Building Stable Lives

Unless you’re one of the richest 1% of Americans, you have probably been or felt poor at some point in your life. There is poor and then there is poor though, and while some of us might have had to suffer the embarrassment of reduced lunch and too-big hand-me-downs, or drafty one room apartments and a steady diet of ramen and rice, I hope that most of us will never wonder if, without help, without some intervention, we might starve, might lose our homes, might not be able to give our children the basics for living let alone a prosperous life.

But this is the reality of life for many people in America, far too many – as of 2008, nearly 15% of American Households were food insecure. There are programs in place to help people without access to food, such as United Way’s 211, but 211 and other programs like it are stopgaps, meant to get people through brief periods of urgent need. Serious poverty is a relentless monster, however, and many people find themselves calling for assistance over and over in a given year. Obviously the help they’re receiving isn’t doing anything for the core problem, that circumstances in their lives have brought them to a place where they can’t acquire the basics of human survival.

One of the areas with the greatest number of repeat callers in Chattanooga is East Lake, which has some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates and lowest high school graduation rates in the city. In other words, the area is a perfect storm of all the factors contributing to poverty and hunger, and it has the fewest resources available to aid in these problems. But how can that be helped, other than giving people food and monetary aid? For Raquel Hidalgo and the “Building Stable Lives” initiative, the solution is – as usual – not a handout so much as a hand up.


The biggest problem facing most of the families she deals with is a lack of work, which takes not only a financial but a psychological toll as well. This has gotten worse recently, as rising unemployment leaves people of all educational backgrounds scrambling to find any employment, leaving the poor of areas like East Lake, who often don’t even have a GED, to compete for work with high school and college graduates. Construction, labor and production have been good sources of work for those without high school diplomas in the past, but few construction projects are initiated in an economic climate like this one and those are temporary anyway – once the building is finished the job is done. Labor and production have been dwindling for years, giving way to a service based economy as the industrial and agricultural work of our parents and grandparents is moved out of the country. The logical solution is to go back to school or at the very least get a GED, but when food is scarce, children are crying, and the stresses of living in poverty pile up on every side, it can be difficult if not impossible to rally the time or the psychological energy, let alone the money, to do so. This is where Raquel comes in: she helps families in crisis take inventory of their lives and shows them ways to work within their circumstances to pull themselves out of their current chaos.

One of the most important services she provides for her clients is showing them how to get a GED and, beyond that, how to achieve even higher levels of education. Many have begun the process of getting their GED, many have already gotten it, and a few have even enrolled in classes at Chattanooga State. She also gives her clients access to computers and shows them how to use them to find work and handle their resources – something that many of us consider incidental but which have become almost necessary for full participation in society, since even the lowest paying jobs are moving to exclusively handling the application process online. Little things like computer illiteracy can add up to a severe handicap, and helping with these problems is a large part of Raquel’s work.

But working and thinking, jobs and education, those are the keys. Those are the foundation around which all the other work, all the other assistance, is done, and it really is staggering the dignity that meaningful labor can bring a person who thought they were useless, the hope that education can bring do a mind that has been for too long turned inward in despair and frustration. What Raquel and the rest of the Partnership provide for the people they help is not a crutch or charity, but – as I’ve said over and over – empowerment and the freedom to be productive. I will leave you with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath that, to me, sums up exactly what we mean when we use the E word:

The last clear definite function of man-muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.