March 21 was Social Work Awareness Day. There were tables set up in the SUB to help better inform students of the work that social workers do and to help students understand the hardships that many people go through on a day-to-day basis.
One thing they did to show students these hardships was a poverty simulator. When you hear the work “simulator” you would usually think of a game, but this was far from a game. The purpose of the simulator was to give students an idea of what it is like to live on an incredibly small budget.
Students were placed in fake families with fake names and were given information about their identities and financial situation. Everyone in the families are given specific tasks, and they have to make difficult financial decisions in 15 minute increments representing a work week. This goes on for four weeks (one hour).
I was one of the students to participate in the simulation, and it was definitely not a game. I was stressed through the entire hour trying to balance everything. Since the identities are based on real-life situations, there were so many choices I had to make with the others in my family just to survive the week. We barely had time to look at the next week in advance.
Ashley Hillsman, a TSU SNAP-Ed Agent, was one of the coordinators for the simulation.
“The goal is to walk away with more empathy for people who live below the poverty line today,” Hillsman said. “You never know what people are going through in their real life and that’s the goal of the poverty simulation, to get people more empathy towards people who are struggling to make ends meet.”
Throughout the simulation, you could see frantic students trying to pay bills, pay for food, pawning appliances and even getting ripped off by vendors and businesses.
Kaitlyn Stutz, a senior social work major, participated in the simulation.
“I felt very stressed out, very spread thin,” Stutz said. “I was running from work to the bank trying to get there before it closed; my employer was not nice to me. You could barely get anywhere because you had to buy transportation, and by the time you could buy transportation, you were late to work.”
There were no real moments of levity in the simulation either because there was always a pressing task to complete.
We tend to look down upon those we think aren’t trying to fix their situation. This simulation will prove otherwise. There are millions who are struggling to overcome poverty, and it can be very hard to do so.
If Union brings this back next year, I would highly recommend it. You can’t understand what it’s like to be in poverty unless you can get a taste of what it’s like yourself.
