Communities in Crisis: A New Student Study

When Jess Thomson thinks of America, she doesn't think of pervasive poverty. Or at least she didn't until she helped survey emergency shelters and food pantries last year. She was shocked to hear how many people need food assistance, even when they have homes or jobs, and how many go without a safe place to sleep. And even more surprising was just how many people get turned away from shelters or can't get food aid because the people who are supposed to provide those services don't have the resources.

Thomson, 23, started volunteering with the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, the non-profit group that conducted the survey, when she was a freshman at Rutgers University in New Jersey five years ago. The Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness was founded in the 1980s by USA for Africa and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). It still works closely with PIRG, and many of the students who conducted the survey became involved through their local PIRG chapters.

As part of the survey, Thomson and other student volunteers asked roughly 900 food and housing agencies in 32 states about trends in demand for services and funding. Results of the yearlong survey were released today in a report called “Communities in Crisis.” Thomson, who now works for MassPIRG as a campus organizer at Northern Essex Community College, says the findings show how priorities in government spending are leaving more and more people without places to turn to for help. According to the survey, roughly 39 percent of food providers and 43 percent of emergency shelters that had to turn people away for lack of resources also reported cuts in funding.

As Pamela Bachilla puts it, “It's going in the wrong direction in both ways." The 23-year-old student helped distribute the survey forms and collect results as a volunteer with CalPIRG at UC Berkeley. All of the agencies she spoke to said they had to turn people away. "I expected that to be a high number, but I was devastated to hear that all the agencies had had to turn people away," Bachilla says. She added that the experience has cemented her commitment to working on the policy side of poverty, a problem she feels the government is not addressing properly.

Although the survey shows state funding cuts were more severe than federal cuts, Kathleen Barr, the policy advocate for Student Campaign against Hunger and Homelessness, says that's a result of the way the programs are administered. For the most part, the federal government gives money to the states to fund the programs, and so cuts in federal spending appear to come from the state. Also, the federal government has shifted more of the responsibility of funding these programs onto the states, which often can’t afford to fund them at the same levels as the federal government.