Poverty Simulation Held in Superior

Professionals and community members learn the struggles of people living in poverty

SUPERIOR, Wis. – A program in Superior showed the community what living in poverty can be like.

It’s sometimes difficult for people who didn’t grow up in poverty to understand what it’s like on a daily basis.

At the Billings Park Civic Center, the Douglas County Fostering Futures Initiative gave community members the chance to experience a month of poverty in an hour.

Participants broke into groups with each person being assigned a role.

The roles were as different as elderly grandparents, struggling parents, and even young children.

They had to figure out how to spend their money, where to find a job, and how to get education and services for them and their families.

“There’s a real need for particularly people who have no awareness of poverty, new social workers, new police officers and others to really get a sense of what it might be like to actually live in poverty,” said Lynn Tracy of the Douglas County Fostering Futures Initiative.

By experiencing the simulated adversity of people living in poverty, professionals and community members learned how difficult it can be to navigate systems.

They also learned that the challenges of poverty can have biological effects on people.

“What I’ve found that does for me as a professional is it creates empathy and compassion and instead of asking what is wrong with this person, we can think what’s happened to them, what’s going on in their lives, and how can we better support them?” said Tracy Henegar of the Douglas County Fostering Futures Initiative.

Organizers hope that participants will become more involved in finding solutions to poverty after attending the simulation.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 15.5% of Douglas County residents were living below the poverty level from 2012-2016.