I had never volunteered at a homeless shelter before, let alone spent the night chaperoning and assisting the homeless. In fact, the only experiences I’ve ever had with the homeless, other than the occasional panhandler, were dealing with disturbance and public intoxication calls during my internship with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. The difference in my role and change in environment is what made my experience at ECHO homeless shelter in Atascadero incredibly impactful and eye opening. My overnight volunteer service at ECHO homeless shelter was a firsthand view of how poverty traps, the minimum wage, and the solutions employed by both ECHO homeless shelter and the government directly affect the impoverished members of San Luis …show more content…
Many of them have been in a cyclical process of abject poverty and an inability to escape it—a poverty trap. The World Bank defines poverty traps as, “a stable equilibrium but at a low level of wealth and output, and it cannot get out of this low-level equilibrium (sometimes called a “low-level attractor”) without a potentially large injection of external assistance.” Essentially, poverty traps are when an individual's capital at the moment is not sufficient in allowing him or her to acquire more capital in the future, and without external assistance the individual will remain in a permanent cycle of poverty. Many of the residents at ECHO had little to no savings, no valuable assets, and no higher education, causing a multitude of issues that would result from a poverty trap: lack of funds to invest in capital, inability to afford a vehicle for transportation, inadequate food supply, no access to higher education, limited work opportunities, and inability to afford medical care. Even more unfortunate, It was common to find residents at ECHO that had been in the poverty trap for the entirety of their life. In order to combat the poverty traps its residents were in, ECHO would position itself as an external assistance; providing food, shelter, transportation waivers, educational support, along with a program to find both permanent work and housing, ECHO assisted all …show more content…
Although many of those solutions would benefit the minimum wage ECHO workers residing in poverty, reforming the minimum wage system in a permanent manner may have a more immediate effect, possibly causing other solutions to also gain traction. A preeminent concern of those opposed to raising the minimum wage is that a wage hike may cause the prices of goods and services to inflate; however, the prices of good and services have increased over time, whereas wages have remained