Yesterday at the Dauphin Friendship Centre, the Crisis Prevention Task Force committee and United Way, from Brandon, put on a poverty simulation workshop called Living on the Edge. Cynamon Mychasiw, CEO of United Way, says the goal is to break the stigma of poverty.
“There’s a lot of people that think it’s easy to get out of poverty, that it’s a lazy person’s issue, that it’s just people who are having substance abuse problems, and other issues like that. It (The simulation) really brings some reality to how hard it is to be in poverty, really how hard it is to get out. It brings forward some of the issues that put people into poverty. One of the things people don’t realize is that we’re all one or two paychecks away from financial disaster, many people are. So a simulation like this really brings that forward.”
Mychasiw says they had a great group of participants.
“We had a great mix of demographics for the simulation. People from different industries, and we had some real aha moments during the simulated week 3 where people are really struggling to pay bills, when we evicted everyone in week 3 because no one had paid the mortgage and they realize it’s just impossible to make it from our minimum wage job to get to the bank to pay our mortgage and everything else. They start to realize how hard it is and if at the end of the day we’ve broken a bit of the stigma behind it, we call it a success.”
Esther Fyk was one of the participants in the workshop.
“It really brought home some of the experiences that people in these situations, often through no fault of their own, have to go through and the immense frustrations that happen when you have to line up and then you aren’t told something and you get told conflicting messages and on and on and on. It really brought that home.”
Fyk thinks there’s a benefit for everybody to be involved in a simulation like this.
Mychasiw believes a conversation has started in Dauphin and is looking forward to hearing the results.
Dauphin is the farthest north United Way has come for one of these simulations. They usually do 5 or 6 per year.
