Above: 30th Class Hunger Fellow John Hoang (left) with supervisor Devin Schroeder, Senior Manager of Programs, Hunger Free Oklahoma.
“It is terribly inhumane to block pathways out of poverty and oppressive debt because you didn’t need or have those pathways.” – Bernice A. King
Before I became an Emerson fellow, I was constantly afraid of how I would be punished, penalized, and chastised because I grew up low-income, poor, and economically disadvantaged. Compound that with other oppressive social constructs like race, sexual orientation, gender, and age; I’m keenly aware that the inequality, inequity, and injustice I suffer from will never happen to certain people. In D.C., it often rains. I stare outside my window, thinking of every unhoused person, and wonder if my identity of being low-income is meaningless to our country, despite the many sacrifices others and I make to remain financially afloat and not sink to the deep end of financial instability. During my Emerson interview, I made it known that I had a tumultuous childhood where my parents fought a lot about money. They still do. However, to be bestowed an opportunity to elicit change for those in whom I sadly see many of my lived experiences is an incredible honor. It makes me emotional and grateful to the pioneers who saw themselves in me to transform the quality of my life.
My field site placement was with Hunger Free Oklahoma in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Alongside my superhero supervisor, Devin Schroeder, and Treasure Standeford, I worked on a 72-page community guide to planning non-congregate summer meals. Non-congregate is a new service model for the distribution of summer meals. Nutrition providers/nutrition program operators do curbside grab-and-go (meal) pickup or home delivery to kids in rural areas at a physical geographic location or public service entity like schools and libraries with 5-10 days’ worth of meals for them to take home. Oklahoma, as a state, is primarily rural. Non-congregate would significantly enhance the state’s capacity to combat food insecurity that rises when schools are non-operational to keep kids fed. In collaboration with Hunger Free Oklahoma, I interviewed 17 nationwide non-congregate providers to collect qualitative information on best practices, solutions, and resources to assist existing Oklahoma non-congregate nutrition providers/nutrition program operators in increasing rural participation. It was also to help Oklahoma organizations transition smoothly and easily into non-congregate programming in rural areas for the upcoming 2024 summer. As a result of the interviews, I learned that access and accessibility are vastly different for families on tight budgets trying to provide nutritious meals for their children.
Before my junior year of high school, my family and I lived in the South Valley, a residential area near my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. My dad was the only person in my family who could drive. At the time, he worked as a landscaper in the South Valley. I remember waking up at 5:30 a.m. MST to get ready to go to my caretaker’s house so they could take my sister and me to school and my mom to work in southeast Albuquerque while he would return that distance to go to work. My dad would travel that distance twice to pick us up to go home. That was our family’s routine for a long time. For many Oklahoman families, transportation was one of many structural barriers that prevented children from receiving summer meals, hence the innovation of non-congregate to try and meet parents who don’t have the flexibility to bring the meals closer to them. Many Oklahoman families have access to summer meals, but without the accessibility that the non-congregate service model provided, it didn’t matter if there was food for food-insecure families; they would still go hungry. The key learning is that rural participation increases dramatically when low-income and working-class families aren’t left to navigate structural obstacles and financial burdens on their own while providing relief or solutions to their struggles.
My mom worked as a nail technician. Throughout my life, my mom was the breadwinner of our family. Often, my dad needed to borrow money from my mom to pay the bills. Sometimes, these arguments and disagreements about money from my parents were intense. I call it a World War III environment in the house. The fear of that tension between my parents is internalized permanently in my body and mind. Those recollections of memories would come back when I do my policy work at my policy placement, RESULTS Educational Fund.
At RESULTS, most of my work revolves around housing policy and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). For housing policy, my responsibility consists of assisting my supervisor, Michael Santos, who somehow manages to do it all, in developing programming and a campaign for the Renter’s Tax Credit and keeping a close eye on the Supreme Court case of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Focusing on Grants Pass v. Johnson, on April 22nd, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that will determine its decision whether the Constitution of the United States protects people experiencing homelessness, punished for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go and for not having a choice but to sleep and survive outdoors1. I took the initiative to record an Instagram reel on the case to spread awareness. As I was recording, the irony dawned on me that while I was talking about a Supreme Court case in the hopes of better and more helpful and productive housing policies for all, there were people experiencing homelessness lying on the steps of the Supreme Court. Since childhood, my mom has told me to work and save my hard-earned money, hoping I will buy a house someday. I wonder if it is because she and I both know that if we were nearly unhoused, we would be alone, having to find another water source, dealing with sleep deprivation, shielding ourselves from the elements, securing public space for our clothes and personal belongings, and without an address how could we find ourselves a job to get back up on our feet.
With TANF, I am working on a research report for RESULTS’ U.S. policy team on how to reform TANF to make it more accessible from its racist and sexist origins against Black families for low-income families who need cash assistance and how small pilot basic income experiments, like Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), can be part of national anti-poverty policy. Reading about how these pilot basic income experiments allow families to be more productive and stable over time, I can’t help but think about what aspects of my family dynamic would change.
Being low-income, poor, historically exploited, excluded, and economically deprived systemically is not to let yourself be crushed by the heaviness of policy decisions that perpetuate hardship while having little to no support mechanisms to get out of poverty. Poverty’s primary role is to intervene in every aspect of your life with limits. I don’t want myself or anyone to be fearful of poverty. There is no justified rebuttal to allow anyone in the United States to be in constant survival mode. With all of my heart, mind, body, soul, and essence, I pray to Buddha that I will exist in an anti-poverty reality in the future and that I won’t need to be employed in anti-poverty work because poverty will no longer exist.
- This post was written before the Supreme Court released its decision on June 28, 2024, which held that laws regulating camping on public property are not unconstitutional. [↩]