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Despite
the myths, Colorado food banks feed mostly working U.S. citizens
with kids
By
Courtney Hunter-Melo
for Headwaters News
Hunger in America is an invisible affliction. Although
those who suffer from hunger may not be obvious to us, the need
is real.
In the United States today, 33 million people are struggling to
meet their basic food needs. More than one-third of those are children,
a fact all the more shocking because children only make up one-quarter
of the overall population.
How can this be? In a country of such great wealth, how can people
go hungry? How can we let our children, the most vulnerable of our
citizens, go without the nutrition their young bodies need to grow?
There are many misconceptions about hunger, and during
my tenure at Food Bank of the Rockies in Denver, I have heard them
all. Food Bank of the Rockies distributes food to nonprofit agencies
with hunger-relief programs that serve the ill, needy and children
in northern Colorado and Wyoming.
I would like to dispel some of the myths regarding the people who
seek food assistance in our communities, and tell you about the
reality.
Myth: Most people who go to pantries for food assistance
are lazy and on welfare.
Reality: Of all client households receiving food from Food
Bank of the Rockies, 53 percent include at least one employed adult.
Across the U.S., 38 percent of the adults living in poverty worked
during the last year. For many of these hardworking people, there
is "too much month at the end of the money." Since a monthly
food supply does not come with a bill such as rent or utilities,
it almost becomes a luxury item, only to be purchased after those
bills are paid.
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Region
has poverty in abundance
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Oct. 30, 2002
By several measures, the recession of the past year
has pushed more families in the region to food banks, homeless shelters
and the brink of financial disaster.
And in some states, the newly poor are swelling the ranks of what
already were some of the highest poverty rates in the nation.
Colorado lost 21,000 jobs last year, and food banks and the agencies
that supply them can't
keep up with the increase in demand. Colorado also ranked last
in the nation for job growth, evidence that demand won't slacken
much soon.
Still, as Courtney Hunter-Melo notes above, it's more often the
underemployed who need help feeding their families, than the unemployed.
Wyoming and Idaho claim bragging rights as the top two states in
the nation for cutting
welfare caseloads in the past decade, pushed by federal mandates
and state programs to train recipients for new jobs.
Wyoming cut its welfare cases by 95 percent between 1993 and 2001;
Idaho ended benefits to 89 percent of its total in the same period.
But critics say that Idaho's two-year maximum to receive benefits,
the shortest in the nation, pushes low-income families to shelters
and food banks, or into the street, either because they've run out
of benefits or quit the program lest they hit their limit before
it's absolutely necessary.
The release of new census figures in September were tinged with
irony for Idaho and New Mexico. New
Mexico's proportion of people living in poverty had declined
from 19.2 percent in 2000 to 17.7 percent in 2001 -- but it was
still the highest in the nation. And those data were before the
recession sank in.
Idaho's poverty rate dropped sharply, as the state rode the crest
of the high-tech boom into the beginning of the crash, but its median
income dropped. At least one analyst said the recession was
taking a bigger toll on the highest-paying, high-tech jobs, on which
the Idaho economy had become ever-more dependent. And that, the
analyst said, outweighed the optimism of a lower poverty rate.
Another study of housing affordability and census data came to similar
conclusions. The National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual
report found that 20
percent of Idaho families can't afford to rent a two-bedroom
home, a threshold that would require a salary of $20,534 -- an hourly
rate of $9.87 for one worker.
In Colorado, the average family must
earn an hourly wage of $15.99 to afford a two-bedroom home,
or to put it another way, a worker earning minimum wage would have
to work 124 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom unit at fair market
rent.
Advocates say rent typically takes as much as 60 percent of a low-income
Colorado family's pay, instead of the 30 percent considered manageable,
and the discrepancy is one of the biggest barriers keeping families
mired in poverty.
In Montana, a mid-September survey found that of the 2,229 homeless
people surveyed, more than 60 percent were families
with children, 700 were children under the age of 14, and 33
were pregnant women.
More than half of the homeless had lived in their community for
at least two years, while about a third had been residents for more
than six years.
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