A proximate view of poverty
December 20, 2024
Connie Snyder Mick, Ph.D.
I look north out the 11th floor window, past the St. Joseph River flowing with purpose below. On this permacloud November day, I see Notre Dame’s golden dome still glistening, as if from some internal source. South Bend’s skyline asserts itself to the west, pert construction cranes and fresh paint reveal its aspirations. On the other side of the river sit blocks of new homes and all the amenities a wealthy neighborhood desires—a dynamic new public park, a Farmer’s Market, and hip wine and beer restaurants along the newly paved running path. I see two places I frequent—Notre Dame’s McConnell Family Boathouse and the South Bend Boathouse, where I gather to row crew with the South Bend Community Rowing Club.
I thought I knew this river, this place. But I’ve never seen it like this before. This is a million—no—a billion dollar view, and I’m experiencing it from one of South Bend’s senior living subsidized housing towers. I am on the “wrong” side of the river, looking out at all that opportunity from a very different place, and I am here with my Poverty Studies Capstone students to remove all of someone’s earthly possessions so they are not formally evicted. This is Poverty Studies.
This particular experience was not on the syllabus for my Fall 2024 Writing for Social Change senior Capstone course for the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. In this course, students propose a portfolio of diverse writing connected to their primary academic and professional interests. They must write from what they have learned in their other four Poverty Studies courses and write in ways that can inform and animate people to disrupt and diminish poverty.
Poverty Studies students take two kinds of courses. First, they take courses that educate them through more traditional methods, such as reading books and articles, listening to lectures from experts, and conducting research from academic texts. Second, they take experiential learning courses. Experiential courses require students to leave our glittering campus and experience poverty directly by working with the people who address and live in poverty. Both kinds of learning are essential to studying poverty.
This Capstone course asks students to learn from academic texts and from people who know poverty in the local community so they can write with conviction and understanding to effect social change. The students proposed site visits they would like to do in their final Poverty Studies class, visits to places they know and love, and visits to places they had not yet engaged. That’s how we connected with the New Day Intake Center, a housing-first high-access nonprofit that works with people experiencing homelessness, people who would often otherwise be living on the streets. They believe “housing is healing” and do remarkable work to place people in safe, dignified homes.
When the Capstone students and I arrived at the New Day Intake Center, we were greeted by the Executive Director and a team member, both Notre Dame graduates, who told us about their work while giving us a tour of the administrative offices, the well-used food pantry, and the grounds of this motel turned into temporary housing. We met residents living there while they receive wraparound mental, physical, and emotional services and support to find permanent housing. Many doors were decorated with personal touches, including a “Welcome” sign. We felt welcomed.
Then our tour took a turn. The New Day team invited us to assist with the difficult job of moving one of their housed guests out of their permanent placement. The resident broke a rule at the housing unit and was asked to leave. To maintain a good relationship with the apartment administration, the New Day team decided to move the resident out immediately. I asked my students if they were game—they did not hesitate to help.
At the 14-story low-income senior living housing tower, we waited for the one working elevator to take us up. One person was already in the elevator and joyfully recognized our New Day partners, the people who had secured this housing for her. She praised them the entire ride, her gratitude spilling out in tears. She insisted we see her place first, an immaculate apartment with those priceless views.
The apartment we went to next had the same view outside, but inside we saw a life upended. A baby stroller lay on its side, emblematic of the lives disrupted across generations. We put on gloves and got to work removing everything. As the bags piled up in the hallway, some of us worked in the apartment and others took the bags down the one working elevator to the dumpster. The elevator stopped on almost every floor, the doors opening to people in wheelchairs who would have to wait.
Several bags in, I paused to look out that window and take in the view across the river. I thought of how that river formed a kind of line, a barrier between prosperity on one side and poverty on the other. I thought of all the lines we use to segregate communities, the historic federal red lining of “undesirable” neighborhoods of color and poverty from those deemed worthy of financial and social investment. I thought about the gates we put around wealthy neighborhoods and the bars we put around people imprisoned, people who are disproportionately poor before and after incarceration. I thought of how we bent that river to our will, using it like our own public poverty line to invest on one side and evict on the other.
But there’s little time to pause and think about why we’re doing what we’re doing. Poverty is filled with urgency, chaos, and instability that requires hyper vigilance and presence, not reflection on the past or deliberation for the future. We had bags to fill.
We worked hard but had to leave before the job was done. This class was over, students’ next class began soon. I wondered if the students would talk about this experience in that class. Poverty Studies students say that some people give them a hard time for taking courses that place them inside prisons, homeless centers, and places like this in the community instead of in a traditional classroom. “What can you learn there?” others question.
I hope the Poverty Studies students respond with knowledge gained from their first assignment in the Introduction to Poverty Studies course, the Poverty and Place assignment that asks them to research places they have called home, places they think they know, but to do so with a Poverty Studies lens. Through big data and personal stories, students realize quickly that place matters, and not all places afford the same hospitality and opportunity. I hope they speak from their academic understanding.
I also hope they respond by invoking wisdom from public interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson, the Institute for Social Concerns’ 2024 Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C., Lecturer. Stevenson spends much of his time with juveniles in prison and on death row, and he says “getting proximate” and “getting uncomfortable” are necessary components of understanding and addressing complex problems like poverty. I hope students share their discomfort with a world in which doing what we did was genuinely the best possible solution.
It’s hard to convey a full sense of Poverty Studies in a brief exchange with a skeptical student who has been able to avoid poverty due to all the ways we keep it contained and hidden, and who has not chosen to take a class that requires proximity. Our t-shirts hint at this different way of seeing poverty and place, saying, “Poverty Studies: Where poverty is more than a line.” Many people only understand poverty as a financial poverty line set by the federal government, a line in the sand that says you’re eligible for assistance or you’re not. In Poverty Studies, we see that line and so many more, and we see all the people whose lives are diminished by those human-constructed barriers, people on both sides of that line who live entrapped by artificial designations of worth.
As I look out that 11th floor window, I consider how, in rowing crew on the St. Joseph River, it’s the coxswain’s job to find a destination point and guide the rowers in a straight line toward the point. But the river resists. It bends and it pushes from below and side-to-side, sending us off course. A few years ago, a deluge of rain caused the river to surge above its banks and immerse the surrounding neighborhoods in a 1,000 year and then a 500 year flood. The river resists. Maybe these are reminders that lines are not natural, perfect lines are not found in nature. Lines are a human invention, maybe even an obsession, that impose binary thinking and unnatural separation disrupting human proximity. Maybe we should aspire to be more like the eagles that soar above the river, above that tower, flying freely across banks and boundaries to find the safety and comfort of food and shelter. That is an experience every human deserves.
Connie Snyder Mick, Ph.D. is a senior associate director and the director of academic affairs at the Institute for Social Concerns and director of the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. She has an article on poverty, proximity, and prison coming out in the Winter 2025 edition of Notre Dame Magazine.
