The other day I delivered a keynote speech to a group of advocates and nonprofit leaders. When asked what I should speak about, I was told to tell them what I thought they needed to hear. I had started my speech the night before I left, thinking I would finish it on the plane. Speaking for twenty minutes was a huge task for me, and I had gotten well through half of it before I left home.
By the time our final plane landed, I had written well over half the speech, but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t the one I was supposed to give. The time change kicked my butt. I went to bed three hours later than usual and woke up at the regular time. But I was ready to write.
I decided to talk to them about how my early experiences still determined my behavior today in a lot of cases. I remembered with them the embarrassment of paying for food with those old food stamps that came in a book and had to be counted out, and I shared how I never made my kids use the food stamp card if they didn’t want to because I remembered that embarrassment so well. Most in the room nodded their head, remembering their own experiences with food stamps.
I also talked about how opportunities like being flown to California to deliver a speech weren’t supposed to happen to people like me. You know, people who have lived experience of poverty. I talked about how I hid the generic brownie boxes when my friends came over and we were baking. I shared how I dropped out of college and what the struggles are for poor kids who leave home for the first time. And I talked about how dropping out of school set my path for working two and three jobs most of my life to pay the rent and car insurance.
My favorite part of talking with people who have the same lived experience is that we share the same lived experience. I have laughed until I have cried with folks while sharing stories about the ways we got by. Even in my speech, I talked about the winter I started every morning by popping the hood on my car, sticking a screwdriver in the choke, running to start it, and then running to grab the screwdriver. I tell that story with pride and excitement. Some people will get it and some people will never understand.
I spoke about why it is so important to bring marginalized folks into the room. We imagined the walls were lined with poor people with no clear path to the center of the room to see what work is being done there. They can’t see through the crowd and, before long, they grow bored and restless because they can’t get involved. Life’s everyday stressors remind them that they should be at work or at home and they leave.
The people in the center don’t have to be concerned with the people on the walls because they’re in their peripheral vision. The centers know they’re there, but they rarely provide enough chairs for them to join the group. What happens is that marginalized folks are left feeling like tourists, standing around, wanting to be invited into the center.
I tossed some personal experiences in there, such as how I started to speak up when I was asked to by someone in the center. I gave examples of shitty ways people had treated me when I made it to the center, like several people stopping me to remind me of the policy against drinking and driving company vehicles when they realized I was going on a work trip alone. There was no reason for anyone to say that to me.
The group was asked to go deeper when they invited marginalized people to participate. Want them to fly to DC? Make sure they have proper i.d. and money to eat on. Rather than tell them to not bring their clothes in plastic bags, offer them luggage for the trip. I bought a $5 set of luggage at a yard sale this summer to replace my duffel bag. People who can’t afford to travel typically don’t have suitcases laying around. And I’ve never met anyone who thinks it’s cool to pack in plastic bags.
My point is, we need to create spaces for poor and marginalized people to be involved in their communities, whether that’s attending city council or neighborhood watch meetings. We need to realize they are worth far more than merely being written into a grant. We need to stop talking about them and start talking to them. And we need to provide more chairs.
Onward,
Amy Jo
