WHITE STONE—Participants in a day-long seminar October 24 found that childcare and children’s services, housing, transportation, jobs and education—including job training— are the primary areas in which gaps in services exist for persons in poverty.
Approximately 100 representatives of local direct-service agencies, government offices, businesses, churches and funding sources gathered for “Living on the Edge: A Look at Local Poverty and Ways to Respond,” at White Stone Church of the Nazarene.
The seminar was sponsored by Visions Inc. The goal was to name the gaps that currently exist in the provision of services to persons living in poverty and to initiate next steps in closing those gaps, reported steering committee chairman Tom Coye.
The event began with a plenary presentation of a paper prepared specifically for “Living on the Edge” by Dr. Laverne Carter, president and chief project director of Burgess-based Research, Evaluation and Social Solutions Inc. (REESSI).
Her paper, “Poverty: Us and Them or We?” took a monthly income of $1,900—set by the federal government as the definition of poverty for a family of four—and described the up-and-down, and generally losing, battle faced by persons trying to run their households with this amount of money.
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