Working with work requirements

Posted by Lisa Williams in on Feb 4, 2017 Tagged:

This is a continuing blog series by Lisa Williams, Feeding Wisconsin’s blogger in residence. Lisa will be sharing stories from her lived experiences, her fight against hunger, how she faced it down, and how she won.

She is now a Lead Recovery Specialist at a local non-profit helping others turn their lives around. Lisa is a current Fellow in the Ex Fabula Fellows Program. You can find the rest of her series here. 

I read last week that the Governor released his budget proposal that would change the FoodShare program and require parents with children to work 20 hours a week to be eligible.

As someone who was formerly on the FoodShare program, let me tell you that all I did was work and when I was out of a job, all I wanted to do was work to build a better life. What I didn’t want was to have a deal with a bureaucratic requirement that did not help me work or address the challenges that I had in finding work.

When I was a Certified Nursing Assistant in 1995, I was living in Chicago but working in one of the suburbs. I got up at 3:30 am to make sure I left the house at 4:30 am to get to work by 7:00 am. I had to take two buses and two trains just for the morning commute.

When I got off at 3:30 pm, I would turn it around and do the reverse in the evening, which got me home at about 6:00 pm.

The only reason I could do this was because my sister or my mother would babysit my young son. Well, that was only if my sister or mom and I were getting along at the moment. If we weren’t getting along, I couldn’t go to work. I was only making $5.25 an hour and I couldn’t afford childcare. And even if I could, what childcare is open at 4 am?

So I would be gone from my son all day and when I got home, I would play with him, make sure he ate, read to him, and then go to bed by 8:30 pm so that I could it all again the next day.

It was exhausting.

I am lucky to have made it through. Unfortunately, my story isn’t that special. There are many, many people in this same situation – traveling far distances to do tough work for low wages.

I wonder if the people making these laws knew how hard people like me were working and the challenges that we had or still have to overcome every day. If they did, I have to believe that they would be doing more to address those issues, instead of making it harder for people on assistance programs. This doesn’t even take into consideration some of the other challenges that single parents may have whether it’s mental, physical, or emotional.

These work requirements don’t even begin to address the basics of why people have difficulty getting to jobs: they need a living wage, access to dependable transportation and programs to help with the costs of transportation, childcare, and housing.

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The Holidays on a Low-Income

Posted by Lisa Williams in on Dec 1, 2016 Tagged:

This is a continuing blog series by Lisa Williams, Feeding Wisconsin’s blogger in residence. Lisa will be sharing stories from her lived experiences, her fight against hunger, how she faced it down, and how she won. She is now a Lead Recovery Specialist at a local non-profit helping others turn their lives around. Lisa is a current Fellow in the Ex Fabula Fellows Program. You can find the rest of her series here. 

The holidays are complex for me and I have some really conflicted feelings during the season.  First, I feel like the commercialism surrounding the holiday season has overshadowed the fact it should just be a time of reflection and to be with families and friends. I still struggle with the holidays because I remember growing up, I would get very little in the way of gifts or food during Christmas. There was one time when I saw my cousins getting some very nice gifts for Christmas and all I got an undergarment and a pair of socks. I vowed that if I ever had kids, I would never get them underwear for Christmas. 

When I had my son, I really couldn’t afford to get any gifts with an income of $268.00 per month, so I wasn’t financially stable enough to get him gifts until he was five years old and I went crazy shopping for him. I wanted to see him happy, and I guess I was trying to make up for the years that I couldn’t shop for him.

Yet, while the holidays were tough because we had so little as a child, I still looked forward to them because I would get to be with my extended family. Since I was the only child living with my grandparents, I spent so much of my time alone, and so during the holidays, I got great joy being around my cousins as we would eat together at the table and then spend the rest of the time talking and playing throughout the house as the adults talked among themselves. 

During the summer months where we lived in the Mississippi Delta, a truck would pull up outside of our house and the man would deliver huge baskets of peas to my grandmother. I can remember helping my grandmother "shell peas” which meant cracking open the shell with our fingers and letting the peas fall into a bowl. I remember shelling so many peas that my fingertips were purple. On some occasions, when my cousins visited, we would sometimes try to see who could out-shell each other. 

My grandmother would then half cook the peas and put them into plastic bags and put them in the freezer. We then had a season’s worth of peas to eat and they usually came out in the winter, during the holidays. 

Because we always had peas and butterbeans to eat, I never remembered being hungry as a child. But sometimes I didn’t want any more peas and beans because I had eaten so many of them I would just get physically nauseated especially when my grandmother made me eat them.  

When you eat so much of one thing, it tends to get boring whether you’re hungry or not and your body starts to crave other foods. I would get the guilt trip that some people didn’t even have peas to eat, so I should be grateful. I grew up eating so many peas and butterbeans that when I could finally say no, I refused to eat them for a while as an adult. Now, when I hear kids say, “I’m not eating any peas,” I just chuckle because I realized that I wasn’t the only one that must have had peas on their dinner tables, whether it was during the holidays or not. 

As an young teenager, I remember my mother signing up for holiday food baskets and standing in long lines, which at that time, I really didn’t care to do. Even though we were getting food for the holidays, I didn’t want other people who may have just been passing by to see me as being greedy or even needy because I would hear some people in the community say that “they” - meaning people who were in the food lines - were taking advantage of these programs and didn’t really need them; “they were just being greedy”.

However, as an adult when I first moved to Milwaukee, I had to stand in those same lines once or twice and was very humbled by the whole experience. I was just as embarrassed as I had been when my mother stood in the lines years before in Chicago. I felt like I was one of the poor people who I heard other people put down. 

Let me tell you - nobody wants to stand in that line. The only reason I did it was because I wanted my son to have a nice holiday dinner and to not feel like we couldn’t afford food. So, I was grateful that these programs were there for that reason alone. 

I’m glad that I don’t have to do stand in lines anymore, at least not right now. I try and donate to help others eat for the holidays because I know someone in the past donated to help me and my family eat during those times. 

In the Thanksgiving post on the blog, David wrote of his experience answering phones at the holiday phone bank for Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin. He wrote, “Food, especially during this time of year, carries with it a lifetime of meaning. It's through these holiday meals shared with friends and family that we mark the progress in our lives. These meals remind us that we are cared for and loved and remembered.”

That was so powerful to me. Because while the holidays still remain a complex time for me, I remember all of the good times that came with it – and they usually had to do with people coming together to prepare food and to eat. Food brings people together and I think it’s food is the most important aspect surrounding the holidays. Something special happens when people eat together, it builds a sense of community and bonding as one, because no matter our differences, we all have this one thing in common – we all need to eat.

Food gives our bodies and minds energy so that we can  move through the world, and if some of us don’t have food, our bodies won’t allow us to do this very basic thing – to live.

 

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The Stigma of Living On Food Stamps

Posted by Lisa Williams in on Nov 3, 2016 Tagged:

This is the first in a blog series by Lisa Williams, Feeding Wisconsin’s blogger in residence. Lisa will be sharing stories from her lived experiences, her fight against hunger, how she faced it down, and how she won. She is now a Lead Recovery Specialist at a local non-profit helping others turn their lives around. Lisa is a current Fellow in the Ex Fabula Fellows Program. 

I grew up having to use food stamps to purchase food and if you think that this was all rainbows, I’m going to tell you different. Every time I went to the store to use them, I felt shame and humiliation.  

As a kid growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I remember when food stamps were issued as paper coupons. I never knew exactly how my grandmother got them, all I knew was that she would send me to the store with these coupons to buy food. 

I’m not quite sure why. Maybe she was trying to instill a sense of responsibility and work ethic within me or maybe she was ashamed to go buy things with them herself. I remember the first time using them. After getting the groceries, I came back home feeling very angry because some people I went to school were also at the store. They were using cash to buy food. I was using food stamps. I knew something was different but not quite sure what. 

Later, it got around the school that I was on food stamps and I became a joke. Right at that moment is when I felt that using food stamps was something to be ashamed of.

When my grandparents died, I had to move with my mother to Chicago. Just after I turned 18, and as I was trying to graduate from high school, I became homeless. I had to leave my mother’s home because of constant abuse and depression and so I had to apply for food stamps and cash benefits to live on my own. 

Just going to apply for these public services in the first place was a nightmare because the welfare workers made me feel like a criminal and that I didn’t deserve this aid. Suddenly that anger and fear that I had as a kid rekindled as I sat in the welfare office. It was so overwhelming because I saw the mistreatment of people and remembered that same mistreatment as a child. I felt like the “welfare queen” that was reported on the TV news, and I didn’t want to be that person, but yet there I sat in the welfare office just trying to get some help to have a very basic living. 

At this time in 1984, I qualified for $150.00 of cash assistance and about $100.00 in food stamps. This would allow me to rent a room in someone’s house for $75.00, buy necessary toiletries with the remaining money and buy food for myself with the food stamps. 

Back then, the state would send your general assistance check and food stamps to the closest assigned currency exchange center depending on where you lived in Chicago. I would have to present my welfare I.D. card that had my name and a number to pick these items up. I would try to get to this place as early as possible to avoid the long lines but sometimes it was just impossible.

The currency exchange would be packed with people trying to get their monthly benefits as well as people who were trying to get change for bus travel, laundry and other things. Sometimes I would stand in line for long periods of time and hoped that I didn’t get robbed when I walked out and thank goodness that I never did. 

As I stood in that line, I would feel so low and ashamed that I felt physically sick. But I knew I had to eat. See, I had always wanted to work but I was never allowed to work any summer jobs as a teenager. So there I was, as an 18 year old, on my own, with no home, just trying to get some basic assistance to live. 

I feel like crying right now as I think back to those days. 

Even buying food at the grocery store was another point of shame and sent me back to my days as a kid buying groceries for my grandmother. Every time I presented the food stamps to the clerk, I would get the same reaction: they would become upset and roll their eyes, just like when I was kid. 

I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was just trying to buy food. 

I tried to hand them the food stamps discretely because I felt so ashamed, but that never worked. The clerk would always sigh and make a big deal out of it, like I was troubling them. 

Leaving the stores, I always felt a huge relief, not only because I got through the shame, but because I could eat, at least for a while. 

Little did I know then that these programs would positively change my life forever.

Check back in the future to see how these programs would help Lisa in her fight against hunger. 

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