From 9 a.m. to 1p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23, at Joplin First Church, 501 W. Fourth St., One Joplin will host a poverty simulation. The event is designed for participants to experience what many low-income residents experience on a daily basis.
Jay St. Clair, a volunteer with One Joplin since its inception and chair of the Social Capital Team, took part in a similar simulation in the mid-2000s when he was first establishing God’s Resort, a transitional-housing community. The simulation left a profound effect on Jay that he feels to this day. “Economic Security had put on a poverty simulation, and I’d heard about it and so I thought, ‘Well, that sounds interesting, I’ll go and check that out,’ and not realizing how it would impact me so profoundly,” he says. “It’s an artificial experience, but you get out of anything what you put into it.”
He and the other participants were told to leave their identity at the door and to immerse themselves in their assigned role. “It was so stressful, and so grueling emotionally,” says Jay. “I ended the poverty simulation in jail. I don’t even remember how I ended up in jail, but I’m sitting there thinking, ‘How did my life get so screwed up in one month of living in poverty?’. It really opened my eyes to what a lot of people in the community go through every month, and how you feel so alone. There was nobody that understood me, nobody who advocated for me. Me and my family were on our own.”
Jay recognized that the lack of access to support systems was one of the biggest barriers in his simulation and the real world too. Not just the systems themselves, but even just basic information about them. “Isolation is the poison of progress, and community is the pathway to healing,” he says. “We had no community, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get community in the simulation.”
Firm in his belief that relationships form the backbone to overcoming poverty, Jay seeks to foster positive relationships and build community at God’s Resort. Starting as a community ministry in a dilapidated blue house near 15th Street and Pearl Avenue, God’s Resort now includes multiple community buildings and several apartment complexes along South Pearl. Each of the 40 apartments God’s Resort uses for transitional housing have blue doors, paying homage to their humble beginning in that blue house more than a decade ago.
As the organization continues to expand and assist more people in reestablishing themselves, Jay continues to impress the importance of building community.
“You’ve got to create intersections where people who love people can meet,” he says. “We need our people as much as our people need us. There’s no hierarchy of helping; it’s something that is innate to us, something that we were created to do.
“What God gives every community, ‘Common Grace,’ I call it, expresses itself especially in crisis. We’re learning it can express itself anytime we want it. In reality, we’re desperate for it in communities.”
Jay is no stranger to crisis, citing the Joplin tornado as one of the biggest turning points in his life’s mission. “[The tornado] framed it for me, that there was an F-5 storm that came through Joplin and destroyed a third of it, and killed 161 people, but there was a social, economic, spiritual F-5 that has been grinding its way through the fabric of our city for decades,” he says. “And just like we had to come together to deal with an F-5 weather storm, there’s no way we could recover the soul of our community without coming together in the same way. That’s the expression of One Joplin, it’s the expression of a Common Grace that God blesses when communities come together.”
Jay is a man unwavering in his commitment to helping others. He has a true belief that through building strong relationships within their community, people can overcome any barriers. “Whenever you can place yourself in the shoes of somebody else, you can gain a greater understanding for what other people experience, you become a better person yourself,” he says. “You’ve shared someone else’s life and struggle. The poverty simulation just gives you that little taste that hopefully will spark a compassion that allows you to become part of the solution.”
Guest Author, Eli Lawson is an undergraduate at Missouri Southern State University and intern with One Joplin. He is pursuing an English degree with an emphasis in Professional and Technical Writing, and is on track to graduate in the Fall of 2024, after which Eli hopes to pursue a career in technical writing while still continuing his creative writing pursuits.
