Mal Freeman graduated from high school 10
years ago and still dreams of becoming a registered nurse. She’s looked into a nursing degree at
Lincoln Land Community College that would take two years of
full-time classes, but she’d prefer to spread the program out
and study more carefully if the care of patients is to rest in her
hands. “I’d rather be prepared,”
she explains in a soft voice. “Going to school for four years
instead of two, I get a good chance of working in a hospital.
I’d have options.”
Freeman, a 28-year-old mother of four living
in a Springfield Housing Authority development, southeast of
downtown, will struggle more than most to realize her dream. Barely
clinging to the poverty line, she and her husband of seven years
are expecting their fifth child in November. The couple already has
legal custody of Mal’s sister’s two oldest children,
ages 8 and 11, in addition to their own
3-, 5-, 6- and
7-year-olds. Her husband used to make $400 a week on the
late-shift cleaning crew at a restaurant, but new management
recently hired a different provider. Now he’s looking for a
job. Freeman’s pregnancy left her too sick to continue as a
part-time teacher’s aide for Springfield District 186, an
on-call position paying $7.50 an hour with no benefits. Because the Freemans’ income depends on
whatever work is available to them, their earnings occasionally touch the poverty line of
$31,570 for their family of eight. More often than not, they live below
it, managing to get by on some food stamps and a modest Social Security
benefit paid for the sister’s children. This family is part of a rising tide of poor.
The latest Census Bureau statistics reveal that 12.4 percent of
Illinoisans lived in poverty in 2004. In 2000, the rate was 10.7
percent. Freeman was brought up not to complain, and
she doesn’t think she’s been dealt an unfair hand. Her
grandmother — who took her in at the age of 10 after her
mother turned to drugs — taught her to appreciate the life
she has, without envy or anger. “What you got in your house, you thank
God for it,” she says.
Hurricane Katrina dumped poverty
into the nation’s living rooms by pointing cameras at
thousands of poor residents stranded on rooftops without the means
to escape the rising water. Although poverty is more common in New
Orleans than in many other cities, the plight of those on
society’s lowest economic rung is hardly unique to that
region. More than 1.56 million people in Illinois
live below minimal-income levels of $9,310 for one person or
$15,670 for a family of three. Yet with housing, gas, and heating
costs rising rapidly, many agencies will serve those experiencing
poverty even with incomes at 150 percent or 200 percent of the
official poverty cutoff. With so many in need, social services
— government, churches and secular nonprofits —
are scrambling to keep up. On a recent Saturday morning in Springfield,
some 120 families — mostly white, the rest black and Hispanic
— lined up for two hours outside the St. Martin de Porres
Center on South Grand Avenue to receive a monthly allotment of
food, an armful of used clothes or both. Last year the center
helped 14,400 families, or about 60,000 individuals, as a ministry
of the Catholic Church. “This year we expect to serve 16,000 to
17,000 families and 65,000 to 70,000 individuals,” says
director Gene Humphreville, an 84-year-old widower who has guided
the center for more than a decade. “Every year has been 10
percent, 15 percent, or 20 percent above the year
before.”
Among those lined up for help are
grandparents caring for grandkids and laid-off workers who used to
consider themselves middle-class. Some greet Humphreville by name,
shake his hand, or thank him. “Bless you,” they say.
The center doesn’t turn anyone away but does ask for
identification to ensure that visitors don’t come more than
once a month, even though the box of food each person is handed will
last perhaps three or four days. One woman balancing a toddler on her
hip tells the intake volunteer that she needs food and clothes for one
adult and six kids. The volunteer nods silently and enters the
information into the computer. Posted on a bulletin board in the clothing
section is a faded notice for dressforsuccess.org, a nonprofit
group that provides a business suit for an interview and another
once the recipient is hired. No one here today is a likely
candidate for this organization’s services: Many are already
employed in low-paying service jobs or are unlikely to seek work
that requires a suit. “The positive progress made in the
second half of the ’90s, where the numbers of people poor
were reduced and we had movement in the right direction, that has
stalled,” says Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn. “We have to renew our efforts. The best
way to fight poverty is if you’re able-bodied and breathing,
we want you in a job — but we also must create jobs in our
own back yard that don’t go to a foreign country.”
Most who try to assist the poor
agree that economic recovery has bypassed a state strapped with
high unemployment and sluggish job growth. “What economists call the economic
recovery of the last couple years did not impact Illinois as much
as other places,” says Amy Rynell, director of the Mid-America Institute on
Poverty within the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and
Human Rights. “We continue to lose businesses, and that’s
what I hear a lot in the middle of the state: that such-and-such
company left and there’s no new companies to replace them. So
when people find another job it’s a downgrade, and it might mean
more travel.” Yet living costs continue to increase,
particularly such live-or-die expenses as health care and
prescription medicine. The price of gasoline has nearly doubled in
the past year, and experts predict that home-heating costs will
skyrocket this winter. Those who must survive on fixed incomes,
particularly the elderly, face a crunch of tough financial
decisions. “I think people are choosing between
paying utilities or buying food, or paying the rent or buying
medicine,” says Pam Molitoris, director of Central Illinois
Foodbank, which delivers food to nearly 200 agencies in 21
counties. “You’ve got a lot of families that, even
working, cannot make ends meet.”
The agency gets its food from a network known
as America’s Second Harvest, USDA commodities, and corporate
donations of food overruns, test products, mislabeled packages, and
unpopular products that didn’t sell, Molitoris says. The
Foodbank delivers just under 4 million pounds of food annually to
Springfield, Decatur, and a sprawling rural area spanning 22
percent of the state, or 12,000 square miles, in refrigerated
trucks that are expensive to operate. But even that huge effort is
not enough. “In Springfield, over 50 percent of
kids are eligible in school systems for free or reduced lunch
programs and in Decatur, it’s even higher — 60
percent,” she says. On a recent trip to Decatur, Molitoris saw a
pantry run out of food on Monday when the next shipment
wasn’t due until Friday. Although the agency’s food is
supposed to supplement what families can buy on their own, she
adds, “it is an indication when they’re closing early
there’s a need issue there.”
Quinn has spearheaded several initiatives
aimed at reducing poverty and unemployment. Next month he and a
partnership of utility companies will unveil a program to
“weatherize Illinois” — a two-pronged plan to
create jobs and conserve energy in public buildings and private
residences by weatherizing against heat loss and replacing lighting
with energy-efficient bulbs to cut back on electricity use. In
addition, because the poor pay as much as 20 percent of their
income for fuel and utilities, he hopes that energy efficiency will
save them money while reducing the state’s dependence on
foreign oil. “Almost all the money we spend in
Illinois on energy leaves our state and never comes back,” he
says. “If we, as a society, say we
don’t want to spend so much hard-earned money on buying
energy from foreign countries, then we have to use American common
sense and figure out how to become more energy-efficient.
Conservation, Teddy Roosevelt said, is the patriotic thing to
do.”
Largely through Quinn’s efforts, the
state recently funded the Paul Simon Rural Transportation Service
to bring public transportation to residents in 30 rural counties,
including Sangamon, where bus service previously ran only within
the Springfield city limits. He also favors tax reforms that would
allow the working poor to keep more of what they earn, and he has
spurred a contingent of volunteers to educate low-income working
residents who may be eligible for the Earned Income Tax credit,
which reduces the tax they owe and often results in cash-back
refunds. One such outreach netted refunds averaging $1,300 per
household, he says. Other groups partner with the state to
strengthen communities and provide the economic development
necessary to attract residents, jobs, and prosperity. From her
position as chief executive officer of Rural Partners, Kay Gregg is
leading efforts to bring broadband into rural areas so that those
towns can appeal to urbanites looking to live a rural lifestyle and
develop small businesses that create jobs. “The
infrastructure has to be in place for rural areas first,” she
says.
At the Illinois People’s
Assembly in Springfield, Chris Miller organizes at the grassroots
level to address what he calls the “big issues”
confronting the poor: transportation, health care, child care,
housing, education, and jobs. By working on behalf of new policies,
Miller strives to bring poverty out of the shadows and urges
low-income residents to participate in the political and community
decisions that will affect their lives. “There’s people power and
there’s money power,” he contends. “People in
poverty are never going to have that power; they’re never
going to have the voice that money can have in an
election.”
Miller and a coalition of advocacy groups
recently fought — and won — a battle against the
state’s powerful payday-loan industry. Earlier this summer,
Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed legislation that will regulate
predatory lending and rein in sky-high interest rates charged by
short-term-loan companies, which have mushroomed in Illinois from
zero storefronts 10 years ago to nearly 1,000 today. The law takes
effect in December. The recently unemployed are particularly
vulnerable to such tactics, Miller says. They need to adjust their
expectations and trim expenses to conform to a lower standard of
living, but many will turn to short-term loans to cover the bills
after the paychecks stop, thinking that another job is just around
the corner. Instead, months may pass before they are able to
retrain in a new field or develop the computer skills that many
employers require. “For the first time, factory workers
are facing poverty,” he says. “They go to payday-loan
stores because they don’t know what to do. Someone living a
middle-class existence suddenly finding themselves in poverty, they
don’t know how to deal with that.”
Reaching those who are slipping
financially is challenging. Few people openly discuss whether they
can pay their bills, so many who drift in and out of poverty feel
stigmatized and alone. Most, like Freeman, don’t want to draw
attention to themselves, so they try to sound better off than they
are. In fact, truly understanding and assessing a situation such as
Freeman’s is complex and politically charged. Religious conservatives might applaud her
decision to forgo abortion and give birth to her unplanned third
and fourth children. And her willingness to adopt a niece and
nephew from an overwhelmed sister — when the sister
threatened to turn them over to child-protective services and a
rocky future in foster care — deserves praise. Yet others would note that her decision to
have so many children in the first place has hampered her ability
to earn more and live better. And had she pursued nursing
immediately after high school, when that goal was still attainable,
she would likely not be living in poverty today. Freeman says that she applied for college but
had to move before receiving an acceptance letter, so she
doesn’t even know for sure whether she was admitted. Like
others who are poor, she says that she has moved nearly every year
for many reasons — to avoid rent increases she couldn’t
afford, to leave a unit flooded by burst plumbing, to escape a
violent neighborhood. After that, she doesn’t remember what
went wrong. “Life got in the way,” she says.
She focused on supporting herself through a series of fast-food
jobs in Chicago. But Freeman has a lot going for her, too. She is a high-school graduate, avoided her
mother’s fate of teen pregnancy, and is married — all
crucial factors in achieving economic well-being, according to
numerous studies and experienced policy advocates such as Rynell of
the Heartland Alliance. (“Teens who have children are almost
guaranteed poverty,” Rynell says.) Freeman has not only held
her family together but also provided a stability that she lacked
growing up. She is most proud of an accomplishment taken for
granted by the well-to-do: On Nov. 16, she and her family will have
lived for four years under the same roof. And whereas virtually
everyone she knows “just gets by” or worse, Freeman has
a savings account and no outstanding loans or credit cards. In her
view, accumulating more cash as a safety net was not a prerequisite
to starting a family. Yet Freeman is far from alone. The vast
majority of working adults who live on the financial edge are
vulnerable to being blindsided by an emergency such as a natural
disaster or health-care crisis. A recent study revealed that 15
percent of Illinois households have zero net worth, putting them at
risk, according to Heartland Alliance. “There are a few different ways to get
out of poverty, and one of them is to build assets,” Rynell
says. “That’s how the GI Bill helped so
many veterans make a good life for themselves and their families.
Without having things like a house, higher education, a savings
account, it’s hard to weather the crises that come and go in
your life. We all experience similar crises, but what you have in
your back pocket to deal with those crises is important.”
Quinn says that it’s critical that
state government commit to leaving no resident behind. “We don’t want anyone in
Illinois, the land of Lincoln, to be invisible if they have
need,” he says. “We have to look at policies in
government and private life to make sure our neighbor is not left
on the side of the road.”
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 2, 2005.
