Happy New Year!
Wishing you a joyous New Year.
2013 was a great year for CoActive Connections! We trained approximately 400 individuals about poverty through our Poverty Awareness Training and the poverty simulation. We updated our mission statement to more accurately reflect what we do, and we even moved to a brand new office location!
More importantly, we heard your stories of how you have been personally impacted by poverty. At nearly every training, a participant shares their personal story about how poverty has touched their lives.
After a recent training, one participant shared with me how much the training meant to her because her colleagues could experience poverty from a very personal perspective during the training. She revealed that most of her colleagues assume that nobody they work with struggles financially because they are in stable jobs at their organization.
Hers is a different story.
She works with the organization part-time, and also works 2 additional jobs in order to make ends meet. But she still struggles. Trying to meet her basic needs every day is a struggle, no matter how much she works.
Further into the conversation, she started shedding tears because our training hit "close to home." She realized how close to poverty she is, and that nobody around her at work could really understand. She was embarrassed, and she was stressed.
But she thanked us for doing the training because it humanized the poverty experience. Even though she may never tell her colleagues of her struggles, she feels that they better understand what living in poverty is truly like. She was grateful that she saw some changes in the way her colleagues perceive poverty, and the people who experience it.
This participant's experience is, unfortunately, one we experience at nearly every training. There is almost always someone in the audience who has, or who is currently, experiencing poverty. They are embarrassed, and their colleagues, friends, neighbors, and even families may not know. They don't want them to know. But education goes a long way in improving understanding and changing the way we look at poverty and the people experiencing it. Poverty hurts many people, directly impacting more than 1 out of 6 Oregonians.*
As 2013 wraps up, please consider supporting poverty awareness education. With your support, we can reach more people with real life stories and data about the impacts of poverty. We can change the way people think about poverty. Why? Because our vision is that no one should be treated differently because of their economic status.
Will you help us make our vision a reality? Make a secure, tax-deductible donation today!
*United States Census Bureau 2012 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates
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