Experience poverty as it is
What is The Poverty Challenge?
The Poverty Challenge is an intensive one-day summit on poverty. This event provides experiential learning about living in poverty and about poverty reduction. Afterwards, you may wonder, “now what?”
Experience poverty as it is
by assuming the role of a person living in poverty with particular challenges and responsibilities. For example, you are a single mother of 3. After losing your job, you are evicted from your apartment. Your challenges are to feed your family, find alternative housing, and seek a job or support from Ontario Works.
Navigate the system in a real-world simulation
by seeking help from local agencies. Do your best to succeed by providing the necessary answers, information and documentation. If you are not successful, you must find another way for you and your family to survive.
Become an agent of social change
by acting on what you have learned.
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Check out the April 2021 Newsletter here!
What we accomplished in 2020:
- updated all our event materials and our toolkits;
- created video walkthroughs to support communities running their own Challenges;
- studied wraparound models of service, and explored what role it could play in poverty reduction in our community; and
- held three Poverty Challenges.
Unfortunately, due to Covid 19, we are unable to safely hold Poverty Challenges in the near future. We did briefly explore the notion of using tools like Zoom or Google Hangouts to hold Poverty Challenges, but quickly realized that at this stage those platforms are inadequate to provide the positive experiential learning event we have developed so carefully over the years. Instead, we have focused our efforts on updating our Toolkit.
You can reach The Poverty Challenge at thepovertychallenge@gmail.com