Being able to vote is something I see as an amazing opportunity and a serious responsibility. But when you’ve moved around a fair bit in the last few years, as I have, that makes it harder to stay informed about state and local politics, since you kind of have to start over every time you move.

Thank goodness for Project Vote Smart! Their mission “is to provide free, factual, unbiased information on candidates and elected officials to ALL Americans.” I’ve come to rely on their easy-to-use tools and the huge amount of non-partisan information they provide to insure that I vote for the candidates that best reflect my values.

So during this election season, I encourage everyone to spend some time on their website (and maybe to make a donation to support their work, if you can)!

A while back, I wrote about attending a poverty simulation on Ball State Campus that was organized by Teamwork for Quality Living. As I said then, it was a really worthwhile experience!

I just went through a similar poverty simulation online that is worth mentioning to those of you who don’t have access to one in person. It is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure website that you can click through to see what it is like to try to live for a month in poverty, and along the way it gives you lots of information about poverty in America and the choices faced by people living in poverty. (It is also very attractive in terms of design.)

If you don’t have first-hand experience with poverty (or maybe even if you do), I encourage you to check out the simulation at http://playspent.org.

A couple of days ago, I participated in a Poverty Simulation on the Ball State Campus that was hosted by TEAMwork for Quality Living. What an amazing experience! I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When you arrive at the poverty simulation, you’ll be assigned a new identity for about the next 2 hours, and you’ll work together with the members of your family to try to meet all the challenges that come your way throughout the (simulated) month. All the families have to figure out how to arrange for transportation, buy food, and pay bills; depending on your specifics, you may have to deal with issues at work, health problems, legal trouble, and people in the community who *ahem* are not very kind.

No matter what your situation is in real life, I think this is an excellent way to learn about what other people go through, and to foster empathy for a wide range of folks. The post-simulation reflective discussion can be a real eye-opener!

Poverty simulations are offered regularly (TQL has done 80+ over the years), so check out their website to sign up for the next one!

On Thursday, I went to my first meeting of Teamwork for Quality Living, a group of folks in Muncie who have been working together to empower people in poverty toward self-sufficiency since the late 1990s. Teamwork uses a collaborative model to bring about positive changes in the community, and the Circles Campaign has been shown to be quite effective by various empirical studies.

I met a wonderful, demographically diverse group of people, learned a lot about the Muncie community, and shared a tasty dinner with the group! Now I am looking forward to next week’s meeting and the upcoming poverty simulation that I’m going to participate in. My challenge, moving forward, is to start figuring out the best ways for me to contribute to Teamwork’s mission.