The Behind Deep Poverty In Philadelphia

The Truth Behind Deep Poverty In Philadelphia

My name is Kyla Gladney-Enos and I’m going to talk about an important topic for my You And The World project that some people are ignorant to, or that some people don’t like talking about. The topic that interests me the most is deep poverty in Philadelphia. More specifically, hunger as a result of deep poverty. Deep poverty means that the person or family is living under the average poverty rate of $20,000. This is a problem because when you’re impoverished, you may not have the things you need to survive like drinkable (running) water, electricity, heat, etc. The current population in Philadelphia is nearly 1.56 million. The population in Philadelphia who are impoverished is about 200,000 people. I plan on raising awareness by grabbing people's attention with actual facts instead of trying to make poverty seem not as bad as it actually is.

This is a picture of the nation’s 10 most populous cities. As you can see, Philadelphia has the highest rate of poverty and deep poverty within the nation’s most populous cities. About half the people who are living in poverty are living in deep poverty in Philadelphia.

I’m interested in this topic because it’s an issue that is inevitable to terminate due to the number of children being born each year. About four million children are being born in the United States each year. 14.5 percent of those babies are going to poor families. When I was a little girl, I didn’t know what poverty was, so how could I have known what deep poverty was? My mother was so good at hiding the fact that we were living in public housing, didn’t have a lot of money, and got most of our food from food banks.

This is a picture of kids in the lunch line getting food. This is important because in order for children to be healthy, they need the proper nutrients and protein from healthy food.

The official definition of hunger is feeling or displaying the need for food. In Philadelphia, 1 of 5 people are considered a risk for hunger. That’s about 260,000 people in Philadelphia who might be starving. This number has been increased 65% in the last eight years. The people who are hungry in Philadelphia are mostly children. 30% of Philadelphia’s children are hungry and 6% are senior citizens. 14% of the people who are hungry in Philadelphia are white, 18% are black, and 24% are Latino. 60% of hungry children are most likely to miss school than children who are not hungry. This is a serious problem because if these kids who are starving miss too much school, they’ll have to repeat the grade over.

These are pictures that I took on April 25, 2017 at 4:07 PM on 20th and Arch. This is a pretty popular avenue in Philadelphia that’s located in the city near a lot of museums. In the pictures, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of trash on the ground, the sidewalks aren’t cracked, and the streets look nice.

My goal moving forward is to volunteer at a food bank every once and awhile. When I started researching deep poverty in Philadelphia, I didn’t expect Philadelphia to be the poorest big city in the nation. I feel like the government is good at hiding this stuff. The other day I was talking to my friend who has never lived in poverty. She’s lives in a primarily white neighborhood with her white mom and sister. When I was explaining what deep poverty was and showing her pictures of North Philadelphia, she said those pictures make the city look bad and that Philadelphia doesn’t look like that. I started thinking how could she not know this? Why doesn’t she know this? But it’s not her fault. It’s the media’s fault. Even in school they don’t teach us that Philadelphia is the most poorest big city nation wide. I want to inform people (who haven’t experienced what the conditions of poverty are like) about what’s really going on in the real world. I want to learn more about why we don’t get educated about important things that’s going on in our city.

These are pictures I took on April 25, 2017 at 7:02 PM. This block is also a popular avenue in Southwest Philadelphia. In this picture, there appears to be trash in the street, cracked trolley tracks, and cracked sidewalks.

Here’s my annotated bibliography!