By Kendall Worth!
In today’s blog, I want to share some thoughts on how people in my community struggle to find their comfort zones. This may seem an odd idea to many readers, as there is much more written about BREAKING OUT of comfort zones, than efforts to find and take refuge in them.
This is particularly true of the personal growth and business worlds where comfort zones are viewed as spaces in which comfort creates passivity and acceptance of the status quo. In this frame, the comfort zone becomes a sort of prison that we need to break out of if we want to make changes to our lives and be more ‘successful’.
Of course, the very opposite is more often true in my community. People on Income Assistance and living with mental health issues or disabilities are often very uncomfortable in the spaces we inhabit. We often feel that we are living in a negative – sometimes hostile – environment. People are then more inclined to actively seek out and take refuge in their comfort zone, - a space in which they are at ease, experiencing low levels of anxiety and stress.
I often write in this BLOG about how and why people in my community live high-anxiety, high-stress lives. The most obvious reason is poverty. Even with recent increases in Income Assistance rates, discussed here, the standard household rate in Nova Scotia is $1,005 a month. Given recent rapid increases in basic living costs (rent, food, power, etc), this newly increased benefit remains WHOLLY INADEQUATE, compelling people to live well below the poverty line.
Another major source of stress and anxiety for people living on IA is the sad reality of social stigma. I have recently discussed the nature and impact of social stigma, and this remains a major source of stress and discomfort for many IA recipients. Interestingly, the only time in living memory in which the rates and intensity of social stigma incidents declined was during the COVID Lock-Downs, as I recounted here.
Together, these two factors, poverty and social stigma, mean that many people in my community live well outside their comfort zones every single day.
In these circumstances, how best to help people find their comfort zones is a big challenge. I have suggested one approach: establishing a Social Prescribing Program that would be focused on helping people meet their social needs through different activities. I am a big advocate for setting up such a program or organization in Nova Scotia. This idea has been welcomed by some of the people in my community with whom I regularly discuss such issues, as reported in this recent BLOG.
Let me share recent conversations I have had with two Income Assistance recipients. As always I will conceal their identities to protect their privacy. Mr X and Ms Y are two friends – not a romantic couple – who struggle to survive on IA benefits. I have written elsewhere – here, here and here - how Nova Scotia’s Income Assistance program is structured to penalize if not punish IA recipients who may be thinking of establishing a romantic relationship – but that is an issue for another day.
Today, I just want to share the arithmetic of poverty, as experienced by these two Income Assistance recipients.
In the case of Mr X, he receives the standard IA household rate, along with a $300 Rent Subsidy. He also receives $54 a month to meet special dietary needs, as well as a $40 special needs allowance for a cellphone. Mr X was deemed not to qualify for a disability supplement and is currently appealing that decision. Given today’s housing market, Mr X is paying rent of $1000 a month, along with a monthly power bill of $80. We can all do the arithmetic: Mr X has less than $300 for ALL other living costs, including groceries, personal care and more.
In Ms Y’s case, she too receives the standard IA rate, plus the new $300 Disability Subsidy as well as a $306 Rental Subsidy. This means her monthly income is just over $1600 a month ($19K per year). When rent and power costs are subtracted, this leaves Ms Y with just over $500 a month for all remaining costs, including groceries and personal care. She also has costs related to her pet cat which she keeps for therapeutic purposes. While $500 may seem like a lot of money to cover monthly living expenses, in this time of high inflation it is not, and Ms Y struggles to make it to the end of every month.
My experience is that these two cases are a fair representation of many Income Assistance recipients in HRM. The core issue is that people simply do not have enough money to live on. This becomes a huge source of stress and anxiety. Furthermore, these stresses and anxieties, - are then amplified by social stigma in the larger community. This prompts many people in my community to withdraw into social isolation, which of course only adds to the stress and anxiety.
Social isolation should not be our comfort zone, but it is where many First Voices find themselves today. There was hope some years back that a process of reviewing and transforming the province’s Employment Support and Income Assistance (ESIA) program would lead to its transformation. But we see little hope of that happening under the current government.
Both Mr X and Ms Y shared with me stories as to how over Christmas they were exposed to the continuing – maybe even growing - stigma they face on a daily basis as IA recipients, even amongst family and friends. They reflected how life through the “dark days” of the pandemic – with income supplements as well as constrained opportunities for social interaction – actually put them in more of a “comfort zone” than where they find themselves today.
Surely, we should all expect more. Let us work together to identify solutions and put them in place TODAY!
Kendall Worth is an award-winning anti-poverty activist who lives with disabilities and tries to make ends meet on income assistance.
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