Americorps Service Day Update

Photo Courtesy of OBB Mobile Express Blog


Remember Americorps Service Day when we went to Grove City and planted a garden outside the Mid-Ohio Food Bank?

It grew!

Americorps workforce to triple by 2017

Check out this article.

The Serve America Act, signed by Obama in 2009, plans to increase the number of AmeriCorps workers from 75,000 to 250,000 members by 2017.

Go team!

Yes, it's yet more federal spending...but think of the good that could come out of this. Americorps stipends? That's a lot of bang for the buck.

Put-In-Bay!

Me at work. Not too shabby :)

A group of lovely VISTAs journeyed by car, ferry and golf cart on Tuesday to Put-In-Bay Island in Lake Erie for a Resource Fair.

Mo's cart had some lack-of-speed issues, but she loved driving it anyway.

The OBB Mobile Express came too!



The fair was inside the island's fire house/senior center.





Not too many people came through the fair, but we did get a chance to talk to several other agencies and some sites around the island, as well as got a write-up in the island paper, so hopefully we got the word out a little more.

We found out that the island's only grocery store does not accept food stamps. So for the several island families who have food stamps, getting food is quite a process, especially in the winter, when the only way off the island is by plane or snowmobile if the lake is frozen enough.

Hopefully the owner will sign on as a USDA retailer so that food stamps can be used on the island. Especially because it's easy to apply online and doesn't cost the store anything to implement.

Greenhouse Project, Part II

New stone path built by juvenile offenders

Today a group of VISTAs came to Toledo and took a tour of the community garden project in North Toledo called The Greenhouse Project.

A smaller group of us had toured the garden about a month and a half ago, but several other VISTAs heard about it and wanted to see it too, so we went again.

It was amazing how much had changed even in that short of time! The project is continually growing and adding and beautifying the site. They never stop working!



Big progress made on the Tilapia hydroponics project. There will be more than 2,000 fish in there soon!

Huge new expansion garden across the street.

More bees added

New water-collection bed

Special raised bed constructed for a woman in the neighborhood who is in a wheelchair and can't reach the regular raised beds but still wanted to garden.

Fulton County Expo

Our last of three planned Expos was on Tuesday, this one in Fulton County.

It was held at Open Door of Delta, an awesome community resource that offers a little bit of everything -- OBB site, thrift store, food pantry, shelter, job board, and more. They even already had the room arranged so that it took us only a total of about 5 minutes to set up for the event, which was nice.

We had a great turnout -- 12 people at the first session and 4 at the second -- and some solid interest in becoming new sites. Yay!

Russell giving a tour of the OBB Mobile Express.

The inside of the Mobile Express. There are room for two laptop stations where clients can have applications done.

The only slight hitch was during the final session, when we had a mini-debate with one of the guests, who seemed a bit peeved that food stamps don't have a time limit attached to them. But I shouldn't even call that a hitch. It's a valid question and it was a respectful discussion.

Poverty Simulation

On Friday afternoon, Mercy College and Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Banks hosted a Poverty Simulation at Mercy College in Toledo.

A Poverty Simulation is an interactive event that helps participants understand what life is like with a shortage of resources and an abundance of stress.

We had about 30 people attend. Each person was assigned an identity and got a packet with information about themselves and their family group. Included in the packet were any resources the family had, like cash, transportation passes, food stamps, social security cards, household goods, etc.

Every family was different and had different circumstances, but each had to figure out how to feed their family, pay their bills, and get around to different appointments or businesses during the simulation's four, 15-minute "weeks."

I participated in a poverty simulation back in December, but this time I got to see it from the other side of the table -- playing the role of a community agency or business that the participants would need to visit to accomplish their tasks.

I was the bank. Here's me with my money pouch.



More people were cashing checks than paying off loans, so I ran out of cash pretty quickly. There was a lineup of people needing money, so I started "minting" money to meet my demand. Pretty sure that's illegal, but hey.


Other busineses included:

The General Employer, aka the workplace where all adults with jobs had to go and sit for 7 minutes each "week" in order to get paid. This is Amy, my replacement VISTA for next year at the Food Bank in Toledo.

Quik Cash, aka check cashing with interest and transportation passes for purchase. This is Kylee, another new VISTA at the Food Bank in Toledo.

Social Services, aka Job and Family Services (for food stamps, welfare). This is Veronica, a VISTA from Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Toledo; Maureen, who is going to hate this picture; and a volunteer from the community.

School/Day Care, where all the kids had to go or risk getting in trouble for truancy. This is a volunteer from the community.

Pawn Shop, including Guns For Sale. This is one of the new VISTAs from the Food Bank in Lima.

Utility Company. This is Ina, one of the new VISTAs from the Food Bank in Lima.

Community Action Commission, aka a resource for food vouchers and free bus passes. The CAC is one of those hidden resources in a community. Most people were buying bus passes from Quik Cash and didn't realize or think about visiting the CAC where they could have gotten bus passes for free. This is one of the new VISTAs at the Food Bank in Lima.

Grocery Store. This is Jacki from WSOS community action commission in Fremont.

Beth (Oak Harbor High School graduate and VISTA at WSOS in Fremont) was the sheriff. Sharon (VISTA at the Food Bank in Lima), looking appropriately shady in the back, was the "criminal element" of the simulation. Her job was to deal drugs, swipe any cash or household items left unattended, and generally create an element of chaos. Sharon, who is very sweet and unassuming in real life, was surprisingly good at this! Also, by the end, Beth the sherriff in cahoots with Sharon the criminal. I personally witnessed several illicit transactions. Police corruption!

If people didn't pay their rent or mortgage on time, they got evicted.



Sometimes agencies were randomly closed.



Beth had a gun and handcuffs...

...and she wasn't afraid to use them. This family was in trouble with the law practically the entire time, this time for their child's truancy.

At the end of the hour, we had a group discussion where everyone shared how their family fared during the simulation and any thoughts about the experience they wanted to share.



It was a lively discussion. Comments included:

Wow I learned a lot. This was hard!

I can see now that there were better ways to do things. But you don't always think clearly when everything is happening all at once and your kid is in jail and you're getting evicted and bills are piling up and you just lost your job.

Several people commented on the frustration of transportation passes. Each time you visited an office you had to surrender one. So going here and there trying to figure out the right process or office, or having to come back for another appointment cost you a pass each time.

One man noted that it's all about timing -- if he would have understood the system from the start and handled things in a different order, he might have come out even or possibly ahead. But a few mistakes and missteps compounded and he ended up losing his job for being late, which left him with no money to buy bus passes to go find a new job or for his kid get to school so he gets arrested for truancy issues, and so on. I didn't realize I could get fired in this simulation! he said.

Be your own advocate, be informed and refuse to be a victim, and that can not only help you but empower and teach those around you. Many low-income families believe what authorities tell them. For example, several families got evicted and accepted it. But, in reality, it's illegal to evict someone with no warning and they should have called the mortgage company out on that. Only one woman thought to protest the eviction.

One woman commented that she felt low-income men trying to raise children alone are at a disadvantage because many social services are set up to help women and children, and the man may not have the benefit of "knowledge of the system" passed down matralinerally through the generations.

Viva Latino!

On Thursday, Maureen, Amy, Kylee and I attended a half-day training at United Way called La Conexion: The Connection to Latino Family Resources.

The training was modeled off one of the most useful trainings I have attended this year, No Wrong Door, except this one was specifically focused on Latino services and cultural sensitivity training.

No Wrong Door is the idea that every local service agency will be familiar with what every other agency does, so that when someone calls looking for help, even if it's the wrong number for a particular service, the person can be pointed in the correct direction rather than told no and sent away with nothing and no idea where to turn next.

The event opened with a skit meant to demonstrate how misunderstandings can arise between two people who speak different languages, whether a language like Spanish or English, or the hidden languages of different classes or systems (ie between a JFS caseworker spouting acronyms and a low-income client who doesn't understand the system).

An English speaker was having a conversation in Spanish with a Spanish speaker. The English speaker was able to keep up fairly well, but slowly the conversation got too difficult for him to follow. But even after losing the flow of the conversation, he kept nodding and agreeing to the questions and statements spoken by the Spanish speaker -- unknowingly agreeing to get a pie smashed in his face, which brought chuckles from the group.



The best part was watching part of "Which Way Home," a 2010 nominee for Best Feature Documentary. The film follows several unaccompanied child migrants -- some as young as 9 -- as they journey alone from Central America and Mexico en route to the US, largely by freight train. They are all looking for a better life or hope to somehow meet up with family who are already living there.



It's a long, dangerous journey. Many die, and many get caught and deported back home. According to the film, around 100,000 children are caught trying to cross the US border and sent back every year. Who knows how many actually make it.

We didn't get to watch the end of the film, so I don't know what happened to the main characters, but the presenter said most were caught...

They served delicious-smelling Mexican food for lunch, but tragicaly we didn't know there would be food and had eaten just before...Such a waste.