Dispelling a Myth: Funding for rural poverty
I was recently attending a board meeting for an upcoming state problem-solving competition for children k-12 in the state of Texas. This meeting contained the voices of adults representing children in the wide range of incomes throughout the state. Part of the agenda for this meeting was to discuss fund-raising ideas for teams that could otherwise not afford the program. These ideas resulted in the decision to allow the teams to sell particular items within their own communities for a certain (fairly expensive) cost. Now, as one who comes from an area of rural poverty, I pointed out that these items were too expensive for our teams to a)purchase b)find buyers for. I was then informed (unanimously) that this was actually a way of helping the “middle class” teams that don’t get funding from their school districts. The rationale was that “those poorer teams can always get funding from a local bank”. I sat in stunned silence as this meeting went on to the next item on the agenda.
“This”, I thought,”explains a lot.” If one justifies to themselves that those in need have funding from a mystical, magical source..then it is easy to deny them support. As one who writes grants for a non-profit in a community that is “land rich and money poor”…I assure you nothing is further from the truth. There are no magical banks that support the rural poor. There are no magical government programs that support the rural poor. There are no magical corporations that do this either. Most big banks and big companies prefer to support those in their immediate area. Rural areas are very rarely in the “immediate area” of these banks and corporations. Government programs have been cut so severely over the past decade, that they are definitely not a reliable source of revenue for those really in need. So, please, the next time you justify to yourself that “those poor people get lots of funding from x,y or z”, remember that you are telling yourself a myth.
Filed under: anti-poverty programs, fund raising, land rich, land rich money poor, local funding, middle class fun raising, poverty, poverty myths, rural Texas, rural poverty, texas, youth fund raising
This reminds of me when my husband was in a first year med school class. The professor told the students not to worry about the cost of the drugs they were prescribing because if they didn’t have insurance, they would have medicaid to pay for it. The sad part was that there weren’t any students in the room from backgrounds that could dispute the claim.