Learning to Cooperate and PLAN For the Future as well as help the Needy Now with basic info

How poor people survive in the USA | DW Documentary is a piece a friend recommended to learn about how 40 million Americans (of about 320 million people) live in poverty. Likely more of us count on the spectrum than we realize but with family, friends and ways to get loans or barter it may not feel that way.

A tee shirt and billboard and more online talk could help everybuddy appreciate what's really going on. Much of it is a forerunner to the reality of Climate Change Refugees. As Deepak Chopra shared at the start of the Marianne Williamson for President talk recently in NYC, millions of such refugees will be the result of climate change. I learned that in 2008 studying the Permaculture Basics which highlighted the need to get off of fossil fuels.

Those in poverty have more survival skill sets than most can imagine having to learn, but learn we would be wise to do Before it's a necessity. Living in mobile homes or even vans for a week (in warmer climates, but learning to hunker down with warm gear) may be a skill students could learn to also be guides. Then there is co-housing in many forms, teaming up to care about and for one another. Likely 'women caring for women and kids' and men caring for men would also be a reasonable way to have some formats set up. Then families as housing and camps may allow for everyone's personal safety and so on. 

Many government programs often have more fluff than real stuff to offer. There can be big funds matched with minimal services,paperwork and lack of services and personnnel. Reading of child abuse cases that NYC knew about for instance in the Daily News was a heartbreaking way to note that this is the season of giving and good cheer.

They did say there is a new person in charge of the system (why not a comprehensive team since too often many leaders set up others to 'look the other way' or cut corners or plain get things wrong?!). I felt horrified and hopeless reading specifics of children being punished for having a bathroom accident (pooing on the floor), for not being good in school, for 'anything or no particular reason' and getting not any reasonable level of a consequence but a severe beating or other cruel punishment (in the midst of dismal parenting whether poor or wealthier.)

If children could be monitored for basic safety (and really parents willing to have serious training and screenings, and support people in their lives, much if not all of that kind of crime and violence could be avoided. The parents or abusers who harm children sometimes end up in jail (and then there may be more violence visited upon them. )

Maybe those adults harming others were harmed in the past (as children or even in prior lifetimes, and maybe even by those who are their children. That is a difficult 'far out' theory I have heard. Another possibility is that those being harmed have incarnated to wake up the world, and our hearts only hear of the more serious crimes to understand the spectrum and pattern of decline. We need to clarify expectations and laws, and again support resources online, on the phone and in person or locally.

There should be a 24/7 safe shelter in every community or with transportation to such a shelter in each region (within an hour or two depending on the size of a state.) Children should be able to request a way out of harm as soon as possible.Every child should have 5 or even more advocates who can weigh in on their well-being and needs, so infants wouldn't fall through the cracks of a very broken system. 
More new parents, moms and dads for instance, could opt into a care center where more support would be given for a few months if not the the first year to provide free childcare, daycare,  meals and more to help a family get off to a good start.

We need to dream and create more options for healing rather than deal with the end of a pattern of abuse that results in injury if not death or children (and even parents, some who commit suicide.) Marianne Williamson proposes a Department of Children to address some of the basic deficits linked to schools being funded by property taxes primarily and other factors of poverty. Thanks for sharing this information and addressing concerns in your area with others. Advocacy can move mountains and provide hope and help to those in need...and really, we are all in need in different ways (various indicator lights as it were) but the internal experience can be similar, so the more help the better for people of all ages and walks of life to ease the burden, fear, and fill in the gaps.