One day, when I was about 9 years old, I accompanied my mother to a food bank where we lived in northeast Pennsylvania. Divorced and raising four children, she juggled occasional part-time work as a waitress or telemarketer. At the food bank, I wore a T-shirt and weathered shorts from a thrift store. Even at that young age, I immediately felt the staff look us up and down and appraise us, their eyes lingering on the holes in our shoes.
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One day, when I was about 9 years old, I accompanied my mother to a food bank where we lived in northeast Pennsylvania. Divorced and raising four children, she juggled occasional part-time work as a waitress or telemarketer. At the food bank, I wore a T-shirt and weathered shorts from a thrift store. Even at that young age, I immediately felt the staff look us up and down and appraise us, their eyes lingering on the holes in our shoes.
Top Lines
Bobbi Dempsey
Like many Americans navigating a threadbare social safety net, my family felt pressured to display the Goldilocks “just right” level of poverty.
Social service providers often unwittingly pressure clients to “perform” their pain and gratitude to prove they deserve assistance.
Many assistance programs rely on cookie-cutter solutions and treat the poor monolithically, ignoring the circumstances and causes of their need
My mother then got the third degree. When did you last come here? What have you done with the food you got last time? They reminded us that others needed this food, implying that each box of cornflakes we took was one fewer for someone else — perhaps someone more deserving.
Throughout my childhood — and a chunk of early adulthood — I was dependent on charities and public welfare programs. As a child, my family relied on SNAP (then known as food stamps), food banks, and giveaways of donated items from nonprofits like the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities.
While I knew that our poverty was often viewed by society as a byproduct of laziness, these encounters were different. The nonprofits — charitable groups committed to helping me and others like me — judged us for looking not quite poor enough. Like many Americans navigating a threadbare social safety net, my family felt pressured to display the Goldilocks “just right” level of poverty to merit assistance.
Granted, my feelings that we were being “sized up” were just that — feelings. But today, as a journalist who reports on the nonprofit field, I sometimes find confirmation of my suspicions. I’ve heard staff workers grumble about people who arrive at food banks in “fancy” cars or name-brand clothes.
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Social-service providers often unwittingly pressure clients to “perform” their pain and gratitude to prove they deserve assistance. This can retraumatize clients, strip away their dignity, and even help mire them in poverty. Some individuals may choose to earn less money to maintain eligibility. Or they may feel pressure to follow program requirements even when those conflict with caregiving responsibilities, health needs, and other demands.
Even worse, perhaps, some groups treat people monolithically, ignoring the circumstances and causes of their need. For example, after escaping domestic violence, my mother raised her children on her own, struggling without child care or transportation to make ends meet. She had to walk the fine line of earning too much to exceed eligibility guidelines for SNAP and other programs. Child support would have eased our suffering, but my father never had to pay it; my mother had a protection order against him and didn’t feel safe letting him know our address.
The Dempsey siblings around 1972: Billy, Bobbi, Joey, and Marylin.
‘Deserving’ vs. ‘Underserving’
When Jomaris DeJesus was a single mother working three jobs, she turned to a cash-assistance program that required her to participate in training programs — rigid expectations that failed to take into account the demands of her life. Once her case manager found DeJesus a $10-an-hour warehouse job and asked her to start the next day. The case manager did not consider her child care needs, did not ask if she could afford the required shoes, and threatened to remove DeJesus from the program if she did not accept the position.
Today, DeJesus is executive director of the Prosperity Agenda, which helps community organizations center their work and practices around the people they’re helping. Many assistance programs rely on cookie-cutter solutions. In her situation years ago, DeJesus says the case manager should have taken the time to understand her needs and challenges as a single mother of three. “Rather than presenting a single ‘solution’ with implied consequences, I would have appreciated an open dialogue where she asked about my current barriers, such as child care and transportation, and discussed what kind of support I’d need to transition sustainably into the work force.”
Such negative interactions stigmatize those in need and can deter them from turning to organizations for help, says Karen McLean, department chair and associate professor of social work at Western Connecticut State University. “America’s system of social-service provision is rooted in the notion of the ‘deserving’ versus ‘undeserving.’”
In my case, my family had to constantly prove we were “deserving” enough for help. My mother often had to recite steps she had taken to earn money or stretch her budget — demonstrating that she had made sufficient efforts to solve the problem before coming to the food bank.
Not ‘Needy’ Enough
“Oh, this is really nice,” the woman said with surprise as she surveyed Orna Walters’s apartment. Walters, now 58, had lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., for several years when a nonprofit bought the building. She felt organization employees, including the woman who toured her apartment, viewed her as too “well-off” to live in a rent-controlled residence. Walters loved her apartment, which became her safe haven after she left a domestic-violence situation, but the atmosphere deteriorated quickly with the new owners, who refused to deal with problems that included termites, noise, and security. Walters tried to fight back in court, but after a drawn-out legal battle left her exhausted, she relinquished the apartment.
Explore ideas, conversations, and solutions for a fractured country.
It may be impossible to eliminate bias among staff, but groups can take steps. First, they can acknowledge the potential of bias. “Someone who assumes that a person is ‘acting’ to get help or ‘look needy’ might be operating from a place of implicit bias,” McLean says.
Economic hardship can befall any of us — even nonprofit staff members. If staff members recognize this and dismantle narratives that suggest they are somehow different from those they serve, it’s easier to build empathy and effectively serve.
“Food insecurity can affect anyone,” says Mitch Steichen, a communications official withFeeding America. “People with a steady income and access to affordable housing can experience a temporary setback that leads to food insecurity, including job loss, medical emergency, natural disaster, or family crisis.”
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Working Toward Solutions
Meaningful change typically requires an organizationwide analysis and possibly an overhaul. Establishing a culture of empathy includes even small things. At Feeding America, staff members refer to the people they serve as “neighbors,” not clients, a subtle yet important way to reinforce the human connection.
Many organizations incorporate formal processes like sensitivity-training workshops, but these aren’t a quick fix. “Unpacking deep biases takes work,” McLean says. It’s best to chip away at negative mindsets and deeply ingrained stereotypes over time, she says, and through a variety of activities that encourage staff members to reflect on their biases, origins, and “blind spots.” Ideally, key concepts related to equity, inclusion, and empathy would be reinforced through regular training and other work that revisit these goals.
Groups also can change how they screen individuals or determine their eligibility for services. Experts say these processes should be fair and equitable and give staff flexibility to assess every case individually. Enforcing rigid demands like multiple identifications, proof of income and expenses, and other extensive documentation can create obstacles for those who don’t have immediate access to those documents, McLean says.
Groups often subject individuals to multiple screenings, which can increase their feelings of shame. DeJesus recommends a proactive, comprehensive intake — a one-time assessment considering factors like family composition, local living-wage standards, job history, and challenges such as child care, transportation, or health issues.
Initiatives that aim to empower clients also can help. Dozens of human-service agencies have adoptedFamily-Centered Coaching, DeJesus says. In this case-management approach, individuals seeking services lead decision making, assess resources, and explore solutions in collaboration with their case managers.
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Finally, it’s important for staff to recognize that you often cannot know the struggles someone may be experiencing. It is difficult to determine who may be “performing their pain,” McLean says. Agencies must listen.
“The real question is, how can someone really tell that a person is ‘faking’ to receive help, just based on what you see?” McLean says. Assumptions based on superficial assessments can cause harm or lead to the denial of services for someone who really needs help.
All those years ago, as my mother and I endured the interrogation at the food bank, we felt increasing shame. At the same time, we were afraid to say or do anything that might jeopardize our chance to get food. We were hungry and terrified at the prospect of leaving empty-handed.
Eventually, we received a few bags of items like boxed macaroni-and-cheese and oatmeal. As we prepared to leave, I instinctively felt compelled to give one last performance — an expression of gratitude. So I said a series of “thank yous” and tried my best to look visibly appreciative. We were conscious that it would not look good to be seen as ungrateful or undeserving. A demonstration of humble appreciation was, we felt, part of the performance expected of us.
The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, the Freedom Together Foundation (formerly the JPB Foundation), and the Walton Family Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. Seemore about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and ourgift-acceptance policy.
Bobbi Dempsey is a journalist and reporting fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project covering nonprofits and economic inequality. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and other outlets.
