Heather Warner, GoPacks founder, prepares attendees at Tuesday morning’s Cost of Poverty Experience to begin the first session. (Photo by Gwen Sour)

Local educators, service providers and community members gathered Tuesday morning for a cost-of-poverty simulation aimed at helping participants better understand the daily challenges faced by low-income families.

The event, known as the Cost of Poverty Experience (C.O.P.E.) was hosted through the No Wrong Door initiative and facilitated by the Family and Children First Council. GoPacks, a local food-support nonprofit, participated as part of the coalition of agencies involved.

Participants were assigned real family profiles and navigated four 15-minute sessions, each representing a week in poverty. They were required to make decisions about housing, employment, child care and transportation under tight financial constraints. Volunteers staffed stations representing employers, social service agencies, banks, schools and other community touchpoints.

Joy Edgell, director of preschool services with the Ohio Valley Educational Service Center, attended with members of her administrative team. Edgell said she wanted her staff to better understand the realities many local families face.

“I direct all the public preschools in the county with the school district,” Edgell said. “We just want to make sure that we can assist with our families starting off at that earliest age as much as we can. And we always feel like there’s maybe not enough we’re doing.”

Attendees at the Cost of Poverty Experience are separated into family units to work together to understand how to survive under a myriad of limitations, including child care, finances, ability and food access. (Photo by Gwen Sour)

During the simulation, Edgell was assigned the role of a grandmother caring for two grandchildren while also supporting a disabled spouse — a scenario she said is increasingly common in the region.

“When I look at the budget, the struggle for me is I know that everything we bring in is not going to cover all of this for the month,” she said. “So we were already talking about what are we not going to pay for… what we bring in is not going to cover this.”

Heather Warner, GoPacks founder, said the simulation offers an important opportunity for residents who may not have personally experienced poverty.

“It’s a poverty simulation to let people who may have not experienced poverty before get a peek as to what it really is like day to day — all the tasks we all do, the barriers, the challenges that they face,” Warner said.

She said the broad range of participants – teachers, police officers, nonprofit workers and others – reflects the importance of community-wide understanding.

From left, Paige Lockhart operates the employment booth and helps Joy Edgell figure out how her job works at the Cost of Poverty Experience. (Photo by Gwen Sour)

“Poverty is in our community, and everyone who’s in poverty is just as valued and important as people who are not facing poverty,” Warner said. “If we all understand what everyone’s facing, it can just make for a stronger community, stronger support systems, more empathy, more kindness.”

The No Wrong Door initiative brings together multiple local organizations committed to ensuring residents can access services without being redirected or turned away. Warner said the goal is that “whatever door they walk through, we will help them find the resources and support they need.”

The simulation, she added, helps reinforce the daily realities behind that mission.

“Every day, people make decisions — do they buy food, do they pay rent, do they buy medication?” Warner said. “Hopefully it will be less judgment, more helping, more walking alongside people instead of trying to fix people.”