It Takes Courage

This week in the Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-By World workbooks, our women took a thorough and unflinching look at all of their personal resources.  Each woman individually assessed her own status in the areas of financial, physical, emotional, mental, social support, relationship, spiritual, hidden rules of class, language, integrity, and motivation resources.   We understand poverty, and conversely prosperity, to be about the extent to which we have resources in all of these areas–not just finances.  And we can see how they are all intertwined–our strengths can be used to build up areas of weakness, just as crisis in one area can be a debilitating burden on the resources we are using.  There were teary eyes as women came to terms with their own situations–realized strengths they didn’t know they had, clearly saw areas that needed work, felt the intense desire for the safety and security that comes from having more resources in all these areas.  Now they are onward…planning their personal paths to prosperity one step at a time.

SOS Women Getting Ahead

Hi, I’m Kathy, one of the staff here at Soup of Success. The women participating in our current class are in their sixth week now, which means they’re working hard on everything from making soup mixes and sewing to improving computer skills and assessing their own skills and interests for career planning.

I get to facilitate the group in a process called Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-by-World. Once a week we investigate together poverty, its causes and effects in their individual lives and in the community, and how to develop a path to prosperity. Our discussions often become intensely emotional as the women share the despair and isolation they’ve experienced as they scramble daily to meet their families’ basic needs, and as they encourage one another to keep on fighting. Today we continued a discussion of the hidden rules of economic class, as defined by author and educator Ruby Payne. We talked a lot about language and the power of being “bi-lingual” as in being able to use both casual and formal ways of speaking, as the situation dictates. The women thought that gaining skills in using language could help them in job interviews, at a workplace, and in communicating with their children’s teachers. I was struck today, as I often am, by their resilience, their willingness to change, their strength.