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Amidst the craziness of last week, I forgot to write up my part in an innovative new educational exercise created by social workers in Missouri. On Friday afternoon, Bay Area community leaders and organizers gathered at the Garden House Hotel in Palo Alto to be given an alias, as well as a background history. We were then ushered into one of the conference rooms to meet other members of our “family”: in my case, I was Pablo Perez, a 23-year old who had abruptly become head of the family when my divorced Dad was thrown in jail, leaving me to care for my two young teen sisters and their baby sister. The rules were as follows: we had to survive for 4 weeks (15mins of real-time each) below the poverty line, negotiating the kafka-esque labyrinth of social services, state benefits and pawn shops while ensuring that all household members were fed and the utilites weren’t shut off. The perimeter of the conference room was arranged with tables representing the different organizations we needed to visit: employment agency, bank, pawnshop, supermarket, utility company, daycare, police station – and to add an extra headache-inducing element, we could only move from table to table by surrendering a ‘transport pass’, which we had to buy when we ran out. This was to reflect the proportion of benefits that end up wasted on expensive local transport when people try to make their way out homeless shelters for real.
Here’s a video of the same poverty simulation being run in Pittsburgh to give you more of a sense of what it felt like to participate:
Needless to say, what started out as an interesting interactive exercise turned into a stressful, exhausting nightmare as we were deliberately kept waiting, hamstrung by misfiled paperwork and long queues everywhere we went. Some particular highlights included being robbed of a transport pass by none other than local council member Greg Scharff, or of $20 by a homeless outreach specialist. I might add that both were in character at the time, but the irony wasn’t lost on me. Here’s a full write-up of the afternoon by the local Palo Alto Daily, including a description of the above incidents:
Dan Archer, a social issues cartoonist from Mountain View, stood befuddled in the middle of the room after his character was robbed of his cash on the way to the grocery. It was the same money he had spent so long obtaining in the previous week that he was late picking up his child at day care.
All in all, it was an excellent way to raise awareness of a vital issue that applies to communities nationwide, far more powerful and resonating than a lecture or article, and further proof that interactivity is a key trigger for engaging with an audience on what some might deem “dry” topics. For more information, visit visit Step Up Silicon Valley’s website at www.catholiccharitiesscc.org/stepupsv/ or the Downtown Streets Team’s website at www.streetsteam.com.
Last but not least, here’s the full video of comics journalist Joe Sacco‘s acceptance speech of his highly deserved Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Journalism. Interesting to see the stigma against the term “graphic novel” in his closing comments, as opposed to “comic book”, which he prefers. Surely it’s a formal question of length (comic books being serialised 28pp saddle stiched), while a graphic novels are self-contained, 80pp+ works? As ever, your comments are welcome below.
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