CHAMPAIGN,Ill. – About 150 students who are taking an introductory course in social work at the University of Illinois this semester will experience the problems that
low-income families in their communities struggle with every day when the students participate in a poverty simulation exercise on Tuesday (Sept. 28).
The United Way of Champaign County is conducting the simulation exercises for organizations in the area to help people better understand what daily life is like for the county’s residents who live in poverty.
The U. of I. students participating are enrolled in Social Work 200, a survey course that introduces them to social work and the practices and methods used by social workers. A required course for students in the school’s bachelor of social work degree program, the course also is open to undergraduate students of all majors to fulfill the university’s general education requirement in the social sciences.
The two course sections offered this semester are taught by Samantha Hack-Ritzo, who is a doctoral student and teaching assistant, and Tara Earls Larrison, a faculty member in the school.
Alicia Beck, interim assistant dean of advancement in the School of Social Work, was among a group of about 40 people in the community who took part in the exercise on Sept. 1 in Champaign as part of the United Way’s Emerging Community Leaders Program. Afterward, Beck discussed her experience with Hack-Ritzo, who had heard about the exercise from graduate students in another class that she teaches.
“They were all saying how amazing, transformative and educational it was,”
Hack-Ritzo said. “Alicia and I started talking about it and thought it would be an excellent experience for people considering the social work profession or helping professions in general.”
In the past, Hack-Ritzo, who has taught Social Work 200 for three semesters, has had her students engage in empathy exercises to help them better understand what life is like for people with physical disabilities.
“It’s important to understand the obstacles and difficulties that people encounter that the students haven’t had to deal with,” Hack-Ritzo said. “We can give the students charts, show them slides and have them read about poverty and learn statistics, but the important thing isn’t for them to be able to recite statistics about poverty, it’s for them to understand what poverty feels like.”
At the outset of the poverty simulation, participants are split up into groups representing various low-income individuals or families, such as a single parent with two small children or an elderly couple raising a grandchild with a learning disability. Participants receive packets that describe the unique challenges that their families face along with a limited number of transportation vouchers, tickets to use as cash and information about their debts, bills and personal belongings.
Participants must figure out how to pay their rent and utilities, feed their families, get their children to school, and pay for public transportation to get to the social service agencies they need to visit – and sometimes accomplish all that while dealing with an unexpected expense, such as an unplanned pregnancy or a broken appliance.
Even Beck – who has a master’s of social work degree and spent four years in the field working with homeless people in Ohio and Kentucky before joining the School of Social Work’s staff – found the exercise challenging. Beck also is a member of a working group that is addressing housing and homelessness issues in Champaign County.
“I’ve been with clients as they’ve walked through many processes, such as obtaining Social Security benefits, getting food stamps and getting into public housing,” Beck said. “These aren’t easy systems to navigate. When you start the exercise, you think you’ll be able to think through it, identify all the obstacles down the way, organize things and get it all done – but the fact is, you forget that you have to have bus fare to get back home after an appointment, or you find you can’t afford bus fare for the whole family when you need to go somewhere.”
During the exercise, Beck was paired with another participant as an elderly couple with ongoing medical problems and a limited income. When their money ran out, Beck and her partner had to turn to the food pantry and pawn some of their belongings.
“Organizing all of those different things – making sure you got to appointments on time and had enough transportation money, deciding whether it made sense to apply for food stamps – took an amazing amount of coordination – and, sometimes, we failed,” Beck said.
“It’s meant to be very realistic, and you develop a better understanding about why people might be pushed into taking certain paths,” Hack-Ritzo said. “Suddenly, people realize that when someone is busy trying to pay the rent, find a job and obtain food getting the kids to school becomes less of a priority. In the simulation, sometimes the kids miss so much school that the truant officer comes by and picks them up.
“As social workers, we come in with good intentions, and we want to help, but many of us don’t know what it’s like to deal with poverty every day of our lives because we haven’t been in the clients’ shoes. Things look very different when you are the one in that role trying to survive.”
The School of Social Work, which is one of the oldest schools in the U.S., offers a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a doctoral degree program, preparing students for clinical practice as social workers in mental health, schools, child welfare and health as well as for leadership positions in education and research. Faculty members and students also perform cutting-edge research in numerous areas, including public child welfare and family reunification, bullying, race and ethnicity and provision of services and substance abuse treatment.
