CHARLESTON, W.Va. — You have to stay in poverty to survive poverty.
Too
often, several West Virginians say that continues to be the reality for them as
they work to support their families in the new challenges that have come during
the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s an endless, vicious cycle,” said
Stormy Johnson, a single mom to three who works as a student support specialist
for the school system in Preston County.
“Until those people that don’t
see what we know is the truth take time to open their eyes and see it, we’re
never going to get a change.”
Mary Reinbold from Benwood, a single mother
to three kids, works as a bank document processor.
“You get stuck at the
bottom,” Reinbold said.
Both Johnson and Reinbold were among the four
panelists who told their stories during Friday’s closing session of the 2020
Food For All Summit, a week-long virtual event focused on “bold ideas” to
address hunger and food insecurity in West Virginia with alternatives to the
current system.
“I think that we just need to really start telling these
stories because, poverty and financial struggle, it forces a lot of us to keep a
lot of secrets,” said Amy Jo Hutchinson, organizer for Our Future West Virginia,
the session moderator.
“One secret is, I’d almost lay money on the fact,
that there are some of us here right now who probably don’t have as much food at
home as they really could use or need, but society tells us that we need to hold
that as a secret and we really shouldn’t say stuff like that out
loud.”
The challenges of bureaucracy were a common theme.
Reinbold
said the top policy priority needed to be changes to simplify qualifications for
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and to make income guidelines
“more realistic” with adjustments to better transition people off
SNAP.
Johnson, who currently earns too much money to qualify for SNAP,
echoed that.
“We shouldn’t have to worry about, hey, do I take a raise
and lose all those benefits or do I tell my employer, well, you know, I can’t
take that raise because I’m going to lose the ability to feed my family,” she
said.
“We’re faced with a lot of choices that shouldn’t have to be
choices if our system wasn’t so broken.”
Other panelists included Amber
Roy, a married mother of two from St. Albans who works as a direct care work
with mentally ill and developmentally-delayed West Virginians, and Jasmine
Reynolds, a single mother with two kids who works as the center director of the
King’s Daughter Child Care Center in Wheeling.
During the discussion,
Hutchinson issued challenges designed to inspire “radical change” to those who
were part of the session.
– Challenge No. 1: Try to apply for SNAP
benefits to experience the difficulties and extensive information needed
firsthand.
– Challenge No. 2: Volunteer to go with someone to the state
Department of Health and Human Resources seeking services.
– Challenge
No. 3: Investigate the poverty guidelines. For a family of three, the Federal
Poverty Level is $21,720