Poverty simulator shows how tough it really is to make ends meet

Opinion

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This article was published 02/11/2015 (3624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s play a “game.”

You’ve just hit a parked car in a parking lot. Do you: a) drive away and hope you don’t get caught; or b) pay the $200 deductible, knowing you only have $223 in your bank account and pay day is still more than a week away?

That was the choice I had to make while trying out Make the Month, a new online poverty simulation created in partnership with United Ways across the country. Launching today, the simulation offers users a small glimpse into what it’s like to live paycheque to paycheque in 15 different cities, including Winnipeg.

You can navigate the simulation as a single person, a single-parent family or a two-parent family. You are presented with various everyday scenarios, and you must make the choice you think is best for you and your family in that moment. The simulation then outlines the impact of that choice — and, of course, the costs are not always financial. What happens when your child can’t attend a birthday party? What if you always have to bail on drinks with co-workers? Poverty is incredibly isolating, and the constant stress and worry can take a real toll on one’s physical and mental health.

Of course, Make the Month is both challenging and eye-opening, and your “choices” are limited. I ran through the simulation seven times in three cities — Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto — as various family units, and I didn’t make the month once.

For me, though, this is a simulation. For one in 10 Winnipeggers, this is reality. That means every month, roughly 73,000 Winnipeggers are making these kinds of decisions every day, struggling to make ends meet.

Make the Month is not about “playing poor.” It’s not a game. As Heather Block, director of strategic initiatives at the United Way of Winnipeg, points out, it’s about challenging people’s assumptions about those living in poverty. “What this simulation does is it breaks stereotypes about people who are employed and still living in low-income situations — and how just having a job isn’t enough to pull you out of poverty.”

Indeed, we almost never hear people living in poverty described as hard-working, even though many people patch together an income by working multiple jobs or pulling 60- to 80-hour weeks in low-paying, shift-work gigs. We almost never hear them described as resilient, despite the fact many of them are managing to survive. We almost never hear them described as resourceful, despite the fact many are able to stretch small budgets so their kids can have new shoes or go on that field trip.

Instead, we hear all about how people living in poverty are lazy.

They make poor, irresponsible decisions, are bad with money, and are ultimately the cause of their own struggles.

Mary van Eerd-Cook flies in the face of all those stereotypes. The Winnipeg mother of six has experienced poverty first-hand, both as a parent and as a child herself, coming from a family of nine kids. She now works long and hard in the community with various organizations, helping others who are struggling with poverty. Her work has shifted her perspective.

“I don’t look at poverty the same way I used to,” she says. “When you go down the rabbit hole of what’s going wrong, you’ll never get out. So I focus on what I can do. What can I contribute? What can I make work and what do I have to let go of?”

She says she’s inspired by those currently living or who have lived in intense poverty who are doing amazing things, pointing to folks such as Althea Guiboche, a.k.a. the Bannock Lady, and Michael Champagne, founder of Aboriginal Youth Opportunities, as examples. “When you see inspiration like that, it’s hard to stay stuck in your day to day.”

Van Eerd-Cook also notes many people living in poverty invest their time bettering their communities — and their emotional, intellectual and physical labour is often unpaid. She believes if people across socio-economic backgrounds could find a way to work together in a collaborative, compassionate way, we’d all be better off.

“The skill and the intelligence of people who are very stable is a positive gift to people who aren’t. Because we aren’t coming from the same places — in education, in life circumstances, in beginnings,” she says.

“The more we work together, the more we’ll see our society change to reflect the things we’re looking for out of it.”

And that’s where Make the Month comes in. Because in order to reduce poverty in this country, we need to take a page from van Eerd-Cook: we need to look at poverty differently.

Try the simulation at www.makethemonth.ca/winnipeg.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti