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Conference will address plight of area's poor Photo by Jim Craven Lauren Spector receives job hunting assistance from Oregon's Wayne Moak. Even with jobs, many fall below poverty line By JoNel Aleccia Lauren Spector would be happy to talk about poverty if only she weren't so busy coping with it. The 53-year-old Central Point woman lost her job last week, when owners of the small coffee shop where she worked couldn't afford workers' compensation costs. So now she's writing cover letters, formatting resumes, following up job leads, looking for a part-time office job to pay the bills. "I am very, very scared," said Spector, who receives aid from the state Senior and Disabled Services program. "I don't know how I'm going to pay my mortgage. I don't know how I'm going to pay my car payment. The phone company just called and if I don't get a payment in by April 14, they'll disconnect me." For Spector and an estimated 30,000 Jackson County residents living below federal poverty levels, conversations about poverty won't come a moment too soon. Poverty guidelines range from an annual income of $8,350 for a single person such as Spector to $17,050 for a family of four. Starting Thursday, ACCESS Inc. and the Medford office of state Adult and Family Services will co-host "Dialogues on Poverty 2000," a second series of local, regional and national talks aimed at focusing attention on the issue and its effects. Previous sessions were held in 1996. The point of the town-hall-style discussions will be to raise public awareness about the changing nature of poverty, said Ida Saito, district manager for the local AFS office. "One thing we've done really well in the last few years is we've been able to move a lot of people off welfare and into employment," she said. But many of the 100 to 150 local families who move each month from public assistance still find themselves struggling in low-wage jobs that don't cover basic costs. "They're still oftentimes living in poverty, still reliant on food boxes, food stamps and other forms of community support," said Saito. In fact, the working poor make up most of the nearly 102,000 clients ACCESS Inc. serves each year, said Linda Grimm, coordinator of the local dialogue efforts. "There's a new face to poverty," she said. "It's working people. It's people making minimum wage or a little more who still can't make ends meet." That image contrasts sharply with the common perception of poverty, said Peg Crowley, executive director of the Jackson County Community Health Center. "We don't see the poverty in this community," she said. "Many people think of homeless people sleeping on the street. They don't see the senior citizens living on fixed incomes, stretching their dollars." Increasingly, the ranks of the poor include people accustomed to middle-class amenities, said Sharon Schreiber, director of CERVS. "What we're seeing are more and more families coming in, more seniors on fixed incomes who always led a middle-class lifestyle, more young people who went to college and got a degree and then realized they couldn't make it," she said. "They did all the right things that we're told we have to do to have the American dream." That dream remains out of reach for some 14.9 percent of people in Jackson County who live below federal poverty levels, according to most recent statistics from the Oregon Progress Board. That's partly because average wages remain low -- the average annual payroll per Jackson County worker was $23,175 in 1998, statistics show. At the same time, housing prices are high. More than three-quarters of renters and nearly half of home owners spend more than 30 percent of their income just on housing. For Spector, costs for her small Central Point mobile home total about $450 a month, a huge chunk of the $607 she receives in Social Security disability payments. Injured badly in a 1984 car accident, Spector also suffers from severe asthma, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. She has spent the past several years in minimum-wage jobs at fast-food restaurants, working part time to supplement her Social Security income. It has meant a dramatic lifestyle change for the daughter of a wealthy New York dress manufacturer, a girl who attended private schools and toured Europe by the time she was 20. "In 1996 I was notified that there was no money in the estate," recalls Spector, who moved to Oregon in 1997. "All of a sudden I find I'm on food stamps." Spector has taken advantage of programs that provide food, heat and other assistance, plus she has relied on the support of her religious community, Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland. Even with the help, however, coping with the emotional and practical aspects of poverty has been difficult. "The last five years have been humbling for me. I had no idea how bad it could get," she said. Hearing how bad it is and what steps could ease the burden of poverty is a key component of "Dialogues on Poverty," said Crowley. The talks will provide a chance to hear stories that could affect public policies. Input from the community will be sent to the National Association of Community Action Agencies, the Washington D.C. group sponsoring the effort. More important, the talks will offer a new venue for creative ways to cope with poverty, said Crowley. The issue affects the poor and the comfortable alike, she said, because poverty is implicated in issues that range from crime and school drop-out rates to domestic violence. But even after more than a quarter-century of grappling with the issues, Crowley said she believes there are still new answers out there. Perhaps a solution lies in family-friendly employment practices -- flexible schedules, collaborative child care -- that pay workers with benefits other than money. Maybe there's a way to motivate churches to take a bigger role in solving poverty problems. "The faith communities hold a tremendous opportunity to say, `How can we truly be our brother's keeper?"' she said. "I don't think we've tapped the collective capabilities of our community." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA