Poverty and Meeting Basic Needs [Interactive Feature] [Activity]

Like many sociology professors, I find that students enter the classroom with a wide variety of lived experiences. Depending on these lived experiences, many students are unaware of the cost of basic needs. This is especially true for middle and upper class students who have never earned their own incomes, contributed to the family income, or volunteered in low-income communities.

The National Center for Children in Poverty published a Basic Needs Budget Calculator

Students can select a location (not all counties in all states are represented) and certain family characteristics. They will then be able to see the basic needs budget of the family.   The example below shows the budget of a single-parent family with 2 children in Atlantic County, NJ.  The budget clearly shows that supporting this basic budget would require $24/hr.

Basic Needs Budget: Atlantic City/Atlantic County, NJ (2010) Single-parent family with 2 children, ages 3 and 6
	Annual	Monthly
Rent and utilities	$13,212	$1,101
Food	$6,559	$547
Child care (center-based)	$15,719	$1,310
Health insurance premiums (employer-based)	$3,135	$261
Out-of-pocket medical	$516	$43
Transportation	$780	$65
Other necessities	$4,745	$395
Debt	$0	$0
Payroll taxes	$3,818	$318
Income taxes (includes credits) [show detail]	$1,423	$119

TOTAL	$49,906	$4,159
Hourly wage needed: $24 Percent of the federal poverty level: 273%

Have you students look up local areas near your universities or near their hometowns to start a discussion on poverty, minimum wage,  rising economic inequality, and/or families in poverty. They can also alter their budgets by adding and subtracting in different categories. (For example, once you see that rent is 1,000 a month,  you can have them search for apartments in that price range on Craigslist, Zillow, etc.  Could they find a smaller apartment in a different area? How would that change their budget?)
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