This week, UCO students will highlight and combat poverty via Shack-a-Thon, a weeklong event that has participants taking up residence in makeshift cardboard abodes and panhandling for charity.
Shack-a-Thon’s impoverished condition may be staged, with students “living” in the shacks in shifts, and seen using their laptops and iPhones. For young people, however, poverty sits close to home.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in September the national unemployment rate held at 9.1 percent, despite a small uptick in new hires. However, youth and student unemployment reached 52 percent in July, the highest youth unemployment rate since the BLS began recording in 1948.
“I think that young people are really having a hard time recalibrating their lives and expectations to the new American economy,” Kate Taylor, a financial blogger living in New York City, said via Skype interview. “The middle class was encouraged to live beyond its means for so long that most everyone has debt; the debt load among young people, via student loans and credit cards, is higher than it’s ever been, and due to the economy our earning potential is less, for now.”
Taylor, who graduated from the New School for Social Research with an MA in political science in 2009, has been documenting her struggle with credit card and student loan debt, as well as offering tips for readers to avoid financial insolvency, since late August under the moniker of “Broke Gal in NYC.”
“I specifically used the term broke and not poor because poverty implies that I was born into marginalized economic circumstances, which I wasn’t,” Taylor said. “I am middle class and very privileged, but I’m broke because of my debt load.”
The UCO Institute of Hope, a new class program running out of the Department of Sociology and facilitated by Dr. Amanda Miller, set up a booth near the student-made shacks. Known among its participants as “iHope,” the organization provided information on poverty and welfare to participants and passersby.
“We set up right next to Shack-a-Thon to have kind of a statistics-based point of view on what poverty is, and what it means to students,” Sam Wargin, a sociology and human services senior involved with iHope, said. “There are a lot of stereotypes that surround poverty, public assistance and things of that nature, so we have a couple of informative pamphlets based off of the Census Bureau’s Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage report from 2010 that came out in the middle of September.”
According to that report, the 2010 national poverty rate was 15.1 percent, and the poverty rate for people aged 18-64, considered to be of working age, rose by 0.8 percentage points from 12.9 percent.
The Institute of Hope also handed out information which separates poverty and welfare truths from fiction, and “free money” with facts on taxes.
According to the former, “In Oklahoma, only a minority of welfare recipients receive any cash aid at all. Those who do receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) payments were paid a maximum of $292 for a family of three.”
Some participants in Shack-a-Thon had personal reasons for taking part in the event.
“I know what it’s like to sleep on a park bench, and to get kicked out of a home, and have to survive on barely nothing but a penny,” Felicia Villegas, a sophomore double-majoring in English education and creative studies, said.
According to Villegas, a roommate kicked her out of a shared living situation despite her being responsible for the majority of the bills in the agreement.
“I worked at Walmart in receiving,” she said. “And I was starting out at minimum wage, and so not only did I have to worry about the bills that he was accumulating, I had to account for myself too.”
Even simulated poverty gave participants a taste of homelessness, as students had to build shacks in the midst of heavy showers on Sunday.
“Yesterday, when we were building, the rain was coming down really hard,” Amber Walker, a freshman majoring in criminal justice, said. “And it wasn’t a reason for us to stop; we still had to build our home regardless of the weather, so we actually got that experience to know what it’s like to be outside without shelter.”
Even with times being tight, students have had to move to increasingly more resourceful ways to flex their wallets.
“I think that if you have debt or don’t want to get into debt you have to take a good look at what your priorities are,” Taylor said. “For example, living at home during college instead of borrowing more to live on your own, or cooking at home instead of eating out, or living collectively with roommates or partners instead of by yourself.”
On campus, students have recommended cost-minimizing plans ranging from hanging out with friends, to buying from the value menus at fast food restaurants to taking advantage of various free video game and movie services on the Internet.
Poverty Awareness runs all week with the continuation of Shack-a-Thon and a poverty luncheon on Thursday at noon in the Nigh University Center.