Final Paper Jessica Hale

GEOG 331/HONORS 231 BA

The Difficulties of Caring About Poverty in the Right Ways

Looking at poverty and care in society is no simple task and after taking an entire class

about this very issue, I feel as though I have more questions now than when I started. By having

the opportunity to work with Street Youth Ministries while learning about these big issues I was

able to see and experience the concepts we were discussing in class. While I grew very attached

to my organization, thinking critically about what impacts their services have and why their care

is needed in the first place helped me to understand the importance of looking at things in their

own social contexts, what produces discrimination and its affects, and how crucial it is to identify

personal privilege in order to understand the root causes of poverty.

Street Youth Ministries (SYM) is a non-profit organization that works with street

involved youth, ages 13 to 26, in the Seattle area. They have three programs in which they focus,

a drop-in center, a case-management program, and life skills activities. I volunteer in their drop-

in center, operating from 7:30pm to 9:30pm each weeknight, where they provide youth with a

small meal, showers, fun activities, and a variety of resources (from clothes to deodorant). The

case-management program is operated by their five person staff and involves meeting with youth

one-on-one and doing a range of things from setting goals to getting IDs and housing help. In my

interview with Kate, the program director of SYM, she described it as walking alongside people

[the youth] (2/25/15). Finally, the life skills activities are primarily getaway outings in which

the staff takes the youth on trips to the mountains to ski, the movies, different game parks, and

more to get a vacation from the streets and education on how to interact in public.
 The work that SYM focuses on is building relationships with the youth that come through

their doors. It is their goal is to make all the youth feel known and supported by the SYM

community and through those relationships, empower and aid them to seek change in getting off

of the streets. What I found inspiring was that when SYM started, it was an all encompassing

shelter in which they provided full meals, a place to sleep, and relationship building activities.

However, as more youth homeless programs arose in Seattle, they decided to come together and

combine as one project providing for the youth. SYM focused on what it was best at, the

relationships, and constructed its drop-in center times so that youth could go get the meals at

Teen Feed and then get a bed at Roots. As for funding, SYM receives their money on a

completely private basis. The executive director of SYM primarily works to secure donors and

identify grants to keep the organization running. She is usually unable to partake in the programs

of SYM because so much of her time is spent building and maintaining relationships with

patrons and organizing fundraisers.

I find SYMs mission very aligned with the relational poverty analysis studied in class

since it focuses on understanding the youth and what got them into their position of

homelessness without any blame or assumptions that it is their own fault. However, sometimes

their mission does not align completely with their actions and there are residual undertones. For

example, their life skills activities are focused on reforming how the youth would naturally act in

public settings by teaching and expecting the youth to conduct themselves as a normal citizen.

This associates very well with Hunts argument of the domestication of the women in Belgian

Africa as a form of reforming gender roles and in effect, establishing and maintain hierarchies

between men and women as well as whites and Africans (Hunt 1990, 499 and 474). The life

skills activities do a very similar thing in trying to reform the youth to be useful members of
society and by doing so enhance the hierarchy between youth and staff members. SYM only

wants to help their youth get out of homelessness, but the way in which they focus on

conforming the youth to society, rather than changing society to conform to the youth, is a

residual undertaking. This is obviously not the intent of SYM and it is difficult to expect more

since they are working in a social context that requires the youth to learn these conforming sets

of behaviors in order to become accepted in society and get out of poverty.

SYM is also a good example of how care is devalued in society with its composition of

staff members as well as its lack of funding. As mentioned before, there are only five staff

members at SYM, four of them being women and the executive director is an Asian minority.

Nakano-Glen picks up on this pattern that women as well as racial minorities are commonly

coerced into assuming responsibility of care work, keeping care work among the low wage

sector of jobs (Nakano-Glen 2010, 5). With the overrepresentation of women working for SYM,

it is clear that the pressure still exists for women and minorities to take up positions of care. If

society appreciated the crucial work of caregivers, we would likely see more men doing the work

since there would be no feminine stigma behind taking care of others.

Additionally, SYM is heavily reliant on volunteers to run their drop-in center because

they do not have the funding to pay more workers. The volunteers are mostly composed of

college students and many are doing this work to add the experience onto their resume. While I

love my fellow volunteers, I feel as though none of us are truly qualified to do the work that we

do. Interacting with the homeless youth population is very sensitive work and volunteers are

automatically in a power dynamic in which we are expected to have a meaningful impact. Most

of us have no experience in this work and while there are some training sessions we are going to

make mistakes that could cause real consequences on the youth. The issue becomes, who else is
going to do the work? Care is not of enough value in which SYM would have the opportunity to

hire truly qualified individuals. When I asked Kate in the interview what she would do with

unlimited funds, one of them was hiring a mental health counselor on staff (2/25/15).

The increasingly privatization of care is another theme in which SYM falls into that

severely limits what SYM can do and the impact they have. As Harveys piece discusses, the

shift into a neoliberal society has promoted the change to personal responsibility and therefore a

defunding of safety net programs and increase of funding from private sectors (Harvey 2005, 11-

16). This work to make care a private matter not only keeps SYM from expanding due to funding

reasons, but also because of the change in societal attitudes about who we determine to be

accountable. As previously mentioned, the executive director of SYM does not get to participate

in the programs because of being consumed in trying to get enough funding for SYM to operate.

The lack of adequate public funding for organizations like SYM only make it more difficult for

them to do their work and, therefore, a paradox is created since they cannot put as much energy

into actually doing the work they are trying to get funding for. Also against their favor is the fact

that as care is privatized, the homeless population becomes more stigmatized and less people are

interested in providing care for them. Society is progressively making it harder for homeless

people to be homeless, some states requiring IDs to be able to vote and many forbidding the

homeless to sleep in public places (GEOG 499 Seminar, week 9), and this shaming of the

homeless makes it difficult for organizations like SYM to gain support as well. All of these

factors constrain how much SYM can do for its youth, resulting in them having less of a positive

influence of the youths lives.

Identifying what caused those that are poor to be put in such a negative light requires us

to look back historically, even before the shift to neoliberalism. Fraser and Gordon take us
through the preindustrial age, where almost everyone is dependent, to the industrial age, where

paupers are bad dependents but housewives and slaves are necessary dependents, and finally to

the postindustrial age, where we now deem certain individuals as good and bad dependents

(Fraser and Gordon 1994, 313-324). The change in societal values was the main proponent to

each turn in how the public would view those that were poor. With the societal values currently

being focused on individualism, the public is of the idea that with hard work comes success and

if you do not have success, that means you did not work hard enough.

The relates directly to the negative views on those that are poor as being lazy and their

situation being a fault of their own. Although it is difficult for me to admit to, I still get nervous

for my safety interacting with the youth at drop-in center or walking by someone I perceive as

homeless on the streets. I have been conditioned to assume that poor individuals are in their

situation likely because they have violent tendencies and are untrustworthy. What this concept of

individualism does not consider is the privileges that are unique to each person in society. No

one starts at the same point in life and everyone must overcome different obstacles. Those

obstacles could range from minor to major depending on ones own situation and because of that,

success can be a lot more difficult for some than it is for others.

There are also major societal forces that make those doing care work invisible since it is

the work of women and is incredibly undervalued. Traditionally, women have provided care

privately in the home (Lawson 2007, 2) and this has a mark in those that do care work today.

Since women were expected to be caregivers along with all their other duties, the work was

never appreciated by society. This can still be seen with the majority of care work being done by

women and at the lowest wage possible. Positions of care have become low-income positions,

which not only devalues care, but also constrains care workers from receiving adequate care
themselves (Lawson 2007, 2). This creates a cycle in which the need for care produces more

need for care. As Lawson has instilled in us week after week, care is a public matter as we all

need care to survive, however, the current ideology of society is that care should be private. This

point of view forces care work to be done by those who have been historically obligated to care,

which is women, historically as housewives, and low-income individuals, historically as slaves.

It is challenging to truly understand the need for care because we have been conditioned

by society to assume care will be provided and because of that, we do not even notice when care

is delivered. Acting on something first involves recognizing a need for change and as Williams

points out, since care is both devalued and made invisible (Williams 2011, 4), for the public to

recognize the need will be tough. Take for example, all the care it takes for you to get up in the

morning and make breakfast: you first need some type of alarm which was most likely shipped

overseas and transported to your door by truck, you need some type of food that was cultivated

by farmers, and you also need the love of a parental figure to instill in you the importance of

eating breakfast each morning. When I wake up each morning, none of that goes through my

head because I have taken for granted all these acts of care. If we do not first recognize all the

care that is present in our lives for us to have the privileges we do, we can never hope to

reconstruct the social forces behind the devaluation of care. Acknowledging ones own privileges

will not be easy because it makes us uncomfortable to identify the ways we have it easy and the

ways we have it hard. However, it is a crucial step toward moving into a society that cares for its

care workers as well as those individuals care workers provide for.

One conversation in particular I had when volunteering at SYM made me aware of both

the rigid social forces working against all poor individuals as well as my own privileges that I

had never been aware of before. The conversation was held with one of the youth that was
anxiously awaiting his trial in court the next morning. He had, admittedly, stolen some food from

a grocery store and was being charged with thievery. He was very unhopeful that the trial would

be in his favor because of the discrimination he faced being homeless. Not owning nice clothes

to attend the trial in or having any address on file, it would be easy for the court judge to assume

his homeless status and he was sure that because of these things, he would not be tried fairly and

would receive the topmost penalty. I cannot help but wonder if you put the same charge on a

wealthy white male, who can afford a suit and a quality lawyer, if that case would be tried lighter

and with less penalties than with a homeless individual. Additionally, I had never considered how

much presentation weights into the court decision and became aware of my own privilege of

having a closet full of clothes to choose from.

With the lack of recognition of the need for care as well as misunderstandings in the root

causes of poverty being the primary reasons why care is devalued in society, I am inspired by

SYMs commitment to combat these problems through engaging with and empowering the youth

that work with us. Their focus on building relationships rather than just delivering care is what is

going to alter societys view from the poor being underserving to the realization we must work

with the poor to help them out of poverty (which will actually benefit all of society). With that

said, some of SYMs work could be made more care ethical when trying to go about building

those relationships with the youth. With their reliance on volunteers, SYM provides very

minimal training for how to interact with the youth and then they expect us to be skillful in our

interactions. Providing care competently is one of Trontos key parts of being care ethical

(Tronto 1993, 133-134) and I believe that for the volunteers to be truly competent in the work

demands more training requirements. At the moment, all volunteers have to do is attend a three

hour Ropes training session, and even that SYM does not follow up on and many of the
volunteers have yet to attend. Training the volunteers to be more competent in their work may

possibly turn more people away from signing up due to the time commitment, but it will allow

for more positive impacts on the youth and their interactions at SYM.

One other aspect in which SYM could improve is in recognizing that while their

programs do a great job getting to know and impacting the youth in the area, to actually work at

combating the problem of homelessness, they must look at changing society. The focus of SYM

is a bit narrow since their focus is on helping the youth that come through their doors, not on the

advocacy work that would lead to less youth needing their assistance in the first place. While

SYM does work with the Homeless Youth and Young Adult Initiative (YYA) of King County, the

work they do with YYA does not show up anywhere on their website and the interview with Kate

was the first time I heard about their interaction with the advocacy project (2/25/15). Even

though the mission of SYM is small-scale work, to be truly care ethical, they must use their

experiences to change societys views on the poor or else they will just become part of the

homelessness issue. Doing care ethical work may require becoming involved with things that are

not part of the organizations focus and may make the work of the organization feel tedious and

slow. However, if an organization does follow the guidelines of being care ethical, the results

they have will be truly powerful in changing society for the better.

While my service learning with SYM is supposed to be about serving others, it was

impossible to not learn something about myself along the way. Through working with the youth

and acknowledging my own feelings during the interactions, I have become more aware about

the kinds of discriminations I have about those that are poor. The nerves I experience when I am

alone with the youth, the surprise when I realize how intelligent each one is, and the need I feel

to wash my hands after volunteering all show how much I am judging these youth for things they
do not deserve. Whether this is a product of societys conditioning of me or my own personal

assumptions, I am truly thankful for what interacting with these youth have taught me about

myself and my need to stop and ask before I assume.

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Accessed March 10, 2015.

Lawson, Victoria. "Geographies Of Care And Responsibility." Annals of the Association of

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Accessed March 9, 2015.