The Daily Gamecock

USC’s poverty simulation event addresses socioeconomic hardships

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Picture this: You’re a parent to three kids, living paycheck to paycheck with an hourly job and juggling the expenses of groceries, electricity bills and healthcare — oh, and your car just broke down. What do you do?  

That’s exactly the type of situation USC students found themselves in while participating in the poverty simulation put on by the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA) Thursday evening. During this three-part event held in the Russell House Ballroom, students were paired in groups to represent families and completed two online poverty simulations and a virtual reality segment. 

Kimberly Seibles, OMSA’s associate director of diversity and social justice education, coordinated the poverty simulation using her previous experience at Converse College where she conducted two similar events in partnership with United Way of the Piedmont. Seibles said she saw success with these events and wanted to see what she could do at USC. 

“I saw that the individuals who were a part of [the simulations], it really had them to reflect on a lot of things," Seibles said. 

The two online simulations, the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s “Reality Check” and “Spent,” were sources Seibles found herself and wanted to integrate into the event. The virtual reality experience, navigated using the Oculus Quest, came from the Richland County Library as part of its My Life Experience Empathy Lab. 

While immersed in this virtual setting, participants encountered different scenarios to demonstrate how seemingly small, unexpected difficulties can lead to major setbacks for a low-income individual, whether that be rent, a speeding ticket or other personal troubles. 

Seibles said the simulation is designed to make participants aware of the cyclical nature of poverty.

“If you’re living from paycheck to paycheck and then, once you graduate, you have to help your family, you can’t go to school to better yourself, then you really can’t just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, because you’re just living to survive and not living to live,” Seibles said. 

Jaden Howell, a first-year integrated information technology student, said he decided to attend the event after his girlfriend mentioned it.

“My father left, so single-mother household,” Howell said.  “We didn’t get food stamps 'cause [Howell’s mother] didn’t want to, and so we had about 15 grand a year on all of us." 

Howell said he thought the poverty simulation focused too much on the stigma surrounding low-income individuals and should have been more solution-oriented.

“If you just promote looking at [poverty], people are going to stare at it and think of it as an abnormality, and while it’s normal that a lot of people grow up like this, it needs to be made aware that there are ways to get out of it,” Howell said.

Samantha Feeney, a first-year public health student, said she enjoyed the event and felt it presented accurate situations low-income families might face.

“Thankfully, my family has never been homeless, but a lot of the struggles with budgeting was things we had been through before, things I was familiar with and knew how to handle,” Feeney said. 

Feeney said events like the poverty simulation could help USC students be more knowledgeable about backgrounds different from their own. 

 Understanding that there’s more than one way to live — that not just the way that you grew up is the way that everybody grows up ... is a good thing to have,” Feeney said. 


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