Photo Credits to Fibonacci Blue. 

Originally published on The Undefeated. 

I don’t know how other people buy cellphones. Me, I make sure I’m getting all the gigabytes I can. Just in case I witness police killing another black person, I want to have enough space on my phone to record the state-sanctioned slaughters. It’s just in case, but in America, there’s always a case.

In less than 36 hours, two black men were added to the list of the estimated 136 black people killed by police in 2016.

On Tuesday, I woke to news that a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officer had shot and killed Alton Sterling. The accusation, lodged by a 911 caller, that led to his death? Allegedly harassing customers with a gun outside a convenience store, a claim the store owner disputes. Bystanders captured parts of the confrontation on video that showed two white officers pinning the 37-year-old father to the ground and shooting him at point-blank range.

To read more, click here. 

Originally published on Quartz. 

This fall, thousands of college students from across the country will begin their undergraduate careers at colleges around the nation. They will inevitably pack too much to fit in their tiny dorm rooms. They will also carry with them their share of over $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, in addition to countless “hidden” out-of-pocket costs paid for by their bank accounts and the bank accounts of their families.
At my well-respected, private, four-year university in Washington, DC, which boasts a yearly tuition of $44,046 not including room and board, I receive over $57,000 yearly in financial aid. As a student from a family that is struggling to make ends meet, my financial aid package is a combination of federal grants and federal work study, university merit scholarships and financial aid awards, and about $8,000 yearly in federally subsidized and unsubsidized loans. On paper, my expenses and my financial aid just about even out.

Off-paper, they don’t.

Universities today are in the business of making money, and mine is no exception. They hit me right out of gate with a $160 fee to attend my freshman orientation, a price which does not include the cost of travel to and from the District. Almost every class has an associated fee not included in the cost of tuition, most between $40 and $100. Fees for lab science classes are the highest, and all students at my university are required to take at least one lab before they graduate. Buying a laptop proved a necessity and, thankfully, a relative bought me one as a gift. Renting a mini-fridge for my dorm room costs my roommates and I about $140 a year.

Schools will charge you whatever they can. The costs of any damages to the dorm, including elevators, bathrooms, and common areas are billed to every person on a dorm floor, or even the entire building if they do not know who caused the damage. After I fell out of my bunk bed twice during my freshman year, the university installed a railing—for $20, billed to my student account. My financial aid did not anticipate any of these costs, and so it did not cover them.

An internet search of “hidden costs” of college turns up a host of articles on parent-centered websites on the college application process. These articles are almost always geared towards upper- and middle-class families. Take, for example, this article on the hidden costs of college offered by US News & World Report. Alongside the hidden costs of fridge rental, printing costs (my school charges 10 cents per page of printing), and cold medication for the inevitable bout of the dorm flu, the article also encourages parents to budget for student vacations, trips to visit friends at other schools, and the purchase of the latest iPod or gaming system. For students already struggling to pay tuition, these costs may be the least of their worries.

So what hidden costs should low-income students really be paying attention to? My college experience offers a few examples.

If you are low-income student who will be attending school out-of-state, make sure you know if you can use your state benefits, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It wasn’t until after I had accepted admission to an out-of-state school that I learned that I could not use my Ohio Medicaid on campus for anything other than emergency care. My benefits became void the second I moved out of Ohio. After my freshman year, I had to opt for the school’s insurance plan, which costs around $2,000 a year. Even if your school offers a flat-rate fee for a doctor’s appointment at the student health center (mine is $20 a visit), these fees often do not include extra fees for lab tests or prescription medications.

If you plan on paying off bills in your student account with a credit card, be aware of any additional costs. My school charges an additional fee for the use of a credit card to settle outstanding charges, which can add upwards of 3% of the balance to your bill.

There is another bleak reality hidden within even the largest financial aid packages: Colleges often offer the most generous packages during freshman year as a way to entice new students. My family was careful to ask about the chances of financial aid being taken away after my freshman year. We were assured that, barring low grades or a raise in family income, no money would be taken away. We did not know to ask—and the school did not readily point out—that even if tuition rises, my financial aid package will stay the same. So when my university voted to raise tuition costs 3% at the end of my freshman year, my financial aid package remained the same and I was suddenly responsible for an additional $1,200 for the next year. The university administration will likely vote to raise costs at least once more before my graduation in 2018.

Yes, I chose to attend an expensive university far from my hometown. Yes, there were cheaper options. But there are promising students from struggling families across the nation who should not rule out their dream schools entirely. All things considered, I am paying significantly less than the ticket price of my university, and having an educational experience in Washington, DC, that I would not have had anywhere else. As a low-income student from a down-and-out Rust Belt community, these educational experiences have enormous potential to brighten my future—and my family’s future.

Students and their families need to understand that hidden costs exist, and that they may prove problematic.

The key is to make sure that students and their families understand that hidden costs exist, and that they may prove problematic. Fill out a more comprehensive checklist, and be wary of listed prices that seem too low. Understand just how complicated the financial aid process is.

Students and families must also understand their ability to self-advocate. They should not pay student bills or excess fees blindly. If something does not look right, ask about it. If it still doesn’t look right, negotiate it. In cases where parents are working multiple jobs, are less knowledgeable about college bureaucracies, have limited English language skills, or are not contributing financially to their child’s education, the burden of self-advocacy will fall on the student. I understand the difficulty, and the embarrassment. But it is necessary.

In the grand scheme of things, however, colleges also must come to understand that the hidden fees they ask for may prove unmanageable for the very kinds of low-income or first-generation students they are trying desperately to attract.

According to a University of Michigan study of a cohort of students in the 1980s, only 32% of college students in the lowest income quartile completed college– 68% dropped out. If not for the support of relatives and a part-time job to help defray those hidden costs, I could easily become one of them.

Originally published on Equal Voice. 

It’s already begun happening. In 2016, 500,000 to 1 million recipients will be officially cut from the “food stamp” rolls. Some reports say it could be more than 1 million recipients.

Before the end of the year, reports say, Tennessee will have eliminated 150,000; Florida will cut 300,000 recipients; North Carolina will chop 110,000 from the rolls. More than 40 states will see changes in the program.

It will happen because this year – with foolhardy confidence in the dubious proposition that the economy has substantially improved – the federal policies overseeing the program reverted back to guidelines established under President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform package.

These guidelines restrict adults without children to food assistance for three months. Adults without young children who want to receive nutritional assistance beyond three months must find full-time jobs, or perform 20 hours a week of  volunteer work (also known as “workfare”).

The result will be a massive housecleaning of the welfare state which should make some lawmakers happy. I presume these lawmakers will be salivating with joy that the reign has ended for the program expansion under President Barack Obama, the man who critics have called “the food stamp president.”

Millions of Americans have learned firsthand what it’s like to be on, and depend on, (and deal with the bureaucratic mazes entailed in) public assistance during the Great Recession. During these years, long-term unemployment pushed the Bush and Obama administrations to extend the eligibility for nutritional assistance beyond a three-month limit.

Americans receiving food stamps, officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and which in a better world would be known as “a minimal food allowance,” reached a peak in 2012, with 14 .8 percent of the population receiving aid.

I was one of those new post-expansion enrollees. Since 2010, when I began to have serious health issues, with kidney, then prostate cancer, I’ve benefited from monthly food allowances ranging from $196, the childless adult maximum, to most recently $60 a month.

And since 2010, I’ve learned how much minimal assistance matters to the very needy.

Direct experience is a great teacher. I’ve often been in situations where by the end of the month, after I paid rent, gas and electric bills, I lacked money for food. Once, I had as little 85 cents left in the bank. I was expecting some checks to come in for work I had done, but they were still a week away.

I could have gone hungry for a week. I didn’t. For low-income families and individuals, like myself, a minimum food allowance is a small economic boost that can be remarkably stabilizing.

The subsidies ($196 maximum benefits for an adult, and $649 maximum for a family of four) do not buy privilege. A minimum food allowance doesn’t provide the means to keep a household. The subsidy isn’t enough to pay any individual or family food bill through a single month.

The benefits do keep recipients from having to eat at Taco Bell every day. They do keep recipients from the destabilization of having to go to a soup kitchen and stand in line for hours to eat.

A three-month limitation on nutritional assistance in combination with a program that helps childless adults find work may look like a good idea on paper. Why shouldn’t independent adults work? If they can’t find work, why shouldn’t they contribute to society performing volunteer labor? The jobless will, in theory, benefit from a training program which demands a real commitment – 20 hours per week.

But as with any idea, the key to its success or failure is the execution. The job training component is run at the discretion of state governments, and many states don’t provide it. So when recipients use up their three-month food stamp limit, they will simply be cast from the rolls.

The other issue is that studies show that work requirements do not reduce poverty because such programs do not address the systemic causes behind poverty and ultimately provide little benefit to the poor.

Large numbers of needy Americans lack long-term career experience, high school diplomas or valid driver’s licenses. Many are homeless. These remain obstacles to getting good jobs. Sadly, due to shortsightedness, volunteering in exchange for food stamps often provides a pretext to make participants “do something,” and the odds are small that a volunteer position will lead to full-time employment. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of nutritional assistance recipients already have part-time jobs.

Curtailing the nutritional assistance rolls amounts to denying food to countless Americans who work, yet earn so little, they often find themselves having to choose between paying for food or their other bills.

The economy has not improved sufficiently to provide full-time work for the massive numbers of Americans who have been crippled by poverty since the Great Recession. We can’t be fooled into thinking the economy has improved for everyone.

While unemployment has dropped to 4.7 percent, it doesn’t count the 3 million potential workers who have dropped out of the labor force because they could not find work. It those people were counted, the unemployment rate would rise to 6.5 percent.

And even when they do find work, it is often in low-paying jobs that don’t allow them to make ends meet. And they’ll go hungrier.

Originally published on Talk Poverty.

For the last year, I have been keenly aware of my dire need for two things: therapy and exercise.

But for those who struggle to make ends meet like I do, it’s normal to live a life without these perks—even though many consider them necessary elements of a healthy lifestyle. Instead, self-care comes down to the very basics such as feeding yourself, showering, and attending to medical issues—that is, keeping yourself alive.

One website, GoodTherapy.org, has a checklist of self-care activities. But only 10 out of 40 are activities I regularly partake in, and these are among the more banal activities: “I take a meal break from work” and “I brush my teeth daily.” The list also includes a host of things I can’t afford, such as, “I see a mental health professional when I need to” or “I take vacations from work when I can,” and “I don’t go to work when I’m sick.”

I haven’t been on vacation since 2013 because if I don’t work, I don’t get paid.  In fact, in my nearly 20 years in the workforce, I have only had one job that provided paid sick days. And so, when I was a student and worked full-time for a meager wage that I split between my tuition bill and my young daughter, I stressed over losing hours due to my daughter being sick. So when she was sick, which was often, I sent her to daycare after a dose of Tylenol, hoping not to get a call to come pick her up.

Constant stress of this sort takes a toll. A 2013 study published in Science Magazine concluded that people in poverty are so overloaded that their cognitive brain abilities are impaired to the point of debility. Yet, while the people living on the brink are the ones who need self-care the most, they are the least likely to engage in it. I can attest to this. When daily life revolves around fighting for survival, stress is part and parcel of the ride.

Originally posted in SheKnows.

I read Sheryl Sandberg’s recent Facebook post from the trenches of a horrible Mother’s Day weekend. The youngest had thrown up on Friday night, and we slept on the couch, sitting up and surrounded by towels, and didn’t move much the next day. Mother’s Day came, and I tried to put it out of my mind. I’m a single mom and estranged from my family. My daughter at one point asked if we could go get a treat, since it was Mother’s Day and all. When I said I didn’t have money to eat out this month, she said, “Well, can’t we just go get a treat for me?”

Sandberg’s post touched a soft spot in me at first. I felt a little hopeful that by her recognizing that single mothers don’t have it easy and many of us live in a hopeless place of poverty, maybe some of the stigmas surrounding us would change.

“In Lean In, I emphasized how critical a loving and supportive partner can be for women both professionally and personally,” she wrote. “Some people felt that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they have an unsupportive partner or no partner at all. They were right.”

To read more, click here.

Originally published in the Washington Post.

I grew up in what some would call an immaculately clean home. I hated my mom a little for it. I wasn’t allowed to paint my nails, since they’d chip and “look trashy.” My brother and I didn’t run around in clothes that had holes or were stained. In fact, I still rarely wear white.

As a kid, I didn’t understand why my mom’s focus stayed on making sure the floors were vacuumed and the kitchen counters wiped instead of playing outside with us. Cleaning seemed to make her happy. Now that I’m an adult, and a single mother with two young kids, I’d much rather have a clean house than a dirty one, and spend about an hour a day doing some kind of cleaning, whether it’s laundry, cleaning floors, or scrubbing the toilet.

Lately I’ve seen a meme on Facebook proclaiming that a messy house means there’s a mom in that house who’d rather be playing with her kids than cleaning. Messes meant love, attention, and devotion to making memories, the thinking goes. When I first saw these memes, my immediate thought was “No, it just means you don’t want to clean. I’m on my own and I still find time.”

But over the years I’ve noticed a lot of the women sharing this meme were middle to upper class. They only associated mess with fun. They didn’t associate dirty and mess and stains with being poor.

My mom grew up in extreme poverty, and always spoke of it with a look of disgust. She felt pressured to fit in, and felt shame about her house, clothes, and general appearance.

When my brother and I were young, we begged my parents to take us to buffet-style restaurants with the endless soft-serve machines. My mom would cringe, and tell the same story about when her parents would run out of grocery money, they’d save just enough for the family to go out to eat, gorging themselves in one last hurrah before facing a week of empty cupboards.

Nearly a decade ago, I started my journey of raising a family on my own with very little. I made the best of what I could with what we had. Even if I found a shirt or toy in a free pile, I took immaculate care of it. I couldn’t afford to replace it.

Over the years, as I lived in low-income housing, collected government assistance, and lived well under the poverty level as I put myself through college, the comments people made about poor people started to sting. The poor are dirty. Hoarders. Their houses are a mess. Their kids are wild, untamed, and feral-looking. Many of my single mom friends and I had a fear of appearing poor, especially when we bought groceries with food stamps, or used WIC checks for milk.

I cleaned the houses of the wealthy those years I was in college, and felt the stark contrast in how the other half lived. I pulled up to their driveways in my old car that leaked oil, in tattered clothing that would be replaced with my tax refund or out of extreme necessity. The majority of these houses were not without piles of clutter, and I had to work around it. Closets had mountains of clothes, offices had desks covered in papers, and I saw a lot of unfinished projects on dining room tables.

Raising a family on government assistance places you in a narrow margin of acceptable levels of appearance. If my kids are unkempt, dirty, snot-faced, and otherwise disheveled, I fall into the realm of neglect, extremely impoverished, and white trash. Our used car is acceptable if it’s in good running condition, the car seats properly installed, and without trash spilling over or smoke coming out the tail pipe. If I had, say, a newer car, my children had nice clothes, and we all had hair that looked to be well-styled, people would assume I was taking advantage of the system when I paid for groceries with food stamps. A housecleaning client said to me once how much it drove her crazy when she saw the huge families buying “junk for free” when their kids are “dressed to the nines.”

But what does that mean for my living space? I live in low-income housing, across the street from some pretty nice apartments. I watch people move in and out of them, and I’m always fascinated at the size of their televisions, their amount of rugs and lamps, and clothes carried in proper bags with hangers sticking out of the top. When people move in and out of my building, so do heaps of trash bags full of clothes and outdated furniture.

Even the wording in our lease states what is and isn’t acceptable for standards of housecleaning and items that can be left on the patio. When my property manager’s budget for lawn care dwindled last year, it was a stark contrast to the manicured lawns across the street that received weekly groomings. In walks down the street in the neighborhood, the difference between the income levels in the apartment buildings that stood across from each other were obvious. I felt a bit of shame in that.

My neighbors in the nicer complexes that surround me might be the type who believe it’s a sign of a good mom to have a cluttered, messy house with craft projects covering the tables, fingerprints on the windows and walls, and laundry in piles.

I’ve never felt I had that privilege. Living in poverty doesn’t afford you the right to a messy house. A mess means trashy and neglectful, not a doting mother.

Originally published on SheKnows.

There are moments in my life that I can return to easily. I don’t have to close my eyes or envision the surroundings or what it smelled like. It might be a moment I can sit in effortlessly because that was what I was doing — sitting on an old love seat. My daughter and I had just moved in to a little place that was part of a row of cabins that made up the homeless shelter in Port Townsend, Washington. I had $100 dollars, no job and no self-worth.

Mia, my daughter, was already asleep in her Pack ‘n’ Play, and I had a book open in my lap. It was required reading for anyone seeking services at the local Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services. I’d only gotten it yesterday and was already halfway through. Lundy Bancroft was like a voice of reason, but also left me with quaking realizations. His book, so aptly titled, Why Does He Do That?, showed me, gently, that I’d been in an emotionally abusive relationship for the last year and a half with my daughter’s father. More importantly, he showed me I wasn’t crazy.

I entered my new life as a single mother having not worked for a year, and without savings, since he’d spent the few thousand I’d blindly put into a shared account. This is often the case with women running from abusive relationships, where they escape with the clothes on their backs and not much else, if they’re lucky. Getting out puts the victim in the most danger, or the choice to leave is often from a climactic event where she feels she doesn’t have a choice, and flees in fear. But abusers can still have control and use that power, keeping victims in a financial state of uncertainty and poverty.

To read more, click here. 

If you or anyone you know may be experiencing emotional or physical abuse, please don’t hesitate to contact the Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE).

Originally published on Rooflines, a Shelterforce blog.

Jenean F. and her husband worked hard to achieve the increasingly elusive American Dream. She was a stay at home mom and he worked as a salesman in the auto industry, affording them a measure of middle class stability in the heart of the Midwest.

They rented their home in an upper income working-class neighborhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They thought the future was set for them and their children.

But they lived on a tighter margin than they realized, making them financially vulnerable to any misfortune.

That misfortune came in the fall of 2010, when Jenean’s husband lost his six-figure job.

It was the most devastating period of their lives. It also spawned a fierce advocate.

As Congress plays politics with President Obama’s final budget, left waiting is a proposed $2.66 billion for the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants, an 18 percent increase from last year.

The programs made possible by the McKinney-Vento act are no stranger to housing and anti-poverty advocates and educators, but the law is hardly known to the rest of the country, even those who are directly helped by it.

So it was for Jenean. The mom of four who never had need to consider the ins and outs of federal housing policy had never heard of this Reagan-era legislation that ensures educational access and stability to homeless students.

She didn’t know that the act, passed in 1987, provides emergency or transitional housing, education, counseling, and transportation to homeless students. And she most definitely didn’t realize the act is the first–and only–major federal policy response to homelessness. (President Obama has proposed a plan in his final budget that calls for $11 billion in funding over the next decade to address family homelessness, but the House says it won’t hear the budget.)

Jenean didn’t know any of this until her eldest school-aged daughter was one of 16,000 Indiana homeless students during the 2013 school year. The state had seen an 81 percent increase in the number of homeless students from 2008 to 2013.

Indiana’s numbers mirror a staggering explosion nationwide in the number of homeless students. More than 1.3 million public school children were homeless in 2013—double the number in 2006, says the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.

Today, Jenean (who asked that her last name and the names of her family members not be used) navigates the byzantine rules of the federal legislation like a veteran ship captain.

Her family’s seemingly solid middle-class life fell apart in October 2010 after her husband suffered a mild heart attack. He returned to work a few days later, but hit his head on a piece of equipment. The injury was severe enough to cause long-term disability, and he lost his job. The family couldn’t afford marketplace health insurance. The couple had two daughters, and Jenean was pregnant with twins.

State-funded insurance covered the girls and Jenean because she was pregnant. The family received food stamps to help make ends meet, but it wasn’t enough. Jenean became an extreme couponer, and the family sold their clothes, jewelry, electronics, toys, books, and whatever else they could do without. They burned through retirement savings. They maxed out their credit cards.

Not long after the twins’ birth, Jenean’s husband began moving around the state, chasing temp jobs that paid the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and sending money home. But by August 2013, they couldn’t afford to pay rent, so Jenean and the children moved into her parent’s home.

Her parents lived in an affluent suburb where her oldest child would begin fifth grade, but officials at the zoned school denied her enrollment because the family was not living in the home permanently.

A state case manager who worked with the family as they navigated available government resources informed Jenean of the McKinney-Vento act. She researched it and learned that it contained provisions that allowed her daughter to attend the new school. Armed with newfound knowledge, Jenean met repeatedly with school officials to advocate for her daughter. The school relented 27 schools days after the first day of class.

Though Jenean’s school battle resulted in victory, the upheaval for her daughter proved to be stressful, and she finished the first quarter with D’s.

A dispute with her parents forced Jenean and the children to move out of their home and into a shelter near downtown Fort Wayne in late 2013, and McKinney-Vento continued to prove its worth. The act allowed the oldest daughter to continue attending the same school rather than switch to another district. The stability enabled her daughter to finish the school year on the honor roll, and two years later she is still there.

The family stayed in the shelter for four months, then moved to a transitional home in southeast Fort Wayne where they still live and are regaining their footing. Jenean has a certified nursing assistant license and works as an administrative assistant at an engineering firm. Her husband found full-time work in the auto industry. They’ve reduced their debt—down to about $12,000 from over $20,000—paying off medical bills, credit cards, and overdue utility bills. The couple has even discussed buying a small home within two years.

Jenean now works with the local neighborhood association to address the food desert that is southeast Fort Wayne—the closest grocery stores are 2 and 3 miles away—a difficult trip without a car, and next to impossible via the limited public transportation system.

McKinney-Vento continues to provide support for their school-aged children—the second child is now attending the same school as her big sister.

It also is being called on to support more children in the U.S. than ever before, and according to staff at the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, the hope is that—given the current homelessness crisis among children and teens—the subcommittees and Congress will fully fund it.

Jenean will be watching.