Opinion: Looking for more compassion
Saturday, June 28, 2008
By Jen Simon
Jackson Hole, Wyoming - In 1999, I accepted a one-year posting as a VISTA (Volunteers In Ser vice To America) and earned $700 a month to live and work full time in Teton County. Yes, you are doing the math right: that calculates to $8,400 for an entire year’s work. Today that figure would be adjusted to a whopping $10,200 for a single person.
The wage was consistent with the Federal Poverty Guidelines and the program’s administrators were strict: you could not have another job. So I had to figure out how to stretch that money. Half went to rent, leaving me with $350 each month for everything else.
It was my great fortune that the voluntary posting was for one year, and had a set end date, but for most everyone else living below the poverty line, there is no end in sight. Currently, more than 17 percent of the residents of Teton County live below the poverty line.
All the while resources to assist them are becoming more scarce - here in Teton County and nationwide. Human services organizations in Teton County are struggling to keep pace with the intense demand for their services. According to Susan Eriksen-Meier of the Community Foundation of Jackson Hole, “The community is living on borrowed time.”
We have already borrowed on too many levels. Demand for vital services – mental health, substance abuse treatment, education, job training and placement – is up, but donations are down, and public funding has been slashed.
Nationally, since 2006, “giving to human services dropped an estimated … 12 percent (adjusted for inf lation),” according to the Giving USA Foundation at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy. In the meantime, giving to “arts, culture and humanities organizations [increased] 9.9 percent.” Adding to this decline is the fact that human services organizations have as many as a third new clients, according to an atricle in the “Chronicle on Philanthropy.”
Locally, we echo this trend, with a fraction of the community’s total donations flowing toward human services organizations, according to the information provided by Compassion Moves Mountains. Likewise, most new clients are established members of the community, who often have been here more than 20 years and are asking for help for the first time.
Compassion Moves Mountains, comprised of the 10 organizations in the Human Services Planning Council, was launched June 15 to agencies and donors and will make its debut in the community in the next few weeks. Thanks to the gift of two local donors, human services organizations will reach out to the community through a sophisticated marketing campaign to raise awareness of the services that the agencies provide - and the profound need for them. The hope is that awareness will translate to donor dollars and volunteer time and human services will see increases in their coffers commensurate with the ongoing increases in requests for services.
As this community changes, we run the risk of the polarization of wealth. It has happened other places, and it can, and will happen here too, if each of us is not concerned with the least fortunate among us. How we choose to support the organizations of the Human Services Planning Council and in turn, their clients - our neighbors - will answer the real question facing our community: What kind of community do we want to be?
I want to live in a community where if I had to ask for help, for real keep-thebottom-from-falling-out-from-under-me help, that help would be there. If I had to live at the poverty line again, this time with no end in sight, I would want to know that my neighbors cared.
Jen Simon is an 11-year Jackson resident, a board member of Teton Youthand Family Services and a founding member of Womentum and theWomen’s Conference on Sustainability.PERMALINK:
Opinion: Looking for more compassion | Planet JH News Article: General News
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