Poverty in Richmond is real.
That’s the short interpretation of Richmond Children First’s report titled It’s Not Fair: The Face of Child Poverty in Richmond A Call to Action, which is being released today (Nov. 20).
The emphasis on making it real stems from the public’s perception that the city is too affluent to have a problem with families and children living below the line.
But according to Helen Davidson, manager of Richmond Children First, statistics show one in four local children find themselves in need.
That’s why, at the start of 2013, Richmond Children First launched “The Face of Child Poverty in Richmond” to help the community understand what it means for children to live in poverty.
“It was also a call to action to discuss and plan how we can better support children and families and how, at a community level, we can work towards alleviating poverty,” Davidson said.
What the report discovered was that more awareness about poverty locally needs to be created to not only understand the state of poverty locally, but dispel some of the notions behind its cause.
It also made a number of recommendations on how Richmond organizations can help alleviate the situation.
Among them was the developing family-friendly resources to increase awareness of existing programs and services.
It’s a situation familiar to Richmond’s chief medical health officer, Dr. James Lu, who told the News that is one area the city’s health workers put at the forefront when working with families, especially those suspected of being in need.
“One of the things that our public health nurses do when they interact with families is to make them understand what resources are available, and helping them to make the right choices for their children given their limited resources,” Lu said, adding that covers subjects from nutrition to mental health.
“Taking food aside and looking into other things, a child who lives in a home that is struggling with having enough to eat or pay for shelter or clothing, there will likely be a lot of tension in that family,” Lu said. “And that can likely translate into a lot of stress.”
In turn, that can manifest itself into physical and mental conditions such as depression and low self esteem.
“The ramifications of living in a family that has limited resources could be quite wide-ranging,” Lu said, adding one place it can show up is in dental care.
While there are no conclusive stats connecting poor dental care to local poverty, Lu said about a quarter of kindergarten aged children in Richmond show one or more incidents of tooth decay, a figure that conveniently matches the number associated with the rate of child poverty in the city.
Incidences of childhood obesity can also be a measuring stick of poverty as more nutritional foods tend to be higher priced while calorie-laden choices are less expensive.
“In studies of larger populations, there is proportionately a larger number of children who live in poverty and are overweight,” Lu said. “It’s a lot cheaper to put high calorie food on the table to satisfy hunger and not consider the healthier, more expensive options.”
The report states the cost of a monthly nutritious food basket for a family of four in the Lower Mainland in 2011 was $868, making it hard for those earning minimum wage, receiving income assistance, or facing other challenges such as high rent, child care, or transportation costs, to purchase healthy food.
Identifying families in need can also be a barrier to providing assistance, Lu said.
“It’s embarrassing to tell people you’re poor. So getting people to identify themselves that way so we can help them is not going to work,” Lu said. “It’s about working with and understanding families to the extent that you build up a trust relationship
to feel okay that it’s accept assistance.”
Part of that identification process is done through discussions with the local school district and registration at some city-run programs, Lu added.
But even when those families show up on the radar, allocating city resources to help them can be problematic, Lu said.
“Because of the way Richmond has developed with different housing types embedded in different communities we don’t have very clearly identified poor neighbourhoods.”
While that may hamper effective means of targeting resources where they will have the best effect, there is also a positive tradeoff.
“The life experience for those children in poverty is much better than if you had a concentrated neighbourhood with families with low means,” Lu said. “That means, those brought up in a mixed neighbourhood, it’s much more positive than those that have nothing but poverty.
“In many ways, how the city has developed it’s neighbourhoods is a good way from a healthy community perspective,” Lu said. “It creates more social capital to help kids who are in need. Yes, it maybe harder to identify them individually, but on the other hand it’s a much more positive experience for children to grow up whether or not they live in poverty.”
