LIFT

I had a lot of pre-conceived notions about poverty and people living in poverty.

These ideas are challenged daily this summer as an intern working at LIFT, a national non-profit whose mission is to help community members achieve economic stability and well-being.

After a comprehensive training orientation with skilled teachers, I have the opportunity to work one-on one with clients in LIFT’s Bronx office to secure housing, employment, public benefits, legal services and financial advising.

In 5 short weeks this experience has educated me and raised my awareness about people living in poverty. The people who come to LIFT as clients are not at all lazy. They work hard every day and come to LIFT because they just need help getting back on their feet.

Having lived through the recession, I think we can all relate to changes in economic security – some folks clearly impacted greater than others – but we all shared common feelings of anxiety, nervousness and panic.

Nelson Mandela & Organizing Your Life Closet

Amanda Anderson is a Graduate Fellow at CHMP

There’s a closet in my apartment that I generally tend to avoid. Besides housing my winter coats, it’s where I hide my toolbox and vacuum cleaner. Dark and crowded, every time I venture into it for my hammer, I become instantly angry at the chaos. It’d be easy enough to organize and light, but who wants to do that? Instead, I curse audibly when forced to enter, and all other times avoid it.

While reading about Nelson Mandela’s current clinical status and lack of documented end of life planning, I couldn’t help but think of my disorganized, but highly necessary storage space.

Death is a topic that plagues every living thing, but our society has decided it is worth talking about only when the occasion arises or is near. Hence, we are left, or leave our loved ones, to make decisions that we likely never spoke of in our healthy life. Cramped and disorganized, we’re forced to piece together parts of the puzzle of illness care in the dark; would mom want to live on a ventilator, would dad be okay with a feeding tube, would I want to persist as a vegetable?