Poverty is becoming an issue of growing concern in Texoma as the Texoma Council of Governments, and other agencies, are seeing an increase in families below the poverty line in Grayson County.

Even with jobless numbers improve, the number of residents in Grayson County who fall under the poverty line has increased. This comes despite a decrease across the state.

The poverty rate across the state of Texas dipped to 14.7 percent, down from the previous year’s 15.6 percent, says a report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Grayson County, meanwhile, went from 12.5 percent in 2016 to 13.7 percent in 2017. Grayson County still remains lower than the state.

Things are even worse for Hispanics. The percentage of Hispanic residents in Grayson County in poverty was 32.5 percent, compared to 22.5 percent for the state.

The Salvation Army is one of the agencies in the county that provides assistance to people facing financial hardships.

B.K. Schlesinger, social services director for the Salvation Army of Grayson County, said she has been getting an increase in residents seeking assistance.

“We have had a good increase of people coming to the food bank. We are also dealing with more people needing help with utility payments,” Schlesinger said.

Among those who fell under the poverty category, 2.2 percent had worked full-time the entire 12-month period in the report. The rate of those who were below poverty and had not worked full time the entire 12 months was 32.3 percent.

Forty-five percent of those below the poverty line were classified as having not worked at all in Grayson County. The rate was 49 percent for the state.

Schlesinger provided some insight into why poverty could be increasing despite a low unemployment rate.

“While the jobless rate is very low, the jobs that are available are typically minimum wage jobs. Even at 40 hours a week, a minimum wage job will not pay for rent and utilities on a 1-bedroom apartment. That’s just not enough income. Our skilled labor force is doing really well. But if you are unskilled you are not going to be able to get the kind of job to have a comfortable living,” Schlesinger said.

More families impacted

Children are especially susceptible to the effects of poverty, Schlesinger said. In Grayson County, the percentage of children in poverty was 22.5 percent for children between the ages of 5-17. That is a significant increase from 15.3 percent in 2016. Statewide that number is 20.2 percent for children in the same age group. The U.S. Census Bureau uses various factors such as family size and income level to determine if an individual is considered below the poverty line.

“We are serving about the same number of children each year. I am concerned about making sure we have enough food from our food drive. For the first time ever, we have begun running short on things this year. We have had to supplement that food more than in the past,” Schlesinger said.

Annette Limoges, executive director for the Grayson County Shelter, said her agency is seeing an upward trend in families with children seeking assistance.

“We have been totally full for nearly a year-and-a-half. The length of time they stay is what has increased. We tell people we are a 21-day facility. In 2017 our average stay was closer to 48 days. We have also seen more families with children than from the previous year, an increase of 15 additional families,” Limoges said.

Limoges said the shelter has been at or near capacity for the last four years. She said the length people stay has increased in the last 18 months and is expected to follow the same trend into this year. For the first six months of 2018, those numbers were already higher than the previous year, suggesting things are still getting worse for some families.

TCOG recently addressed many of these concerns in their 2019 to 2021 needs survey. In that report TCOG recognized the increase in children in poverty, calling it alarming.

“This issue of child poverty is pervasive throughout the region. In fact, 22.4 percent of children in Grayson County live in poverty,” the report says. “One … trend found across all three counties is the percentage of age 18 to 34 years living in poverty; in the case of Grayson County, 19.4 percent. This trend is disturbing, as individuals in this age category are beginning careers, building families, and having children.”

There were two census tracts in Grayson County that had even higher rates than the average.

In Sherman, the region with the largest percentage of children in poverty lies on the easternmost side of the city. The poverty rate for children in that area was 46.3 percent, compared to the county’s 22.5 percent. The northernmost tract in the Denison are, which goes from the city limits to Lake Texoma, has a poverty rate for children at 43.5 percent. The TCOG report indicated the number of children in poverty was higher among single mothers with multiple children, and especially higher for Hispanic families.

Lack of affordable housing compounding problem

The TCOG report says affordable housing is a major problem people below the poverty line. The number of available, affordable housing options for low-income families hasn’t kept up with demand, the report said. Specifically, TCOG believed better educated, upward mobile workers were moving into the county, increasing the demand for homes while also pushing up rental rates.

Limoges said she has been having difficulty finding permanent homes for several of those staying at the shelter. Schlesinger echoed that sentiment saying the Salvation Army has been struggling to find affordable homes for a lot of the families seeking assistance due to a shortage of low-income housing in the county.

According to the census data, the number of men in the 35 to 64 age group in poverty had increased from 10.5 percent in 2016 to 11.8 percent last year. This is also a reversal of the state’s downward trend, from 11.4 percent in 2016 to 10.7 percent last year.

“Our largest number of homeless adults are men age 45-65; we are also seeing an increase in the 18-22 range who are homeless,” Schlesinger said.

Right now, Limoges said the shelter has been seeing an increase of individuals from out of state, and the shelter is preparing to see more following the hurricane evacuations.

Source: https://www.heralddemocrat.com/news/20181007/as-texas-rate-trends-downward-poverty-rate-up-in-grayson-county

SHERMAN, June 2, 2017 – Texoma Council of Governments (TCOG) Executive Director Susan B. Thomas, PhD, announced today the launch of a new program to help Section 8 clients and others build economic stability and take charge of their future direction. Created by Aha Process! and facilitated in partnership with MasterKey Ministries of Grayson County, “Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-By World” is a 16-week program of investigation that positions participants as the experts regarding their lives and problem-solvers in building resources for themselves and the community.

Using the technique of co-investigation, participants and facilitators work to better understand poverty, its causes, and the rich/poor gap in today’s society. After getting a clear picture of their lives now, investigators explore a theory of change that moves them from the concrete thinking used to solve the constant barrage of everyday problems into more abstract thinking necessary for building future plans. The course explores the hidden rules that help participants build relationships of mutual respect, navigate new environments and take action with the support of the group and community members willing to serve as advisors and mentors going forward.

“‘Getting Ahead’ is about helping people find their future stories and discover the joy of being in charge of their learning and their lives,” said TCOG Executive Director Susan B. Thomas, PhD. “Our goal is to help participants realize that ‘what it’s like now’ isn’t ‘how it has to be.’ It is also about bringing our community together to better understand and address the tough issues that lead to economic instability.”

Sponsored by TCOG with support from the community, “Getting Ahead” offers participants a weekly meal provided by area churches and businesses, and childcare through the Foster Grandparents Program. “Getting Ahead” currently runs in more than 200 sites across the nation; this first Texoma-based program made up of 12 participants will meet weekly through mid-August.

The Texoma Council of Governments is a voluntary association of the local governments in Cooke, Fannin, and Grayson Counties. Established in 1968, the Texoma Council of Governments promotes economy and efficiency in the coordinated planning and development of the tri-county region through its community and economic development activities. Either directly, or through contractors, the Council provides housing, utility assistance, and weatherization services for low-income citizens in the region and assists the elderly through a variety of Area Agency on Aging programs. The Council also facilitates the delivery of grant funding for homeland security and criminal justice.

SHERMAN, February 16, 2015 – Dr. Susan Thomas, Executive Director of Texoma Council of Governments (TCOG) held an enlightening dialogue with local agencies about the viewing of the HBO Documentary, AMERICAN WINTER.

“The film was an eye-opening, thought provoking and compelling presentation of poverty in America and is a must see for agencies engaged in providing services to impoverished communities,” said Dr. Thomas. “The documentary was presented as part of Texas 2-1-1 Day, a statewide education campaign of the information and referral system.” The 2-1-1 program is among TCOG’s wide array of services aimed at improving quality of life in Texoma.

Co-produced by Joe and Harry Gantz, AMERICAN WINTER tells the interwoven stories of eight families living in and around Portland, Oregon, each of whom called 211, a nonprofit referral organization, in search of help with paying bills, finding housing, or getting advice on how to weather the current financial downturn. In addition to vérité footage of each family, the documentary includes insights from several local officials and business people.

Agencies wishing to view the documentary may contact Judy Fullylove, TCOG Program Manager at jfullylove@texoma.cog.tx.us

The Texoma Council of Governments is a voluntary association of the local governments in Cooke, Fannin, and Grayson Counties. Established in 1968, the Texoma Council of Governments promotes economy and efficiency in the coordinated planning and development of the tri-county region through its community and economic development activities. Either directly, or through contractors, the Council provides housing, utility assistance, and weatherization services for low-income citizens in the region and assists the elderly through a variety of Area Agency on Aging programs. The Council also facilitates the delivery of grant funding for homeland security and criminal justice.

Texoma is in strong economic shape, on paper. Grayson, Fannin and Cooke counties all beat the statewide average for poverty rates. But, according to Texoma Council of Governments Director Susan Thomas, a strong economy can still leave quite a few people behind.

“We are blessed with broad-based prosperity in this region,” Thomas said. “But the reality is that there are also pockets of poverty. That prosperity, taken across the region as the whole, may be misleading. We want to find ways to identify those pockets of poverty, understand them, and then find ways to address them.”

For TCOG, that way is a new major demographics study with the goal of locating just where Texoma’s poorest citizens live and predicting how those populations might change in the future.

Randy McBroom, TCOG’s planning and development director, said that a strong economy actually makes it more difficult to fund programs that help the needy.

“Quite a few of the grants that are out there have thresholds of official poverty rates,” McBroom said. “And if you look at the poverty rates in our three counties, they don’t hit those thresholds.”

“But if we were to be able to show these pockets of poverty exist, and that the overall poverty rate is not reflective of the actual poverty within our region, we think we could be a little more competitive in some of those grants,” McBroom said.

The first step, McBroom said, is for him and his team to look through census data and see if these “pockets of poverty” exist in our region as TCOG believes they do. If preliminary data show that these trends are real, then the major work begins.

“If this is in fact the case, what we are going to do is try to get a grant so we can do a study of this,” said McBroom. “We would create a map of the Texoma region that would be pretty precise on where this poverty is.”

This study would combine and analyze numbers from various sources, including census files, school district records and direct field observation. It would help TCOG and other local agencies find underserved communities, even going beyond traditional definitions of poverty to more complex measurements.

“We’re looking at poverty in a little bit of a different way,” McBroom said. “Instead of income based poverty, which has been the official way of measuring poverty for years, we and others are looking at what’s known as asset poverty.”

Asset poverty is a broadening of poverty’s definition to include people who earn enough money to be considered above the poverty line, but do not have assets to fall back on in case of misfortune. These people are “working poor,” who could easily be one accident or calamity away from being on the street.

“They live from paycheck to paycheck,” McBroom said. “Anything can literally wipe them out financially and leave them in abject poverty.”

McBroom said that this definition of poverty paints a clearer picture of the economic realities of a region, and many organizations are beginning to favor it over the traditional, income-based cutoffs.

Once the information is collected and analyzed and the map is created, McBroom and his team will begin using the data to make predictions of future demographic trends, anticipating needs and preparing for contingencies.

That moment, however, remains far in the future. “We are just in the very beginning process,” McBroom said. “The whiteboard in my office is filled with ‘what ifs,’ trying to figure out where to go next and what we are gonna do.”

“Obviously it is a long-term project,” said Thomas. “It’s not something that’s going to be done in a couple of months. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of research and resources. We will be looking for grant money to support that research and may even pull in some academic partners to help with that.”

“But I think that it’s a perfect role for TCOG as a planning organization to look at some things that, when you look at growth and development, get overlooked,” Thomas said.

Source: http://heralddemocrat.com/news/local/tcog-study-looks-pockets-poverty