necessarily know where there next meal is coming from.  It’s unacceptable in the wealthiest nation in the world, and it’s a crisis virtually unknown in other wealthy nations.

But hunger is also a problem we can solve—if we look honestly and critically at the policies that contribute to either making hunger worse, or to reducing it.

Lumping nutrition assistance in with other much needed assistance—like housing and childcare—would make hunger worse.  For one thing, it makes it much more difficult for our growing Food Movement to hold legislators accountable for their votes on food issues.  If they vote to cut the block grant is the money cut from food or housing? And if we leave it to the whims of states to decide how much nutrition assistance people can receive, or whether they can receive it at all—as with TANF—then how will we ever resolve as a nation to end hunger?

As I’ve written previously, it’s time we have a Food Movement that votes on a good fair food system for all.  That same movement needs to be vigilant and speak out against bad ideas that will make our food system worse.

That means speaking out in no uncertain terms against Congressman Ryan’s proposal.

Tom Colicchio is a Chef and food-activist.  You can follow him on Twitter @tomcolicchio.

Laffon Brelland, Jr.: ‘My Family Does Not Struggle Because We Lack Work Ethic’

Living in a single-parent household is tough. I grew up with my mother and two sisters, and although my mother always worked, we struggled to make ends meet. When the economy tanked, my mother lost her job. My older sister was in college, and even with the help from other outside family members and government assistance, we could not cover the cost of her education and all of our family’s other expenses.

I remember the day my mother looked me in the eye and said, “I’m going to be honest with you, son. With the way things are right now, I won’t be able to help you pay for college. What happens to you now is all on you.”

I took her advice and got to work. In addition to being a full-time high school honor student, I worked two low-wage jobs to help my family pay the bills. The years went on and things got harder at home. My family was always working. With my help, we were able to put my sister through college. I will be a sophomore at the University of South Carolina in the fall. But even with every able body in the house working, it is still a challenge every month to cover the bills.

My family does not struggle because we lack work ethic, which Paul Ryan’s new plan implies is the underlying cause of poverty in America. My family struggles because of poverty wages, which Ryan’s plan does nothing to rectify. Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the last time the federal minimum wage was raised. My family and I work tirelessly, but until employers are required to pay us enough to thrive, my families and thousands like ours will continue to scrape by.

Laffon Brelland, Jr. is a rising sophomore at the University of South Carolina, double-majoring in English and Spanish. He is a Junior Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change.

Melissa Boteach: Ryan’s Case Against Himself

Yesterday, Rep. Ryan proposed a plan that would eliminate a program that consolidates multiple antipoverty programs into a single grant to states in the name of providing greater flexibility. Yep, you read that right.

While the press coverage has focused on Rep. Ryan’s “new” idea of consolidating multiple programs into a single “Opportunity Grant,” most of the coverage missed the fact that he proposed to pay for part of his plan by eliminating the Social Service Block Grant (SSBG).

The SSBG is a capped, flexible stream of funding to states that funds services such as adoption, childcare, counseling, child abuse prevention, community-based care for seniors and people with disabilities, and employment services. Last year it helped approximately 23 million people, about half of them children. The program dates back to 1981, when a series of social services were consolidated into this single grant, and since then, many nonprofits have been funded by it to provide services like case management. Sounds a lot like Rep. Ryan’s “Opportunity Grant”, right?

Unfortunately, while SSBG provides states with enormous flexibility, over time it lost a lot of political capital. Politicians began to complain that it was duplicative of other programs. Policymakers could cut it time and again without having to cite any specific consequences since the money was “flexible.”  Over time, it has lost 77 percent of its value due to inflation, cuts, and funding freezes, and in recent years, there have been attempts to eliminate it altogether.  This is surely predictive of Rep. Ryan’s new proposal.

Which brings me back to the “Opportunity Grants.”  Right now, Rep. Ryan is claiming that his plan is completely deficit neutral, and states would not lose any money.

Yet, in a cautionary tale, calls for elimination of SSBG have been supported by none other than Rep. Ryan, who out of the other side of his mouth is proposing an eerily similar idea: to consolidate, in the name of flexibility, major funding streams that currently help low-income families. In fact, Rep. Ryan proposes eliminating the Social Service Block Grant altogether to pay for his proposed EITC expansion for childless workers. In an ironic twist that he seems to miss, he claims that SSBG is “ineffective.”

Thank you, Paul Ryan, for illustrating more clearly than anyone else possibly could why your proposal is so dangerous.

Melissa Boteach is the Vice President of the Poverty to Prosperity Program and Half in Ten Education Fund at the Center for American Progress.  You can follow her on Twitter @mboteach.

Peter Edelman: Compassionate Conservatism Rides Again

Paul Ryan has a new suit of clothes, but inside he’s still just Paul Ryan.  In fact the suit of clothes is made of porcupine quills—take a close look and it’ll poke you in the eye.  He’s now seeming sweet and sympathetic in wanting to do something about poverty, but what he’s proposing is mainly a shell game—now you see it, now you don’t.

Never mind that his budgets for the past four years—which would have cut $5 trillion dollars over 10 years, with 69 percent of the cuts coming in programs for low- and moderate-income people—are still on the table.  The latest Paul Ryan says he will turn well over $100 billion in federal programs into block grants once his state demonstrations prove successful.  And he says he won’t cut any of the programs in his block grant.  Will the real Paul Ryan please stand up?

Of course, the new and improved version of his proposals is still pretty lousy.  Block grant food stamps?  Terrible idea.  I guess he thinks it’s fine for Mississippi to say that the definition of hunger there isn’t the same as it is in Minnesota.  Make housing compete with child care by putting them both in the same block grant?  Why?  What we need is more investment in both.

Block grants are not the friend of low-income people.  TANF, among other issues, is receiving the same $16.6 billion appropriation now as it had in 1996.  The Social Services Block Grant received $2.5 billion when it was enacted in the early 70s and is now getting $1.7 billion.   I guess there’s no reference to inflation in Paul Ryan’s instruction manual.

It’s time to get real.  There are two huge problems (and lots of smaller ones) that are making it difficult to reduce poverty right now.  One is the flood of low-work in our country—which results in 106 million people with incomes below twice the poverty line, below $39,000 for a family of three.  What does Paul Ryan propose to do about that?  Nothing. The other is the huge hole in our national safety net for the poorest among us—6 million people whose total income is from food stamps, which by itself is less than about $7,000 annually for a family of three.  Paul Ryan has a proposal there—put TANF, which is already almost nonexistent in most of the country, into a block grant along with food stamps, housing, child care, and God knows what else.  How does he think that will go?

We tried compassionate conservatism.  There was no there there then—and there still isn’t.

Peter Edelman is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law Center, and the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Anne Ford: Put Energy into Raising Wages

I’ve been a nurse for more than 30 years. I worked at DC General for 17 years and as a home health nurse for 10 years before a back surgery left me unable to care for adults. So, I switched to working with children. I’ve worked in children’s hospitals and as a school nurse and I loved it. But when I lost my job of five years, I also lost a $2,000 per month paycheck – resources I needed to care for myself and pay for my mortgage, car loan, insurance, and other bills.

When I was finally able to enroll in food stamps and unemployment insurance, I received $700 per month and had to rely on my daughter’s help to make ends meet. Thankfully, I also received Medicaid, which covered my doctor’s appointments, medications, and follow-up care from my surgery. Without that care I wouldn’t have been able to leave my house. I really relied on these three benefits to survive until things could get better, same as a lot of people I met in lines, filling out forms alongside me.

With his new proposal, I can see that Paul Ryan doesn’t care about us. If he did, why would he want to make getting help harder? If he had asked any person in my situation what kind of help they needed, he never would have come up with this plan. He’s never, not for one day, walked in our shoes.

Paul Ryan and I are both Christians, and I encourage him to pray on his new plan. What he’s doing is not godly. Through my church, I volunteer at So Others Might Eat (SOME), an organization that helps people who can’t make ends meet access food, clothing, and healthcare. If Rep. Ryan’s plan goes through, the number of people needing to reach out to organizations like this will only increase, and these organizations can’t meet that kind of increased demand.

If Paul Ryan really wanted to help he should have proposed creating something, not messing up programs like food stamps that are already working well.  He should have proposed to create jobs, or increase the supply of affordable housing. He should have put his energy into raising the wages at all these jobs that don’t pay enough to survive. The truth is if you don’t have a job that pays more than the cost of living, you can’t afford the necessities to live. And that’s how we ended up with all these people with nowhere to live who are fighting every minute to put food in their stomachs.

I depend on food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment insurance, but it still isn’t enough to make ends meet. But, for myself, I’m hopeful. Just this Wednesday, I accepted a full-time job as a school nurse without even asking the salary. For all those people out there who are still looking for jobs, what Paul Ryan wants to do makes me scared.

Anne Ford is a school nurse in Washington, DC.

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Deepak Bhargava: Ryan’s Poverty Plan Equals More Attacks on the Poor

For those of us who wish our nation’s leaders would pay more attention to the 106 million people living on the brink in this country, Paul Ryan’s new plan to address poverty is so bad it might make us think, “Careful what you wish for.”

Rep. Ryan’s plan adopts the conventional Republican analysis that individual failure and insufficient effort is the main driver of poverty, and then revives as the solution the bankrupt block grant proposals that have failed in the past.

Let’s be clear—the premise of Ryan’s argument is wrong.  The evidence of our own history and from around the world shows that we can—through concerted government action—make a big difference in reducing poverty.  The positive effect of better labor market standards and government supports is undeniable, in the U.S. and around the world.

So what would a serious effort to reduce poverty look like? We could reduce poverty in the U.S. by 80 percent by taking three simple steps:

First, we need to raise wages so that workers earn a living wage. The minimum wage must be increased to catch up with productivity growth, and workers must have the right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages.

Second, we need to eliminate racial and gender inequality in the labor market. Poverty isn’t just an economic issue; it’s a women’s rights and racial justice issue. A paycheck should be equal to the amount of work you produce, not be based on the color of your skin or your gender.

Finally, we need full employment. We need to invest in key sectors of the economy—from the green economy to infrastructure—so that we can create millions of jobs.

This strategy would reduce poverty in America by 80 percent because it would improve access to what people living in poverty really need: quality jobs that pay a decent wage. Paul Ryan’s plan, in contrast, would give people living in poverty more of what they absolutely don’t need: blame that reinforces the conditions that keep people poor.  It would also lead to more hardship by further weakening our already frayed safety net.

Deepak Bhargava is the executive director of the Center for Community Change which you can follow on Twitter @communitychange.

Dr. Mariana Chilton: Not a Serious Dialogue

It may be surprising to hear this, but Representative Paul Ryan is actually speaking my language.

He says he is interested in developing opportunity and choice for people, and that people need careers, not just “jobs.”  He also said, loud and clear, we need to get rid of the federal red tape.   In my state, the need to collect documentation of work participation hours creates such a gnarly cluster of inefficient busy-work and red tape that it sucks the creativity and life out of entire communities.

When Rep. Ryan said “too many families in America are working harder and harder yet falling further behind,” I perked up, thinking—Right! Their wages have deteriorated. We should raise wages to a living wage.  But discussion of wages was a glaring omission in his speech.

Another worrying thing—his talk of turning programs over to the states. There’s no good precedent for that.  Consider Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which Rep. Ryan consistently holds up as a model for reform: that’s the birthplace of federal and state red tape.  Additionally, what we see on the ground with TANF is often punitive, and downright mean. Here’s an example in Pennsylvania: at a County Assistance Office, people waiting to speak to “career development workers” are actually forced to sit facing the wall with their backs to the case managers. This is dehumanizing and humiliating.

Unfortunately, that dehumanizing treatment of America’s families is what I see when I hear that Rep. Ryan is listening to his “mentors”—people who say such thoughtless, non-Christian things as “there is a deserving and undeserving poor.” Last I checked, there is no spiritual tradition, nor any political tradition, that says some people deserve to be hungry (read: poor).  Since Paul Ryan comes from a state that has the highest rates of racial disparities in wealth and in health, everything he says should be held up to our public accountability meter that measures for transparency, fairness and basic humanity.

As I was listening to Rep. Ryan, I almost started thinking I could actually work with him, and that I could join the dialogue. After all, he’s the only leader recently who has shown a public attempt to make fixing poverty a focus of their leadership. But when I saw all the men (read: no women) joining him on the discussion panel at the American Enterprise Institute after his speech, I laughed out loud.  Until Rep. Ryan starts including women—especially women of color, African American, Latina, American Indian, Asian and more—none of us can take this “dialogue” seriously.

A few weeks ago they invited me to join them and other groups in Trenton, N.J. for a day of lobbying politicians regarding issues related to housing and jobs. Many voices, many issues.

I asked the director of the NJ Coalition to End Homelessness, Deb Eliis, if there was only one thing The Coalition could accomplish in the next year, what she would want it to be.

She answered: “A Homeless Shelter in Ocean County.”

Ocean County is where I live.  I know that there are seven facilities in Ocean County that house, care for, and try to find permanent living situations for stray animals, but not a single one that provides the same services for humans.  Toms River is the second largest township in Ocean County and one of its most affluent. I lived in Toms River until a month ago before I moved into permanent affordable housing in a nearby town. When I lived in Toms River I worked with the faith-based Homeless Outreach mission, so I also know that on any given night in Toms River there are between 30 and 40 people (that we know of) living scattered throughout its wooded areas. In case you have never been to a homeless encampment – and as someone who used to be homeless – I can tell you this: there is no way anyone – no matter your age – can live that way for very long without developing serious physical and mental ailments. These people will sooner or later end up in an Emergency Room, which is the least efficient and most expensive way of not dealing with this problem of homelessness.

My contribution to the meeting in Trenton was to get agreement on not calling it a “homeless shelter” and instead refer to it as an Emergency Housing Relief Center.  I feel strongly that words such as ‘shelters’ and ‘the projects’ should be dropped from our vocabularies when we are referring to people living in acute financial distress.

Why? Because words matter.

Check out this vintage 1976 ditty from a former B-list actor in California: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

The ‘she’ is the infamous ‘welfare queen’ who in fact didn’t exist, and the person making the lumpen remark, Ronald Reagan, goes on to become President of the United States in 1980.

The remark helped to turn back a decade of progress in eliminating chronic poverty in America, and marked a significant turning point in American attitudes toward their fellow citizens receiving financial aid and/or food assistance from the government.

Once again, we are back to where we were in the 1970s –defining poverty, rather than just tackling it head on.  But this time we have to be ever more vigilant about not letting it be defined by people who are prejudiced and use negative stereotypes.  We need a fresh working definition of poverty that reflects peoples’ real life experiences and portrays their personal and financial struggles with dignity and respect.

I didn’t get an email or phone call to tell me that it wasn’t working or why. Nobody did.  We all found out when we arrived at the store, and some, like me, not until I had reached the cashier. Embarrassed, I turned to my son and tried to explain why we had to leave the store, and our dinner, behind.

Was it because of the government shutdown? How long would we be without access to the small amount in food help that my son and I receive? I had heard from friends that unless this shutdown was resolved before November 1, there would be no food stamps, veterans’ benefits or social security.  I was worried that the food stamp shutdown had started early and so were other parents in our community.

But this isn’t what captured the nation’s attention, the humility of food stamp recipients in 17 states who were turned away at the register.  People humbled by the need to ask for government help despite long work histories or who, growing up poor, never got a shot at an income above the poverty line.

Instead, what America heard about on that day was the experience at one store, where the cashiers let food stamp recipients shop instead of turning them away.  Without a computer system to document how much money in benefits was on each card, some shoppers may have purchased more items than they were eligible for.  The media called it “looting,” taking any opportunity to cast a shadow on the integrity of the down-and-out.

I am a responsible, hard-working, minority single mother who returned to college, as a full-time student at UC Berkeley, after the bottom fell out of the economy. I am thankful for the help I receive and work incredibly hard as I carefully manage my limited time and money. Most people I know in my predicament—with incomes below the poverty level—are good people who are trying hard to do the right thing.

Government shutdowns, accidental or intentional, are scary for people like myself and my son who would be homeless and hungry without the temporary help we receive from the safety net that is there for all of us in case we lose our jobs, or are unable to work, or work doesn’t pay enough to afford the basics.  While our national leaders have failed to govern based on the real life experiences of most low-income Americans—and instead focus on the sensational exceptions meant to draw the ire of the television watching public—I’m proud to say that some California legislators have charted a different course.

Having heard my story when I told it on a local radio station, California Assembly Member Mark Stone introduced a bill to strengthen protections for consumers with EBT cards by ensuring that both consumers and retailers are informed when there are outages to the EBT system.  Governor Brown’s Administration has also now set up a process to inform SNAP recipients when the EBT system goes down.

This month, the Atlantic ran an article about the lack of real-life experience lawmakers have had with poverty.  It concluded that, while inadequate, perhaps more lawmakers participating in the SNAP Challenge and other poverty simulations might help build empathy and understanding among our nation’s leaders.  I don’t disagree, but I think that they could accomplish a lot more if they would simply stop their rhetoric and listen to someone who knows poverty first-hand like legislators here in California are doing.

We stayed.

We moved out of our middle-class house in Bedford, Massachusetts. Thanks to a state law that fast-tracked mixed-income rental development projects, and also a Section 8 federal housing subsidy, we were able to rent an apartment and remain in Bedford, a middle-class town with its good public schools.

I have vivid memories of that difficult time. Checking out at the grocery store, we were the only shoppers in line using food stamps. At school, I was the kid in the cafeteria paying with a voucher for reduced-price lunch. At the welfare office, I remember my mother telling me to “shush” and promising “it would only be a minute.”

“It’s been a lot longer than a minute,” I told her.

“A minute is a figure of speech,” she informed me.

After three years my mother got a job as a travel agent. A couple years later, she was hired as a contracts administrator at Raytheon. By the time I was eleven—six years after we moved into an apartment and turned to the safety net for help—my mother was able to purchase a house for our family. It was a turning point for us, and one that wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of help during the lean years.

My ability to stay in Bedford’s good school system, in particular, changed the course of my life. I went on to attend UCLA and then Yale Law School. I was acutely aware that a lot of nameless public servants had made decisions to expand opportunity and that those decisions had made all the difference for my family and me. So today, I take great pride in leading an institution that at its very core is about expanding opportunities for all Americans. We talk a lot in this town about things like “sequester” and “the debt ceiling” and “target deficit rates”—but to me, public policy basically comes down to this question: is it expanding or contracting opportunity for most Americans?

I believe we have a historic opportunity to address poverty today, because the interests of low-income people and the middle class are converging. Median wages—the wages of middle-income earners—have been stagnant for twelve years. People recognize there is growing inequality in this country and that something is amiss when companies are doing well but people aren’t—when dividends, stock prices, and CEO salaries rise but wages don’t.

And while we have a clear opportunity to make the connection between the interests of people in poverty and the interests of the middle class, we have our work cut out for us. Conservatives have successfully pitted people in the middle against people struggling near the bottom. They are skilled at exploiting economic anger and anxiety, fear and distrust. For example, they have convinced many Americans that many people who turn to the safety net want to be on welfare rather than having a job. This mistaken notion is particularly troubling right now, when the hardest-hit communities face high unemployment rates of 20 to 30 percent. Conservatives say we have to break up the safety net or people won’t pursue jobs. But the truth is those jobs just don’t exist right now. So the real effect of these heartless policies will be more people hungry, more people homeless, and more children with fewer opportunities to succeed—children just like my brother and I.

For my family, as for many American families, the safety net was a bridge that carried us through hard times. That’s why it’s important that I tell my story.

Among some on the center left, there is a political strategy to not talk directly about poverty.  Many will say things like “trying to get people to the middle class.” I think that strategy is a mistake. If we fail to talk openly about poverty, we miss an opportunity to address people’s anxieties and misconceptions about low-income people. We fail to correct the misunderstandings about who poor people are, and we fail to make progress we otherwise could.

That is why at the Center for American Progress we work hard to speak clearly and directly about poverty, and to ensure the conversation isn’t an abstract debate, but one about real people. So we support the Half in Ten campaign to reduce poverty by half over ten years—just as we did from 1964 to 1973—which engages people to tell their stories about what the safety net meant for their lives, just as I tell mine. Our new TalkPoverty.org blog features contributors living in poverty today who write about the struggles they face. Teams as diverse as housing, healthcare, education, budget, and tax policy are working hard to determine the impact of policy decisions on people in poverty or at-risk of falling into poverty. (And let’s remember, there are now 106 million Americans—more than 1 in 3 of us— either living in poverty or on less than $37,000 annually for a family of three, which is a single hardship away from poverty.)

When we take on the assumptions and stereotypes directly—and actually look at the lives of poor people—we see in fact that their lives are full of struggle (including the struggle to navigate a welfare system that seems designed to make it as hard as possible for people to receive benefits).

Recently, I testified at a Senate HELP committee hearing on ways to improve the economic security of working women in America. One of the other witnesses on the panel was Armanda Legros. Ms. Legros was 6 ½ months pregnant when she pulled a stomach muscle at work. The doctor told her no more heavy lifting and gave her a written note for her employer, but the employer refused to comply. So Ms. Legros lost her job and had to go on unemployment insurance and food stamps. She is a perfect example of a person who wants to work but is forced to turn to the safety net. Her story is also a perfect example of the kinds of struggles low-income workers face in the workplace every day. We need to give more low-income people the opportunity to tell their stories at Congressional hearings, so our elected officials see the true face of poverty in America, and I applaud the Senate HELP Committee for providing Ms. Legros a platform.

It’s time for a new focus on the solutions to poverty, both in the November elections, and during the presidential election in 2016. To force the issue to the forefront of the national conversation, advocates in Washington and in communities across the country will need to mobilize and speak out. People will need to raise the issue at town halls just as we did for health care reform. We all need to stand with workers who are fighting for better wages and working conditions and give them opportunities to tell their stories. It’s not a question of whether change will come from the grassroots or Washington—we need to fight for good policy in Washington and raise our voices at the state and local levels.

We’re all in the same boat now, searching for economic stability for our families and an economy that raises wages for everyone. It’s time for us to make that case clearly and unapologetically. There are many times when we miss opportunities in public policy. We can’t miss this one.

Until recently, my son attended a childcare program that he and I loved.  He was given instruction and pushed to learn more.  He attended the same program his sister did and has been there since shortly after birth.  Being at the same center gave my son a sense of stability and security that allowed him to excel.  I am a proud mother and I love to talk about how smart my kids are.  I believe that is partly a result of the quality of the care and instruction they have received starting at an early age.

Unfortunately, due to financial reasons, Tasir had to leave his childcare center at the end of the fall.  I lost my job and had to rely on cash assistance to make ends meet but I lost my subsidy that helped to pay for childcare.  It broke my heart to have to move my son from the care he loved and relied on simply because I could not afford it.  Losing my job and then my subsidy not only cost me but it has cost my son.

I have seen the benefits of high quality childcare in the education of my daughter.  Asyiah is a smart girl. She wants to learn and do well at school.  I believe this is a result of the instruction and stable care she received in the first years of life.  She has a strong foundation to build upon.

Since losing our childcare subsidy, my son, Tasir, has had nowhere to go. For four months I have been piecing together care with a network of relatives and neighbors while I looked for work.  I know I am lucky to have people to care for my son – otherwise I have no idea how I would be able to find work again.  The loss of the childcare subsidy is not only a snowball effect from a lost job, but it is also an obstacle to getting any other job.  Without care for my son how am I able to find a new job?  It is a vicious cycle that too many families are stuck in.

While I am grateful that Tasir is safe and fed with my relatives and friends, this is not the stable care he was accustomed to and he’s not learning anything.  At his old childcare center, Tasir engaged with children his age and learned new things each day.  Now I am just focused on making sure he is safe.  I want him to excel but right now our situation is not giving him any tools to help him prepare for school next year.   My son cannot redo these last few months. They will always be a time of lost potential.

I know the importance of early education.  I did not benefit from such programs and I do not want my kids to ever fall behind, or feel left behind.  No child should miss the opportunity to learn because his or her parents lack the money to afford it.  My daughter or son could be a doctor, lawyer, or even the next president of the United States, but without education, without a strong foundation, I fear they will not get there.  That my struggles could impact my children’s future keeps me up at night.

Today, I am happy to say that I have a new job.  Ironically I am now working at a childcare center.  With my new job I am hopeful that I will be able to get my subsidy back and be able to afford care for my son.  But there is no guarantee that I can get my son back in the same program, meaning this disruption in his life might be permanent.

No child should be prevented from reaching his or her potential because the caregiver lacks the funding.  I hope that by sharing my story, I can show the need for high-quality, affordable childcare for all families. Asyiah, Tasir and all children deserve the opportunity to reach their potential.

I have lived in Oliver for the entire 31 years of my life.  In the last two years, I have buried more than nine friends and family members—six of them because of gun violence. You can’t tell a grown man not to sell drugs if you don’t have anything else to offer him. I got into trouble early in my life, and I was locked up for drugs. When I got out and got my second chance, I chose a different path. But my friends lived a certain lifestyle—a street life. Where we live, without a job, in order to eat you have to live a street life. This is the reality and you can’t escape it.

After my best friend, Yarndragus, was shot in the middle of the street in broad daylight, I knew I had to make a change.

If those six friends could’ve found good jobs, they would still be alive today. That is why I believe we have to get Baltimore and Maryland working.  I have been working with TRF and BUILD for the last two years, and I am grateful.  I have seen firsthand how change starts—with meaningful work for the residents of the neighborhoods.

Now, I work with young people who want to work. I take them to job fairs and to apply wherever I see companies hiring—from the new hotels being built down downtown to restaurants to construction sites throughout the city. It’s easy to get 50 young men and women to come with me to apply, but you can see the frustration in their faces when no one in the group gets hired. Our young people want to work, but there’s nowhere for them to go to find a job.

The jobs that TRF and BUILD have created have rebuilt my mixed-income community. The neighborhood I live, work and volunteer in—once drug-stricken—is now vibrant with life, joy and excitement. This past year, I and three co-workers enrolled in school paid for by TRF and BUILD. I passed a real estate class and my co-workers passed an electrician class.  I am now an assistant property manager.  I also bought my first car this year. I am excited for this job, but I could have also been depressed.

If I didn’t get this job, I would have had to go to a job hub day after day to fill out application after application. I would have had to choose whether or not to go back to school and rack up loan debt with no guarantee of a job on the other end. If I didn’t have a job, I might be out on the streets or in jail or forced to sell drugs. So, I’m standing up for myself and for the young people in my community who want to work. I’m standing with TRF and BUILD who are putting people to work, and I hope our elected officials will stand with us too.

So as the song says: “Ain’t no stopping us now: we’re on the move!”

To succeed, this is what we need: Any shovels going into the ground in Maryland over the next 10 years need to be held by Baltimoreans and Marylanders.  Baltimore approved $1 billion in school construction funding, and hundreds of millions of dollars are going into infrastructure improvements in the area. We are asking our elected leaders to invest in residents who want to work, and we are working to get voters to the polls to make sure our leaders know they are accountable to residents.

We never had a working kitchen. My mom would cook food at her parents’ house and then we would take the food back to wherever we were staying at that moment. Most of the places we lived in had no running water and were very unsanitary. We would also go to my grandparents’ house to take baths and we got used to defecating in shoe boxes, putting it in plastic bags, getting on the bus and just throwing it out the window into a lot or something. People who are raised like this simply pass it on down the line. And you grow up thinking that it is ok to live like this.

As for food, we didn’t starve.  But we were hungry.  We ate whatever we could afford.  This is where the past affects the present. Today I’m somewhat of a food hoarder – I’m afraid of not having enough food for my family and me. I know what it feels like to be hungry but not have the food that you need or want. I have to constantly remind myself that I no longer live that way. But it’s the only way I’ve ever known. I don’t take showers, only baths, because I’m not used to it. If I do get cold or hungry I have learned how to deal with it. It’s like when you are being raped and you go out of your body to survive. That’s what it’s like when you are born into hunger and into a dirty, unhealthy environment.  This kind of living goes back in time, too.  If your parental figure is used to living that way, it’s likely because their childhood was the same way. You are stripped of your dignity. You are ashamed. Your soul feels like a bottomless pit. You feel less than human. The hell that I know came from the environment that I was born into. Now I am in my thirties, and I’m still haunted by the trauma and food insecurity.

My scars run long and deep – they will always be there. The long lasting effects of trauma stick with you. But I refuse to let my past dictate my future. My memories keep me humble. I’m shaped not by the commonly accepted “fact” that since I grew up in poverty I have to live in poverty now. Instead, I’m shaped by the idea that while you can’t change the past, you can change the future.

When I go into a market and see and smell food I feel bliss. It’s like I just won the lottery. To know that I can buy a steak if I want to or some seafood is a very priceless feeling. To be able to run hot and cold water is a blessing.

Today I am far from my childhood of mold, cold, and hunger. But even though I’ve healed so much and don’t have to live that way anymore, the effects of early poverty and trauma are still a part of my being. They shape me into the woman I am today. A woman who is motivated, and works hard to make sure that her daughter will have more opportunities than she had growing up. I take what I saw and experienced as a child, and use that to drive me to be a better person for myself, for my family, and for others who live through the trauma of poverty.