FACS students learn about challenges facing poverty-stricken families during simulation event

Over 100 students in Liberty University’s Family & Child Development program participated in a poverty simulation event on Thursday where they encountered the true struggles of low-income households and the impacts of different community pressures and resources.

The Cost of Poverty Experience (COPE), a training program developed by Think Tank Inc. and facilitated at Liberty by FIVE18 Family Services, a local organization, was held in the Montview Student Union, Alumni Ballroom. Every scenario in the program is a true story from a real family impacted by poverty.

Each student was assigned a role in a family unit. They lived out their scenarios over the course of a “month,” represented by four 15-minute periods, during which they had to accomplish tasks such as paying for housing, buying food, finding a job, and going to school. Students faced decisions about where to spend their time and resources, often having to sacrifice one need to cover the cost of another. Evictions, unexpected healthcare bills, and more piled on to paint a detailed picture of some of the obstacles facing people in poverty.

This is the second year that the Family & Consumer Sciences department has offered the COPE training. Dr. Janet Brown, department chair, said that after the success of last year, she made it a priority to bring it back this year.

“My goal as chair and program director of family and child development is that I want all of our family and child development students to go through this at least once during their time here,” she said. “I want them to learn awareness.”

Many of the students in the program will enter one of four areas of focus with their degree: ministry, education, community/nonprofit work, or health. The COPE training contributes to each of those areas as it seeks to give students a more well-rounded understanding of the kind of difficulties impoverished families are facing.

“These are really important issues when we’re working with families because not everyone is coming from a healthy or a godly home, so we want to make sure that we know how to navigate these conversations,” Brown said. “Learning those people skills, having that EQ, understanding, and cultural competency, and having that biblical integration about the family, all those things are going to be very important in any of those fields.”

Senior Lydia Smith connected the training to her experience working with impoverished children at a camp over the summer. The simulation helped her see the other side of the situation.

“It was really interesting and eye-opening to see what home life looks like for them because I didn’t get to step into that (this summer),” Smith said. “A lot of times the parents would come back and be kind of hostile or a little bit short-tempered but now, seeing how many other things they had to go through and deal with, I have more of an understanding and compassion toward them.”

Students took a survey before the event to record their beliefs about poverty and another after the training to reassess those beliefs. For freshman Mayah Struss, the training revealed aspects of poverty she had never considered.

“When they gave us the survey to start, one of the questions was, ‘What do you think is one of the main causes or effects of poverty?’ and I think I put ‘People not trying hard enough,’” Struss said. “I’m so dead wrong and so insanely humbled by this (experience). My immature view has definitely been changed.”

For some students, this was their second time participating in the COPE training. Senior Olivia Garmoe was part of a family unit last year, but this year she played the role of an 18-year-old single mother who was turned out of her foster home with her 7-month-old. As she acted out the part, she was surprised to encounter real emotions.

“It was crazy to see how many emotions arose in me, where even though it wasn’t a real-life situation for myself, I was getting really anxious and stressed and watching the timer tick and getting emotional because I couldn’t buy things that I needed to survive,” Garmoe said. “It just really opens up your mind to (those experiences).”

Nicholette Antoniuk is the chief program officer for FIVE18, responsible for facilitating the COPE exercises. Though she’s led several of these trainings, she said it’s always fulfilling to watch participants’ perspectives change, especially when there is a faith element.

“I’m really grateful for what Liberty allows, and that’s for people to be people,” Antoniuk said. “We are both human and we are holy, righteous, and redeemed. Getting to bring that to the COPE experience is not what I always get to do because a lot of what I do is secular, in groups where we can’t pray, we can’t talk about God, and we can’t bring that in.”

FIVE18 offers several poverty-oriented trainings open to the public for those who want to better understand the realities of impoverished communities.