Poverty Case Study

Poverty, while not a disease process, is well known to have far-reaching effects on the health of children and adolescents and can carry over into adulthood. Using all of the resources at your disposal, make a case for how Adverse Childhood Experiences are connected to poverty and how both are connected to lifelong health and wellness.

The essay is persuasive in nature, and you can pretend that you are writing to your state senator about why this is an important topic. Use the following questions to help you form your argument:

• How does being poor now affect children and their families later? What kinds of protective factors will the kiddos featured in "Poor Kids" need to overcome their childhood experiences?

• What are some of the challenges children in poverty face that children who have better access to resources might not face?

• Why is poverty often called a "vicious cycle?" What makes poverty cyclic?

• Why is school an important place for children living in poverty?

• Why does place matter? How does where one lives affect their ability to be at their best health?

• Do you believe that a family of 4 could make a living earning minimum wage? Why or why not?

• How do we, as community and public health professionals, help families like those featured in "Poor Kids" from falling through the cracks? If you are majoring in another area besides community health, how could your area of study/major help?

• How does the stigma of seeking out and using social service programs (like SNAP benefits or cash assistance programs) hurt Kylie, Jasmine, and Brittany and their families? What could we do to reduce that stigma?

Writing Guidelines

• 3-5 pages (about 1200 words)

• Answer any or all or other questions as outlined above. Those are merely suggestions.

• The goal of this paper is to write persuasively about what you've learned about the connections between poverty and public health to convince someone to make changes to public health infrastructure.

• It helps to make an outline first, outlining the key points of your argument. Then fill in with supporting facts and citations!

• "A" quality papers will use citations in a particular citation style throughout to support their arguments. A paper that uses minimal to no citations will most likely be a "C" quality paper.

• Upload to Moodle as a PDF or Word document only, saved as Lastname_Poverty.filename

• Failure to upload by the due date and time will result in the risk of my not accepting the paper.

Possible Resources:

Frontline "Poor Kids" documentary

ACEs article from NPR

Adverse Childhood Experiences TEDx talk from Dr. Nadine Burke Harris

NPR Greenland articles

Place Matters video

Poverty lecture

Poverty & homelessness lecture/materials from Moodle

Other outside resources