The Struggle Is Real

In my previous blog, I talked about how poverty is an issue, especially in Philadelphia. I gave a quick overview of what’s happening because of this issue. For example,  people are dying. I also focused on how poverty is affecting many people and how we could help minimize it. I talked about how people are dying due to poverty. But I did not go into exact detail to who is affected by it and how we can help out.


Through more research, I found that 1 out of 2.5 children live in deep poverty. That means some children are living with an income below the poverty line which is less than 6,000 and 7,000 if with a child. That is 35% of the total population of 440,000 people. That is extreme, since children are supposed to be the ones getting an education and reaching for their dreams. Children that are in deep poverty will result in hunger due to little money. Hunger results in a possibility of 60% to miss school, 50% to repeat the same grade again, and twice more than a original student to be suspended from school. This also brings down the percent of graduation rate to below 50%. I wanted to ask some students about this topic, so I decided to conduct a survey. One of the questions I asked was “Do you think poverty is affected in children more than adults?”Screenshot 2015-05-09 at 10.42.37 PM.png

As a response to this, 4 out of 6 were unsure while 2 were sure that poverty affects children more than adults. This shows that students are not aware of this, even when it most likely to be affected in them but do you ever wondered why? It’s been proven that the population of a child takes up 20%, and most of their parents are most likely to be either a lone parent, large families with more than 3 children. Since many are born to a large family with a single parenting, not much is made and the children are most likely to be affected by it.  As to why, some students said because they aren’t able to get jobs like adults and others say because they are left out to starve. This shows that some do understand but some just states the obvious of starvation.



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As for this part of my survey, I ask if they had any experience with poverty or see others suffering from it. As a result, it shows that 1 out of 6  say no while 5 out of 6 said I have seen some and some are even affected by it themselves. This show that some student are affected by poverty and some seen many people on the street due to poverty. This proves that it is indeed an issue since due to poverty they are most likely to end up homeless.

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In the beginning, I wanted to bring awareness of poverty but surprisingly, it seems as everyone I surveyed understood that poverty is an issue in the United States. Many blamed the economy since it’s in debt while others blame the people that are unemployed. That’s right it is actually the feds. The feds tricks people making them pay more money than they usually pay. This also affect the student because they make the student in debt too due to educations loans. They make the old people entice to complete dependent   of medicare and medicaid program.


You can find more of the result of this survey here.


    Doing this survey, I learned that more are aware of poverty and bringing awareness is not an issue but not many know that it’s mostly affected in children. I was really excited to do this project but it was not how I expected it. I thought that it would be simple and easy sending out email to organizations but I was wrong. It was actually a lot harder since many don’t have time to answer back or feel like it. It was also hard to target Philadelphia and not other countries since my project is based on Philadelphia. Not only that but I had encountered many problems. I experience issue such as people not emailing back and not only that but answering my calls. I emailed various of organization and not one decided to write back which was disappointing. I felt like it was better to email an organization or person who have the same goal as me which is definity more useful than asking a confuse kid. Since time was near and a submission is better than nothing, I had no other choice but to do a survey. A question that I’m still wondering about is how the government became in such debt to increase poverty each year.


Overall, Poverty is an huge issue and even some childrens know that! For my Agent of Change for Blog Post #3, I am planning to do a bake sale where I fundraise since poverty is an money issue. You all can help out by buying the bake sale when it comes. I would really help out people in hunger since hunger is affected due to poverty. This will help some childrens from dieing since the money will go to a hunger coalition. This is not the only way to help. There are others way to help such  as a shared property organization in which is trying to stop poverty. They have goals such as better job and training employment, economic security, etc. You should check out shared property organization!


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