Posted on 05/23/2003 7:13:20 AM PDT by CMClay
More aid requests from once affluent seen
ALLEN – Mary Ann Knight thought she had seen and heard it all in the eight years she has worked at Allen Community Outreach, helping people make ends meet.
That is, until former upper-middle-class residents, hit hard by corporate layoffs that have rocked North Texas the last three years, began walking through the agency's doors, seeking help paying bills.
Mixed in their stacks of monthly bills that cover life's necessities are those that also cover lives the clients don't want to leave behind: $800 car payments, private school tuition that ranges from $1,200 to $2,000, mortgage statements up to $4,000, cable TV bills in the hundreds of dollars and country club dues, to list a few.
"I didn't think I could be shocked any more," said Ms. Knight. "When we tell people, 'We can't help pay those kind of bills. ... We're here to help with the basics,' they get upset with us. They'll say, 'We've always given to charity.'
"It's not like we don't want to help. But it's just that there are no funds for folks like that. They're just living way above the level in which we can help them."
Facing the prospect of losing their way of life, an increasing number of the unemployed are turning to social-service agencies for assistance for the first time. Allen Community Outreach has seen its number of clients increase by nearly 37 percent in its last calendar year, said executive director Glenda May.
Since January, the Assistance Center of Collin County in Plano has helped 2,292 residents by paying for prescriptions, utilities, mortgages and rent. About one-quarter of such charitable agencies' clients are previously unserved middle-class residents who request assistance of $4,000 to $8,000 a month, agency officials say.
Agency directors call folks new to being needy "the situational poor." They've depleted their savings and retirement accounts and struggle to cling to a lifestyle they no longer can afford.
"Our clientele has changed so much," said Kimberly Girard, program coordinator at Frisco Family Services. "We used to serve the working poor. Now it's the CEOs and former executives of companies. They've tapped out their bank accounts and borrowed from family members." Traditionally, charitable agencies have served the "generational poor" – a single mother of two who grows up poor and earns less than $15,000 annually, for example.
But the lagging economy has hit Collin County, the state's wealthiest county, particularly hard. Home to many of the telecommunications industry's top companies, the county boomed in the 1990s as newcomers flocked to fill high-paying positions.
In the last two years, though, the county's jobless rate has more than tripled, from 2 percent to 6.5 percent in March. The county has witnessed a 103 percent jump in the number of homes facing foreclosure.
Randi Lucero, 55, of Frisco is one of thousands who fell victim to the economic downturn. The marketing assistant was laid off from an electronics company after 22 years. Her unemployment benefits ended last week.
"My lifestyle is going to change drastically," Ms. Lucero said at a recent employment workshop. "I'm in an awkward situation because I support a lot of people. I also help provide for my daughter and grandchildren. There's a lot that we do, so I've got to figure a way to come up with some money."
At the Assistance Center of Collin County in Plano, Jackie Hall said cash-strapped homeowners today seek twice to three times as much in mortgage assistance than they did two years ago. Some are seeking as much as $4,000 in mortgage help a month, far exceeding most agencies' emergency assistance budgets for all their clients that range from $3,000 to $5,000 per month.
"Our funds are definitely stretched these days," said Ms. Hall, executive director.
Area social-service agencies are funded in part by the Collin County United Way, state and federal grants, and donations raised through annual fund-raisers. Said Ms. Girard of Frisco Family Services: "Just since the first of the year, we've seen an increase. Put it this way: In January, we had 15 new clients. In April, 58 new people walked through the door.
"I've had people who paid rent that was almost $1,200. I had a gentleman that wanted us to help pay $4,000 in bills. Our measly $300 assistance wouldn't get him anywhere."
Of the two groups the agencies primarily serve, many job counselors and case workers say that the 30-something and 40-something former professionals have the toughest time adjusting to sudden changes. "The people we call the situational poor are so beyond the level of what we can help with," said Ms. May. "It's like they're in denial. Some have even said, 'I want my United Way donation back.' In many ways, they're actually worse off than the single mother we normally help because they've never had to deal with adversity."
Tim Brown of Frisco, who was laid off by a small software development company 14 months ago, did everything society deems necessary to be successful: he earned a college degree, is highly skilled and eventually earned a six-figure salary.
"I still carry a lot of anger around with me," said Mr. Brown, who has since returned to graduate school for a master's degree and has tapped into his savings and retirement funds to support his wife and three children. He recently sought job-counseling assistance at Frisco Family Services.
"I don't know what the situation is going to bring me in the next six months. I was talking to someone who said, 'You're lucky you're getting your master's degree this summer,' but I don't know how lucky I am. The times changed so quickly, and it didn't allow a lot of planning to come along with that."
Wendy Darling, a career development coach for Frisco Family Services, said highly educated out-of-work professionals tend to identify with their professions and lifestyles more than the working poor.
"We identify so much with our jobs," she said. "For a lot of people, that's who they are. A lot of them are still attached to their salaries and the work they did. We all like our comfort zones. It's hard for them to adjust and accept their current circumstances before it's too late."
Several human service agencies have shifted their focus by providing job-coaching workshops and counselors to help the struggling cope and consider new careers.
"We're trying to get people to think out of the box and accept they may not make six figures any more – but is that so bad?" said Ms. Darling. "I think the positive lesson that could come out of this is that we as a community need to reach out to help our neighbors and get back to the basics in life.
"It's OK to have a nice home and nice things, but when they're gone, that doesn't mean you lose your soul."
Men won't kill themselves over losing loved ones or tragedys like having their small children killed by automobiles.
But one thing a man can't adapt to very well is a financial reversal since that is the measurement of most men's manhood. A financial reversal without a prospect of a full recovery causes a lot of suicides among men. -Tom
There is also the isuue of meeting your wife's expectations. These guys often face a lose-lose situations: if they tighten their belts, their wives will dump them, if they continue to spend, the bank will foreclose.
In Texas, this is known as "Big Hat, No Cattle".
As technological change accelerates ever more, we are likely to find that our education system will need to be totally restructured. There will no longer be time for people to go through 12 years of normal school and then 4 years of specialization in university. By the time they get through with their degree, the knowledge they have aquired will be obsolete. Without a steady stream of graduates with relevent knowledge, technological change will slow down.
People can learn a lot faster than our current system allows. Our education system is inefficient and slow. How long is summer holiday? 3 months? Over the course of 12 yrs of education that adds up 4 extra years (going by the current education calender). In theory, you should be able to pack a four year degree in there.
One idea that keeps tickling me is the notion that one day industry itself will serve in the role currently played by our university system. If we streamlined primary and secondary education for 12 years a person could enter the work force at 18 with the same credentials as someone who now goes on to get a four year college degree. Once in industry, their education would continue but in a more hands-on fashion. Their professors would be those minds working in product research, aquiring their knowledge/science as it is developed rather than being on the back end of the curriculum/regimentation loop. That loop takes time to establish- textbooks must be printed, professors must decide how they want to teach it, activist groups on campus interfere- it's cumbersome and stupid. Professors get tenured and entrenched, political pressure is applied to turn the university into a force that tries to mold minds to the advantage of a political party later- the system is geared ever more towards creating compliant voters than it is at providing people with the skills they need to go out and survive.
This is bad for industry. Increasingly, a university degree isn't a good measure for industry to judge with anyway. A degree from some schools nowadays isn't worth anymore than toilet paper- it's a political statement more than anything else. I envision a future where a real education (ie physical sciences and knowledge that actually applies to our lives) will be handled by corporations and the university system will be more of a political training camp- creating entire classes of politicians of varying ideologies who will seek to control that portion of society that actually accomplishes anything.
Aye, but it's deeply ingrained into our culture. You would have to totally change the way people are brought up and how advertising affects their wants.
Something to think about too- this type of lifestyle is intrinsic to the way our society works at the moment. People live on credit. They live beyond their means. Our government doesn't offer the same extensive safety nets that the Marxist leaning European governments do. This means people are even more motivated to work- they've got to pay for those credit card bills. They've got the bills because they bought the stuff. They bought the stuff because they're currently getting paid to make the stuff. It's a loop- not quite a perpetual motion engine but almost. It's what drives our economy. The downside comes when there is an economic slowdown.
I agree ... Amazing
My mother always told me .. never forget where you come from
Oh aye. I don't discount that side of things. This is obvious. But corporations are the number one consumer of college educated people. That's essentially what most degrees are for in the first place- so the degree holder can go out and use it to find work in the corporate world. You can't disconnect that from the equation.
Universities exist because industry exists. But the reverse isn't necessarily true. There was a time when it was, but no longer. Most technological and scientific advance in the world today is made in privately owned laboratories and research departments not in the venerated universities.
What I was addressing is the future not the present. Things are speeding up. More and more. This has been noted all across the technological spectrum, not just in the computing world. This is operating at an exponential rate. In twenty years we will be much more than twenty years advanced.
To further an anology to the computing industry- the bottle neck Moore's Law faces is the physical limit on minituarization. They must solve this problem or they will run into a wall soon. The same goes for this problem with education turnover. As things speed up more and more the time you spend specializing your education in a univeristy will be wasted. Not because it is bad knowledge but because you aren't actively applying it to something and by the time you get your degree there will be nothing to actively apply it to. If you were in a productive environment for those years you could profit while you learned and so could industry.
Obviously, there's still going to be downsizing and corporate bankruptcies. You can't remove that from the loop either way, but the time you spend in university is non-productive. Eventually, that will have to be fixed.
Note, too- I'm not saying you would go to work and then sit in a class while a corporate teacher taught you- that would be the same thing in the end but run a bit more efficiently. No, what I'm saying is you do away with the 3 month holiday for school children, clean up violence and other distractions out of schools. Education Grades 1-12 would become HARDCORE. You're there to learn how to survive not to play graba$$ or learn how to save the rainforests. By the time you got your high school diploma there would be no need to go on to college because you would've already packed that amount of learning into the same time period. A person could then move on to the work place where all their further education would be hands on- this is how humans learn best anyway. "Monkey see, monkey do" isn't just a funny saying it's the truth.
Vast amounts of money that could otherwise go into the ecoonomy are thrown into the big institutions of higher learning but the returns we receive are diminishing. The universities today are actively engaged in the political goal of destroying a person's ability to think critically. Sure, the liberals benefit at the ballot box, but industry suffers when they get people who don't understand reality well enough to manipulate it, to build it. Industry will eventually have to solve this bottle neck and this is one way I see for them to do so.
I think you have it backwards. Universities existed before large scale industry did. Your suggestion that corporations take over higher education would be completely disastrous.
When you speak of 'corporations' & 'the corporate world', I am not sure I understand exactly of whom you speak. Could you flesh that out a bit please.
The me-me-me generation lead to the now-now-now generation which lead to the spend-spend-spend generation. And now they're receiving their just deserts. People who live/spend like there's no tomorrow will eventually get caught.IMHO, everyone, at least twice a year, should have a "I just lost my job" drill. Think about the implications, etc. You'll be better off.
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