Can A Simulation Change The Way We Think About Poverty?

Four out of five Americans will struggle with economic insecurity during their lives. Sixty percent of Americans will experience poverty for at least a year, and 25 percent for five or more years. Yet, despite this ubiquity, many people often struggle to understand what life in poverty is like.

To combat this ignorance and to build empathy, advocacy organizations have developed a number of ways to mimic the real-life experience of living below the poverty line, such as the SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge and Minimum Wage Challenge that both ask participants to cut back in their own lives for a few weeks.

But one has started to take off that gives participants a sense of the full experience of life below the poverty line: the the Missouri Community Action Network’s (CAN) Community Action Poverty Simulation. CAN’s simulation has grown in popularity over the last decade, selling over 1,100 of the $2,150 kits and even spreading overseas in countries such as Australia and South Korea....
https://thinkprogress.org/poverty-simulation-db2bc93ba25f#.xldgar7e7