Dec. 1, 2023
BY JOHN BAILEY
“I’ve been amazed by the number of senior citizens who’ve called us for help. They can’t live off the income their getting at all. We require a crisis to help and for people on a fixed income, the crisis is inflation.”
- Maj. Angela Repass, The Salvation Army of Greater Hickory
What does it look like for the 20,000+ Catawba County residents living in poverty?
- Not enough food?
- Not enough income?
- Not enough hope?
It’s all of this and more.
And no single non-profit or public agency can tackle all these issues, but the Catawba County United Way addresses many of them through the support of its community partners.
This November, the CCUW is taking the time to talk to some of its partners and learn what poverty looks like for the individuals and families they help – what are the key issues their programs address and what areas of improvement are needed to address this concern in Catawba County.
This series will tell the story of poverty from the point of view of those working on the front lines of this issue every day.
Faces of Poverty
“We have a wide range of people who come into our shelter looking for help,” Sindy Connell, director of social services at The Salvation Army in Hickory said. “It’s not always any one thing they did. Sometimes life just happens to them.”
Major Repass said families sometimes find themselves falling behind because of reduced hours at work or a lack of affordable childcare or the increased cost of everyday essentials because of inflation.
The Salvation Army of Greater Hickory provides help to those in need with multiple programs including: homeless services (shelter and transitional housing), hunger relief (food pantry and shelter kitchen) and crisis financial assistance. In 2022, more than 4,200 individuals received help through the Crisis Center and 604 were helped at the shelter.
In recent months at The Shelter of Hope, the youngest resident was three weeks old while the oldest was an 83-year-old woman who needed a walker to get around.
According to the NC Office of State Budget and Management, the 2021 U.S. Census estimated there were 3,836 families and 2,414 adults 65 years and older living in poverty in Catawba County.
“At one point this summer we had eleven kids in the shelter, not counting the two in transitional housing,” Repass said.
Housing families is a challenge for The Salvation Army. The Shelter of Hope is an 85-bed facility designed to provide space individually.
“But we do what we can, shuffling individuals around to create a family space in one of the rooms,” Connell said.
Staff have other sites they can recommend for families, but they are outside of the county.
What we need
Transportation is a key barrier people face when struggling to break free of poverty.
Major Repass said the county also needs more affordable housing, more rehab programs, more affordable mental health counseling and more family only transitional housing because a shelter is just a temporary fix.
And income inequality is an issue more and more seniors, age 65 and older, face now.
Older Americans living in poverty has increased from 8.9% in 2020 to 10.3% in 2021, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.
This has placed an additional one million senior adults in positions where they need to access community resources or other public programs to help ends meet.
The Major recalled receiving a call at the Crisis Help Center from an older woman who needed help to pay her utility bill.
“She had been on a budget to pay, then she got a bill in the mail and all of the sudden it was tripled, and she can’t afford it,” Repass said.
The woman also had a broken hip. While Medicare got her a wheelchair and had it delivered, she had no way to put it together. She had no way to go out and get groceries.
“We took food to her and had one of our guys put her wheelchair together because this poor woman had no one,” Repass said.
This is a recurring theme for many of the individuals at the shelter or who receive help through the Crisis Help Center – The Salvation Army becomes their family when they have nowhere else to turn.
“One individual we were helping had grandparents and a mother nearby, but she spent every night sleeping on the street. Her grandparents had picked her up multiple times, but she burned those bridges,” Repass said.
Good Days
“It’s when you see people go from homelessness and they find a place and while they are with us, they find a job,” the Major said. “We had a family, a mom with three kids, who recently were able to get a house and are ready to move in.”
Ultimately, it comes down to everyone in the community helping to make days like this possible.
“We need partners. We can’t do it on our own and those in need can’t do it on their own because if they could, they wouldn’t be at our shelter,” Repass said. “And it’s not just with other agencies. It’s with landlords. It’s with individuals. It’s with employers.”
- See more of this series at CCUW’s Friday newsletter.