For those of you who missed our last Advocacy Corps Training, on wage adequacy and storytelling, you will never experience firsthand the joys we had comparing our family budgets to the Federal Poverty Level, the Florida Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard, and, you know, reality. (You'll never experience it, that is, until you participate when ACT trainings roll around again - stay tuned to Call to Action to find out when that day comes.)
However, for a great overview of family budgeting, check out this clip from the Cosby show:
As for the inadequacies of the Federal Poverty Level, alas, those can't be expressed via You Tube, but we did watch an excellent series of clips from West Wing that discuss the origin of the FPL, and the political difficulties involved in trying to update it (Season 3 - "The Indians in the Lobby"). Put it on your Netflix queue (Disc 2), or read every dialogue involving Sam in this transcript - West Wing is a far better teacher about public policy than I could ever be.
Finally, we discussed the importance of storytelling as a way to illustrate the gaps that are always going to exist between the statistics - the averages, the broad strokes - on which public policy is based, and the day-to-day realities that people actually live. Our award for coolest Storytelling-for-Social-Change website goes to the 1000 Voices Archive (not just cause it features several of HSC's all-star advocates!). I'm not going to embed the video here because you should really go to the site and navigate around it to see all the cool tools for yourself, but check out Angelia Calhoun's story, from Miami, in particular.
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