From campus to community: Empowering local voices to transform perspectives on poverty

This article is authored by Maitland Waddell, who was part of the CERi Graduate Fellowship Program in 2023. He is a PhD student in the Psychology department’s Intergroup Relations and Social Justice lab. One of his primary lines of research examines the psychological impacts of the Making Ends Meet poverty simulator, an immersive perspective-taking intervention designed to challenge stigma towards those who live in poverty. Maitland aims to expand the impact of this work by partnering with local schools and NGOs in order to build their capacity to run poverty simulations in their own Greater Vancouver communities.

In 2021, the OECD estimated that approximately 10.5% of Canadians – roughly four million people – lived below the poverty line. Earlier this year, an analysis conducted by the Government of Canada revealed a similarly troubling result: between 2018 and 2022, rates of homelessness rose by an average of 20% within the 67 communities that were surveyed nationwide. Even at a broader level, economic insecurity has become a concern for many Canadians in recent years. For instance, in September 2023 nearly half of Canadians surveyed (47%) indicated they were living paycheck to paycheck.  

Yet, despite its growing relevance to many Canadians, the causes of poverty are often misunderstood, leading to poverty stigma. People living in poverty regularly report experiences with stigma and are often excluded from key aspects of society such as housing, jobs, and healthcare. Furthermore, poverty stigma creates “psychological distance” between those with economic advantage and those living in poverty, leading potential allies to remain ignorant to the suffering of those in poverty and reducing the empathy needed to become an ally. In fact, poverty stigma may lead members of economically advantaged groups to actively oppose policies that would reduce poverty and support policies that exacerbate it. Thus, any solutions to the problem of poverty would be wise to include efforts to reduce stigmatization and target those who have the power and economic resources to act in support of those who are experiencing poverty.

As a graduate student at Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Wright, one of my primary research focuses has been to examine the psychological impacts of our lab's Making Ends Meet Poverty Simulation (MEM). MEM is an immersive perspective-taking experience where participants step into the shoes of individuals living in poverty and try to “make ends meet” for a hypothetical month (see www.mempovertysimulation.com). In recently published work, we have demonstrated MEM to be effective at reducing poverty stigma and increasing support for poverty-reducing policies. To date, over 1200 undergraduate students at Simon Fraser University have participated in MEM. 

For several years we had also been looking for an opportunity to take MEM into our local community. While we knew that MEM provided a worthwhile learning experience for undergraduate students, we also believed that there were others outside of SFU for whom participating in MEM could be particularly impactful. Our reasoning was that the downstream impacts of MEM could be amplified by targeting those who have decision-making power over those who experience poverty (e.g. social service workers, nurses and doctors, police officers). To this end, in the summer of 2023 we began to collaborate with the North Vancouver-based registered charity Harvest Project (see www.harvestproject.org), and in fall 2023, I was accepted into Simon Fraser University’s Community Engaged Research Initiative Fellowship Program (CERi). 

The collaboration with Harvest Project represented my first foray into community-engaged research, and participating in CERi equipped me with the training I needed to conduct this work in an ethical and impactful way. I learned that a core tenant of community-engaged research is to tailor your research tools to the specific contexts of the community with which you are collaborating. To this end, one goal of our collaboration was to make changes to MEM that could better capture those aspects of poverty particularly relevant to the North Shore. Likewise, good community-engaged research seeks to empower the voices of those who are marginalized. Thus, the changes were made to MEM throughout our collaboration were informed by the written testimonies of people who had experienced poverty in North Vancouver. These changes included the creation of new “recent immigrant” roles, new procedures to reflect the impact of language barriers on the poverty experience, and various expansions to the ways in which childhood poverty was represented. Finally, CERi taught me that community-engaged researchers ought to consider the broader impacts of their work, and that such work should prioritize the goals and needs of their community partner alongside those of their research. To this end, opportunities to volunteer, inform oneself, and donate were integrated throughout MEM. 

On April 7th, 2024 we ran this newly modified version of MEM with 45 volunteers, service workers, and a local politician from the North Vancouver community. Participant evaluations have indicated that the vast majority of attendants believed MEM to be a valuable learning experience and would recommend it to a friend, family member, and/or co-worker. Moving forward, we plan to continue collaborating with Harvest Project to run MEM as part of a Professional Development Day for teachers in the greater Vancouver area. Additionally, we have just begun a new project to design a short, 15–30-minute intervention that captures some of the psychological experiences we simulate in MEM. It is our hope that an intervention of this nature could be broadly used in a wide variety of teaching and learning contexts as well as act as a “primer” for more lengthy discussions about the causes and consequences of poverty in Canada. 

Resources

Resource 1: Waddell, M. W., Wright, S. C., Mendel, J., Dys‐Steenbergen, O., & Bahrami, M. (2023). From passerby to ally: Testing an intervention to challenge attributions for poverty and generate support for poverty‐reducing policies and allyship. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 23(2), 334-362.

• In this empirical paper we present two studies that demonstrate the psychological impacts of participation in MEM, including its impacts on poverty stigma, support for policy, and willingness to engage in allyship on behalf of those living in poverty. This paper also provides an extensive overview of the procedures and materials used in MEM. 

Resource 2: https://www.povertysimulation.net

• The website where anyone can purchase all materials to run a poverty simulation themselves. Note that these materials have been developed in a specific American context and may require further adaptation before being used in your own local community. If you would like to discuss this adaptation process further, you can contact Maitland Waddell at maitland.waddell@gmail.com.