Defining Poverty: A Reflection on My Internship and Life

by Charity Gilbert

What does it mean to be in poverty? The Merriam-Webster dictionary tells us that it is “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.” But those words hardly describe how much more there is to be living in a state of poverty. If you want to understand poverty’s real complexity, your choices are to live in it yourself or listen to the voices of those who have done so.

This summer, I began an internship at Red Bird Mission in the southern, most mountainous part of Clay County, Kentucky. I worked in the Outreach department, which is just one of many services that Red Bird offers, including housing repairs, the farmer’s market, selling locally made crafts and art, education efforts, early childhood development, a baby pantry, health outreach, food assistance, a community store, holiday giving, emergency relief, Grow Appalachia gardens, a clinic, and the senior center, Red Bird has a little bit of everything that folks might need. And aside from all these direct ways of helping, when you walk into the Outreach building, you’ll see a table full of brochures and resources for just about anything you could need. Anything that isn’t there is likely just a question away at the front desk. The workers in outreach use a guide that Red Bird created, which I spent a good portion of my summer updating, to refer people to resources they need, such as low-income housing, recovery centers, mental health resources, and many other things.

During the summer, I mostly worked with the food pantry at Red Bird and organizing the Christmas room. There were three separate programs/boxes that folks could get: -emergency food boxes that folks could get one every three months, an emergency (TEFAP) pantry that could be used once monthly, and boxes from the Family-to-Family pantry that were packed once a month for families who qualified. The TEFAP pantry had the most people coming in and was where I had the most conversations with locals from the community, which was a big part of what solidified my desire to go into the field of social work. I had encounters with some folks in the community who were struggling with substance use disorder and also with mental health issues. One instance, in particular, hit me hard.

Red Bird has a work camp, so sometimes, volunteers who are here on mission trips with their churches come to the community, and one or two would come to help us at outreach. In one instance, a woman who was from out west was volunteering, and I was showing her how to help someone “shop” the TEFAP pantry. The person was showing clear signs of substance use, but I helped them just like I would anyone else. After the person left, the volunteer asked about the person being on drugs and explained that it was a shame, and that they shouldn’t be allowed to come there. I had to do my best to explain the complexity of substance use in the region and how every person deserves to eat, regardless of what they are doing or struggling with. It also seemed hard for some volunteers to understand how people could come to the emergency pantry every month, again and again. “That isn’t an emergency,” was the attitude of some volunteers. With that, I had to think carefully about how to tell them what it means to live in such a state of poverty that without food pantries like the one at Red Bird the people who used our services wouldn’t have enough food for the month.

Before my internship, I was considering what area of helping people I wanted to go into, and I was curious about how to best help people and what was the most needed. I thought Red Bird might give me one answer about what I should do. I now know what I plan to do with my life, which is to become a substance abuse counselor, but I realized that there is not just one answer to what is needed most in the Eastern KY region. I had to come to terms with the fact that people can’t think about the “next step” to get out of poverty until they are in a place where their basic needs are met. When you live in poverty and are thinking about having food, a place to sleep, electricity, and running water, you can’t think about anything else. Because people are consumed by trying to fill their basic needs, we need to take a holistic approach to helping people meet these needs.

With the combination of lack of transportation, living in an area with few close jobs, lower levels of education, hunger, mental health, substance use, and physical health issues, along with others, we can’t expect to give someone a box of food for the month and see them miraculously get out of poverty. If it weren’t for the opportunities afforded to me even from a young age, I wouldn’t be in a place where I could have come to college. Such resources and a support system are crucial for anyone: although my family was (and is) poor, I happened to be blessed with good friends, church family, great educators in my childhood, and programs and organizations that helped me and my family. Let me use Berea College as an example of a holistic approach, just based on organizations and opportunities I have had since being here.

When I came to Berea, I had come from a place where I could only think about my basic needs being met, but at the college, I had a safe, clean place to stay and food to eat, so those weren’t things I had to worry about anymore. From there, I developed community, made close friends, connected with other Appalachian Students and other students who played music, joined organizations, and have met professors who deeply cared and have helped me tremendously. Having all of that human support and ways that I could grow allowed me to finally be able to take a look at my mental health, and Counseling Services gave me the opportunity to work on my mental health issues and face them head on. From there, I have been able to build my confidence and feel more prepared, so much so that when something goes wrong, I’m learning not to panic, where-as when I was a child, a flat tire could destroy our family for a while and make everything super difficult. My point is that, like Berea did for me, when it comes to helping folks, people’s basic needs must be met first before they can move on to the next level. Seeing judgement and hearing snide comments about how “people just don’t want to work”, “she’s just a junkie”, and a million other hurtful comments like those have led me to think about my own opinions of myself and of those around me. As someone who has lived in poverty in Eastern Kentucky, I acknowledge how just a few different decisions would have put me in a place where I would most likely be at home, unemployed, struggling with addiction, or with children while working a minimum wage job. I’ll even admit that in the hardest times of my life, some of those things not happening feels like it was just dumb luck due to the decisions I made.

All this being said, when I think about what all the experience of poverty entails, I try to think more carefully and deeply. I think about how drugs were pushed into the Appalachian region and how extractive industries polluted the land and left few jobs; I think about the lack of education many people still have in the region, mental health issues and lack of access to mental health resources, and also about negative stereotypes people have about the poor and those struggling with mental health issues or substance use disorder.

Poverty is so much more complex than a single sentence definition could ever explain. The experience of struggling to fulfill your basic needs becomes such a part of yourself, so even after you’re out of it (IF you get out of it), it will still affect you for most of your life in some way, shape, or form. Our work, mine and yours, is to help build a scaffolding so that each person can find the footing to take the next, best step forward, no matter how seemingly small that step may be.