Area stakeholders will have the chance to learn about poverty and how it affects their communities when Delaware Opportunities hosts a poverty simulation from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday, April 2.
The simulation at the Bainbridge Community Center, 5 Prospect St., was “created as a way to help people understand the realities of poverty,” according to a media release.
Delaware Opportunities Executive Director Shelly Bartow said that although the agency has held simulations countywide, the upcoming event was the result of collaboration with 4TownsForward, a nonprofit organization representing community interests in Afton, Bainbridge, Sidney and Unadilla.
“We participate in one of the 4TownsForward subcommittees, which is focused on poverty, and there’s been a lot of discussion occurring around homelessness, in particular,” she said. “There’s been interest in helping raise awareness of the complexities of poverty to help people better understand how to strategize short-term and long-term solutions.
Bartow said the event is for “key community stakeholders.”
“We’ve been asked to … provide the simulation for groups of elected officials, town board members and other key community stakeholders in those towns,” she said.
“That’s what’s unique about this effort, is its combination of people from the human service side as well as law enforcement and elected officials and business owners,” Bartow continued. “It’s an interesting mix of people trying to come together to address the challenges their community residents are facing.
“My staff here is going to volunteer to be the different agency people that are part of the simulation, and the targeted population for participants is those key community stakeholders,” she continued. “Should we not get enough people signed up, we considered opening it up … but it is particularly for decision-makers who maybe need to update their awareness.”
Bartow said the simulation will represent “four weeks’ worth of time in the life of someone living in poverty.” Though she said executing such events requires “quite a bit of setup, logistically,” the simulation is based on a kit.
“Myself and one of my staff are trained to be facilitators for this, but this is also what Delaware Opportunities does,” she said. “That’s our prime target population, so we have a vested interest, obviously, in helping people understand.
“There’s a variety of family makeups with different challenges and (participants) have to be in the role and navigating the particular challenges their family is facing,” Bartow continued. “In between each one-week period, there’s a debrief, and we talk about what’s going on so far and remind them what to think about in future weeks and the decisions they’re making. The more people that participate, the more effective it is, because the more of the different family situations you see.”
Bartow said such events typically receive strong feedback.
“There’s sometimes some stigma associated with these ahead of time, that it’s just a game, but the strength of the simulation lies in the strength of the facilitator,” she said. “We did a recent one for DCMO BOCES for teachers, for professional development, and a lot of the things we heard were, ‘I had no idea how hard it would be.’
“In some ways, it simplifies what is a very complex problem and helps people understand how hard it is to make really critical life decisions, but in the safeness of a simulation,” Bartow continued. “It is usually very eye-opening for people, especially if they don’t work with that population or haven’t experienced poverty themselves. And a lot of the conversation after the fact is realizing they maybe couldn’t make all the decisions they needed to make, they just couldn’t.”
In that way, Bartow said, simulations can prove catalytic.
“We as facilitators relate (findings) back to our own community and talk about what it looks like in reality, rather than leaving it as a game,” she said. “We really try to connect it back and use that as a launching pad to say, ‘OK, what can we do next?’ Our hope with this particular simulation is that the next step will be bringing more people to the table to be part of more conversations and take actual, tangible measures toward actual results and outcomes.”
For more information, contact jhartwell@delop.org or call Delaware Opportunities at 607-746-1600.