Yes the Oscars were boring what else is new but Quincy Jones…..you are like my grandfathers age. i know that is not you daughter on your hand man oh man i hope this don’t turn out to be like another Anna Nichole incident…..

It is a question that has boggled my head for a while. Why is there so much poverty in low income cities were people get assistance? It is something that I felt that I should look in to as a whole. As a country were we got WIC, welfare, and so much more I cannot understand why a lot of people are living in poverty? Poverty is in so many cities across the United States. In a low income city like the south Bronx were there are a large number of poor income housing development I went and ask some questions to figure out why and what was going on. I took a survey of people who lived in an area in the south Bronx and asked them certain questions like there income, if they were on government programs like WIC or welfare, there race, their family status, and how far they went in school. I also had a group discussion with these individuals and we discussed why even though they were getting assistance why were they still living in poor conditions. The results form the survey shocked me because at first, I thought that the reason was because a lot of people are either lazy and don’t want to work or they don’t have a high school diploma/GED. When I was finished the small survey of people I’ve done, the results were very different from the things I was thinking. In one of my questions about family income, I thought that the families made at any rate 30,000 dollars a year. To see that the families I surveyed made only about or under 15,000 a year stunned me. It made me realize how poor these individuals were. What is the income of the family? families income was an estimate of under or around 5-15 thousand a year Are you on a Government funded program? Almost all was either on WIC, welfare, and other government affiliated programs What is your race Mostly Hispanic but I think that is due to the neighborhood I was in Your family status There was more single parent households the non-single parent households How far did you up to in school Most of the adults I talked to went up to the 9th grade; a lot did get their high school diploma, but a lot more did not go to college With the group discussion I had with these families I asked them a lot of questions about their families, income, and why they think there was so much poverty in their neighborhood. There were many responses I got about theses different topics. For instance, I talked to the families and asked them why they think that there is so much poverty in the city. They told me that when you don’t get any help from the city to fix or get the resources (community center, books for schools) the neighborhood stays the same; they also stated that in a lot of these neighborhoods they don’t have a lot of community activist to help them make a better community. After that discussion we talked about the families’ income and why was it very hard for some to get assistance from the government. One response was that depending on how much you make, that determines how much you get. So, as a result, some families my not get a lot of assistance because of the income they make a year in the household. They said that most of them do get assistance but it is still not enough if you are a single parent raising three children. One of them quoted that by the end of the week you’re lucky if you have at least twenty dollars worth of food stamps to feed your family. The last topic we talked about was their educational background. I asked them why some of them not finished school. One of the answers I got was that they had to stop to help the family; another question was that they did get their high school diploma, but they couldn’t afford to go to college. Ultimately, it is a struggle for these families to work and still take care of their children while still being on federal assistance. It is a given that all of these families want more then just assistance for their household but they want assistance for their community like health and community centers and better schools for their children to go to so they can have a better education then they did. As I walk out the area I learned a lot bout the families and how they lived. It is hard to know that people live like this everyday.