Focus:

People in our Community

Objective:

To develop an understanding of what it means to be poor in the United States – and to begin to make meaningful connections between the official poverty numbers and the real-life situations they represent.

Introduction:

Most people in the United States of America have what they need to live in comfort. Most people have enough food to eat, enough clothes to wear, and enough shelter to be safe. However, in the United States today, there are 37 million people living in poverty. 

People are said to be “living in poverty” when they do not have enough of what it takes to fulfill basic human needs. A person can be poor when he or she lacks the essentials of daily life, such as a sufficient amount of food to keep them from being hungry. A person can be poor if he or she works hard at a job but doesn’t make enough money to buy the things needed to be healthy and secure, such as proper clothing to keep them warm in cold weather or health care to help them when they are sick.

Who is poor in the United States? This is how those living in poverty would answer. We are White. We are African-American. We are Hispanic and Native-American and Asian, too. We are young and we are old. We live in cities, suburbs and in the country. We go to work and go to school and go to church. We are concerned about raising our children well. We help others who are in worse shape than we are. We sometimes depend on the kindness of others. We are one out of every six children in America. We are one out of every ten families in America. We aren’t all the same.