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2009-11-21

2009-11-18

2009-11-05

Agriculture

Lifestyles

Thursday, January 29, 2009 10:34 AM

Photo by Laurie Sisk/Garden City Telegram

Gildardo Asebedo, Garden City, gets a check-up from screener Ada Flores at United Methodist American Ministries in Garden City. Asebedo, who has diabetes, is unemployed and does not have health insurance.

POVERTY: As social service needs grow, long-term fixes more crucial

By SHAJIA AHMAD, The Garden City Telegram

Photo by Laurie Sisk/Garden City Telegram

Susanna Montoya, Garden City, holds her 7-month-old daughter, Adriana Montoya, as United Methodist Mexican-American Ministries Immunization Coordinator Trudy Ortman dispenses an oral vaccine to the infant at UMAM’s Garden City clinic.

The only things Salina residents Denise Hill and her husband, Joseph, could salvage from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were the wedding pictures high up on the walls of their first-floor New Orleans apartment, where the water and growing mildew did not reach.

“I cried every day. It hurt me so bad to know that I had to leave my home just like that and try to make do somewhere else,” Denise said. “Sometimes, you try to block things out, and it hurts so much you can’t even talk about it.”

With only the clothes on their backs and a few bags of personal items, the couple left behind their old lives and settled in Salina, where they knew another family and where they hoped they would be able to find jobs locally and start over.

Instead, like a growing number of Kansans, pulling themselves out of poverty and back onto their feet has been a losing battle, they said.

A few weeks after the couple migrated, they sought help from several local social service agencies, a resource many in poverty rely on time and time again for food, shelter and other necessities.

The Red Cross and Salvation Army helped them buy some new clothes and gave them money to help with rent. Their local church, the St. Jones Baptist Church, donated a few “decent” pieces of furniture to help the couple begin again.

For thousands of Kansans, and families like the Hills, the potential that one bad turn of events — a medical emergency, a layoff, a divorce or some other type of crisis — might suddenly leave them without money for utilities, food or even a home is a harsh reality.

Hundreds of private faith-based and social service organizations serving Kansans have steadily grown in numbers over the last few decades. Their missions are to combat poverty, but in many cases, these groups only help families in the short-term with basic needs that keep the families coming back for more.

Joseph Hill was able to find a job at the local pizza factory, and his wife cleaned houses so they could afford the $375 rent. They were making it until she had to stop working because her toe was amputated, the result of complications related to diabetes.

They were making it until his hands starting shaking because of nerve damage and he could no longer work at the factory. Their combined income plummeted to a $673 monthly disability check, and food stamps became the only source of putting dinner on the table.

“I’ve been through a hurricane, been in a new place, and all these different things have hurt. Lord have mercy, they’ve hurt,” Denise Hill said. “We were barely making it then, but how do we make ends meet now?”

A growing problem

The destructive impact of the 2005 hurricane brought much of America’s poor into the spotlight, a small cross-section of the purported 40 million Americans who live in poverty.

Anti-poverty advocates argue that these agencies may have to come up with new approaches to combat the ever-growing need in the state and conserve resources in the wake of a national economic downturn and lost wages across the nation. Kansas agencies say their food pantries are running dry quicker, homeless shelters are seeing more families seeking care and the demand for affordable housing is on the rise.

The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation services spent more than $353 million — $61 million in state funds — in the last fiscal year to provide and subsidize services such as emergency cash, child care and food stamp assistance.

One fear is that food pantries that once served as emergency assistance are now becoming sites of more permanent assistance as shelters ask for more food.

“We’re having to ask the family that ate for one week to make that same amount of food last for two,” Larry Gunkel, a food manager at the state food distribution center in Wichita, said. “If this trend continues to grow, and it probably will, that gap is going to get wider and wider.”

Kansans fare better than about half of the states in the country — about 12 percent of the state’s population falls beneath federal income guidelines that measure poverty rates.

But researchers at Kansas State University who completed a 2004 study estimating the amount of earned income necessary to assure a family’s total independence from all public and private subsidies puts financial self-sufficiency out of reach for about 27 to 30 percent of Kansas families.

Federal poverty guidelines, according to the report, don’t illustrate the much larger cross section of full-time working families that struggle to meet their basic daily needs.

Over the last 10 years, housing costs have outpaced inflation and earnings in Kansas. A single parent working full-time with one child in a rural Kansas community would need to earn at least $12.14 an hour to meet their basic needs, including food, housing, transportation and child care, according to the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition.

As an attempt to streamline access to help, United Way officials have worked with state and private agencies to create a database to quickly direct those who seek help to respective organizations in their counties.

Call volume for the statewide 2-1-1 hotline created in 2006 has doubled each year, and the inquiries for help concern basic needs such as food and utility assistance, homeless shelters, counseling, senior citizen services and more.

What’s working?

Rebecca Simmons, director of the Kansas and Western Missouri Salvation Army, said the branches of the far-reaching organization are expecting an explosion in need in the coming year. Already, the state’s calls to cut agency budgets in the coming year have organizations like hers worried that even small reductions will be painful.

“If you cut the child care assistance, then you have parents who are either not able to work or may have to choose alternative means of child care that may not be safe or can end in child abuse or neglect.

“If you cut drug or alcohol abuse assistance, then there may be an increase in the crime and need for funding and policing,” Simmons said. “Is it cheaper to provide someone with drug treatment or put them in jail?”

While many advocates agree prevention is key to combatting poverty at its root sources, that isn’t always possible for smaller charity service organizations like churches, said Lisa Davis, coordinator of the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition.

“Rural areas can lack specialized services, especially for serious or complicated problems such as mental illness, and it does not make economic sense to replicate programs found in urban areas,” Davis said.

Based on national demographic data, an estimated 3,400 people in rural Kansas are without permanent housing on any given night and may be living in cars, with other families or camping out, she said.

“Unfortunately, the local police and jails can end up being the ones that deal with the homeless in these areas,” Davis said.

Davis points to a transitional housing program in Paola that has been successful in combatting its local poverty issues. That’s because it has been able to not only provide a place for families to go but to help them tackle their problems once they get there.

When Jay Preston first had a vision to help the struggling families in Miami County, the former pastor knew he needed a fresh approach, rather than duplicating the services that were already in the area but were not helping families cope in the long-term.

He also knew that too often church and charities could provide only short-term assistance. In some cases, they turned families away because their moral compasses did not align with the families’ social situations, he said.

“A lot of people, especially in rural areas, feel judged by church services. Sometimes churches earn that bad reputation, unfortunately,” said Preston, who experienced a bout of homelessnees after dropping out of college in the late 1970s while facing drug and alcohol addiction.

The transitional housing at My Father’s House in Paola, an eastern Kansas city of 5,000, has been in operation only since 2006. But it is already providing housing for up to 42 people and needy families. It has also always had a waiting list of dozens of applications in Linn and Miami counties, which have a combined population of about 40,000.

“Nobody in town even knew there was a need around here,” Preston said. “The assumption was that we’d bring homeless folks from downtown Kansas City here.”

Though families can live at the transitional housing for up to two years, it generally takes only nine to 12 months for a family to get back on its feet, thanks to the extensive case management, counseling, mentoring, budgeting and other life skills offered in the transitional housing communities by case workers and counselors, Preston said.

Preston said he’s been working for the last few years to find ways to partner with other organizations in neighboring counties to develop and implement the self-sufficiency models without creating new non-profits and “reinventing the wheel.”

“We know there is more need than resources, and so the change is needed to be more effective so we can meet more needs,” he said. “Preventing homelessness is much cheaper than continuing to pump money into providing services for the chronically homeless.”

The costs of care

Finney County is one of the poorer counties in the state, with anywhere between 43 and 47 percent of its population falling below standards of self-sufficiency ability, based on the research of Kansas State University professors.

Inside a clinic’s waiting room at the United Methodist-Mexican American Ministries in Garden City, nurses raise their voices over the sounds of wailing babies and children.

Every day, the small clinic’s chairs are filled wall-to-wall with dozens of families and individuals seeking health care who cannot afford hospital or private-care physicians costs.

More than half of the average 6,000 patients a year the United Methodist Mexican-American Ministry health clinics see on a regular basis fall beneath the federal poverty guidelines. In addition to the health and education programs, the network of churches and clinics provide emergency cash assistance, blankets and food, and remain a critical resource for thousands of Kansans seeking care.

Forty state safety-net clinics, which target the uninsured and economically disadvantaged, are indispensable for the between 200,000 and 300,000 Kansans who are not insured, said Kathy Harding, director of the Kansas Association for the Medically Underserved.

Among the faces inside the clinic, Gildardo Asebedo, a tall man with dark hair and metal-rimmed glasses, sits patiently waiting his turn so a doctor can check his severely swollen diabetic feet. They’re so swollen he can’t stand for long or walk far, though he desperately wants to so he can get back to work.

Asebedo found himself in-between jobs after moving to Garden City from his steady job working for a moving company in Atlanta to care for his aging, elderly father, he said.

His hospital bills already have accrued to about $15,000, after a few life-threatening emergencies over the last few months have put him in the hospital. Without insurance and without a job, he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay the bills, he said.

“I told them, ’I can send you a dollar a month, but that’s it.’ I’m not being sarcastic, I’m just being honest,” Asebedo said. “It’s hard, it’s just hard. I don’t know where else to get help.”

The Hills, who escaped Hurricane Katrina, have also sought care at a safety-net clinic in Salina, the Salina Family Health Care Center. With the subsidized health-care costs, they are able to buy insulin and other medications for drastically reduced rates without health insurance. The Salvation Army continues to help them with rent now and then, but in the long-term, they don’t know what to do.

Denise Hill said she tried to apply for disability benefits but was denied. She’s appealing her case and trying again, she said, because she knows it will take a long time for her foot to heal before she can work again.

“After they denied me, I let it alone. They deny you, then they deny you,” she said. “What are you going to do?”