HEART OF STEELE

Think for just a minute about the last time you felt poor.

Was it having to pay rent late because of a big medical or repair bill? Foregoing a family trip you just couldn’t afford this year?

Or was it something with more serious consequences to your health and well-being?

Except for those in that mysterious 1%, I suspect we’ve all felt poor at one time or another in our lives. But as Third District Court Judge Karen Duncan told me last week, we don’t all have the same understanding of the word “poor.”

“We all come from different backgrounds,” she said. “If I have trouble making my bills one particular week, you know, I feel like I’m poor. But that’s not the same as my only resource is to live in my car, and I don’t have gas to put in the tank to turn the car on in January to keep me warm.”

Getting to a common understanding of what it means to be poor was the goal of this year’s Promoting Peace conference, held Thursday at Trinity Lutheran Church in Owatonna. The day-long event had attendees participating in a poverty simulator that revealed hidden barriers people experiencing poverty may face. They also heard from speakers and learned more about how poverty looks in Steele County.

This year’s topic, Duncan said, came from realizing that poverty had been a common theme through events planned over the past 10 years, “and a lack of people’s understanding of what we mean by poverty.”

“We really felt that the people wanting to do good in the community, which is everybody, could benefit from just having more information and more understanding,” she said.

The poverty simulation, she said, was particularly important.

“It’s one thing to hear it, it’s another thing to feel that stress, even in a simulation, of not being able to get where you need to be and pay for the things that your family needs,” she said.

While the conference was originally designed to break down the silos among different organizations within the justice system, there’s also a wider benefit in opening it to the public.

“In a community like Steele County, where there’s such a long history of giving and trying to give people a hand and solve problems, we want the community to be part of that conversation, because that’s where the energy and the passion is,” Duncan said.

In our brief conversation, we also talked about something I’ve seen from my first day on the job more than a year ago. People here find ways to solve problems–whether it’s support for people who are homeless or suicide prevention or helping parents create safe homes for their children.

We live in a community with a big heart–and events like the annual Peace Conference remind us how important that is.