A couple of days ago, I participated in a Poverty Simulation on the Ball State Campus that was hosted by TEAMwork for Quality Living. What an amazing experience! I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When you arrive at the poverty simulation, you’ll be assigned a new identity for about the next 2 hours, and you’ll work together with the members of your family to try to meet all the challenges that come your way throughout the (simulated) month. All the families have to figure out how to arrange for transportation, buy food, and pay bills; depending on your specifics, you may have to deal with issues at work, health problems, legal trouble, and people in the community who *ahem* are not very kind.

No matter what your situation is in real life, I think this is an excellent way to learn about what other people go through, and to foster empathy for a wide range of folks. The post-simulation reflective discussion can be a real eye-opener!

Poverty simulations are offered regularly (TQL has done 80+ over the years), so check out their website to sign up for the next one!

On Thursday, I went to my first meeting of Teamwork for Quality Living, a group of folks in Muncie who have been working together to empower people in poverty toward self-sufficiency since the late 1990s. Teamwork uses a collaborative model to bring about positive changes in the community, and the Circles Campaign has been shown to be quite effective by various empirical studies.

I met a wonderful, demographically diverse group of people, learned a lot about the Muncie community, and shared a tasty dinner with the group! Now I am looking forward to next week’s meeting and the upcoming poverty simulation that I’m going to participate in. My challenge, moving forward, is to start figuring out the best ways for me to contribute to Teamwork’s mission.

Although I’m a little late in posting this, I want to take a moment to recognize National Adjunct Walkout Day, which took place earlier this week.

Many people outside of academia, and many undergraduate students currently enrolled in college, are not aware of just how much the landscape of higher education has changed in recent decades regarding the proportion of faculty on the tenure track as compared to those in adjunct/contingent/part-time/visiting positions, and exactly what that trend means for educational quality and workplace justice. Nevertheless, this is an issue that affects us all: students, families, citizens, and workers.

To learn more about National Adjunct Walkout Day, you can start by looking here, here, here, here, and/or here.