Notes from my Knapsack 2-23-23
Jeff Gill
Should I help? How can I help?
___
There are some impending rollbacks & unwinding of COVID-era benefits. You may not think this is relevant to you, but bear with me a bit.
First, some 16,000 Licking Countians will see cuts shortly to the SNAP benefits, aka "food stamps" that have given the last three years. Call that 9% of all residents in households receiving nutrition assistance. Who are SNAP participants?
Official data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Pre-pandemic data show that nearly 90 percent of participants are in households with a child under age 18, an adult age 60 or older, or an individual who is disabled. Children under age 18 constitute nearly half (44 percent) of all SNAP participants. About two-thirds of SNAP participants are in families with children; over one-third are in households with older adults or disabled people."
That other 10% of single adult able-bodied individuals, between ages 18 and 50, can only receive three months of assistance across a three year period, and must reapply to qualify each time. Further, our county's Food Pantry Network tells me over 80% of people coming to local pantries utilize them once or twice in a year. That's all.
On Medicaid, estimates are around 4,000 Licking County residents will lose coverage in April or May. That's 2% of our 178,500 citizens. Some will no longer qualify, many will simply not keep up with requirements to maintain coverage, often because they moved between March 2020 & 2023.
And while the number of children in foster care are just below 300, for the first time in about a decade, the total number of juveniles in foster care resident in this county is around 600 some. Of 34,000 children that's approaching 2%.
If you're worried about people living on the margins, and believe these benefit programs are in our moral & long-term national interests, you may wonder what you can do to help maintain & improve our social safety net programs: I have some simple suggestions.
1.) If you know anyone receiving SNAP or Medicaid assistance, remind them to keep their current address and contact info current with the relevant agencies. Non-response is the chief reason people get cut, and they find out when accessing services, setting them back weeks or months.
2.) Likewise, encourage in your circles of contact responding to notices & inquiries. People have automatically stayed enrolled for nearly three years; many of us in helping professions have forgotten the old patterns & processes. Help each other keep up!
3.) And in that same vein: discouragement, despair, & fatalism lose more people coverage FOR WHICH THEY QUALIFY than any other reason. Poverty — news flash — is hard work. Anything anyone can do to encourage, provide hope, and offer support, is going to be invaluable in this transition.
4.) Finally, let your elected officials know you support a measure of discretion & flexibility to local agencies. Ironbound federal & state rules handicap helpers both for providing support, and in managing complex issues.
This will not be a "disaster" like tornadoes or train derailments, but people will get hurt, almost always by accident, usually unintentionally, by losses of coverage and lower levels of assistance in this coming year. We need all the compassion & encouragement we can find to share, in order to find a firmer path to stable footing for everyone.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen enough to know we need to help each other, maybe even love one another. Tell him where you find hope at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Monday, February 13, 2023
Faith Works 2-17-23
Faith Works 2-17-23
Jeff Gill
Public votes and private pressures in church life
___
On Feb. 20, 1923, my home church, First Christian Church of Valparaiso, Indiana, had a special called board meeting.
It was a Tuesday night, and any minister knows a special called board meeting is never a good thing. Or at least, rarely so.
Rev. C.E. Burns had asked for the meeting, in fact, with what I infer was the support of a few of the elders of the congregation. In some way, a request had been presented to ask for the use of the sanctuary on Wednesday, Feb. 21, for a public meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Valparaiso.
There are almost no records of that meeting, how long it went, or what arguments were presented pro or con. In the church history it is simply recorded that permission was denied. As I grew up there, some fifty years later I only heard "our church faced down the Klan." And in fact the public meeting was held elsewhere, and the planning for the coming May multi-state rally would continue without the support of First Christian Church. That's almost all I know from the official record.
What I do know in more detail is from a March, 1923 article in the Klan's weekly newspaper, published in Indianapolis titled, of course, "The Fiery Cross." Their coverage bemoans the bias and unfairness of Rev. Burns and his supporters, noting that the motion failed to host the Klan meeting, but adding that the vote was 13 to 9. Not exactly an overwhelming mandate.
And when my father in 1987 was working on a 150th anniversary history of the church, he got a letter from Myrtle Burns Grant, who was the daughter of Rev. C.E. Burns and was a little girl in 1923. She told a pair of funny stories about a potato peeler in the church kitchen, and how her brothers had fallen asleep behind the organ one Sunday during their father's sermon, so when it came time to play the closing hymn, there was no one to pump the bellows and no music came out. Those both made it into the history book published that year.
What the Sesquicentennial Committee voted to have my dad edit out of her letter was a further story, about looking out the front windows of the parsonage one night to see a group of hooded men burning a cross on the front lawn of their home. And about how it happened again, and again, and so the family moved at the end of the year, two states away. That story didn't make it into the history; I heard about it from my frustrated father.
Growing up in that Indiana town, I heard about how the Klan was denied the chance to purchase Valparaiso University, a story which turned out to be untrue in many particulars, and how my church stood up to the Klan, which was true in part, but not true enough to protect a minister with three children in his home.
And paging through the online copies of "The Fiery Cross" to find the hidden details, to compare and contrast their slant to the narratives I knew from more "official" sources, I kept finding headlines next to each other about Valparaiso, Indiana and Newark, Ohio.
You may ask if events 100 years old are relevant today; I note for myself how stories I heard fifty and forty years ago turn out to be oddly edited and often partial. As both a pastor and a historian, I'm interested in what those edits might tell us about what stories we're telling today, and how we can tell truer stories, both to and about ourselves.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few more chapters of this story to assemble. Share your feedback with him as some already have done at knapsack77@gmail.com (all responses will be kept confidential unless you specifically ask otherwise).
Jeff Gill
Public votes and private pressures in church life
___
On Feb. 20, 1923, my home church, First Christian Church of Valparaiso, Indiana, had a special called board meeting.
It was a Tuesday night, and any minister knows a special called board meeting is never a good thing. Or at least, rarely so.
Rev. C.E. Burns had asked for the meeting, in fact, with what I infer was the support of a few of the elders of the congregation. In some way, a request had been presented to ask for the use of the sanctuary on Wednesday, Feb. 21, for a public meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Valparaiso.
There are almost no records of that meeting, how long it went, or what arguments were presented pro or con. In the church history it is simply recorded that permission was denied. As I grew up there, some fifty years later I only heard "our church faced down the Klan." And in fact the public meeting was held elsewhere, and the planning for the coming May multi-state rally would continue without the support of First Christian Church. That's almost all I know from the official record.
What I do know in more detail is from a March, 1923 article in the Klan's weekly newspaper, published in Indianapolis titled, of course, "The Fiery Cross." Their coverage bemoans the bias and unfairness of Rev. Burns and his supporters, noting that the motion failed to host the Klan meeting, but adding that the vote was 13 to 9. Not exactly an overwhelming mandate.
And when my father in 1987 was working on a 150th anniversary history of the church, he got a letter from Myrtle Burns Grant, who was the daughter of Rev. C.E. Burns and was a little girl in 1923. She told a pair of funny stories about a potato peeler in the church kitchen, and how her brothers had fallen asleep behind the organ one Sunday during their father's sermon, so when it came time to play the closing hymn, there was no one to pump the bellows and no music came out. Those both made it into the history book published that year.
What the Sesquicentennial Committee voted to have my dad edit out of her letter was a further story, about looking out the front windows of the parsonage one night to see a group of hooded men burning a cross on the front lawn of their home. And about how it happened again, and again, and so the family moved at the end of the year, two states away. That story didn't make it into the history; I heard about it from my frustrated father.
Growing up in that Indiana town, I heard about how the Klan was denied the chance to purchase Valparaiso University, a story which turned out to be untrue in many particulars, and how my church stood up to the Klan, which was true in part, but not true enough to protect a minister with three children in his home.
And paging through the online copies of "The Fiery Cross" to find the hidden details, to compare and contrast their slant to the narratives I knew from more "official" sources, I kept finding headlines next to each other about Valparaiso, Indiana and Newark, Ohio.
You may ask if events 100 years old are relevant today; I note for myself how stories I heard fifty and forty years ago turn out to be oddly edited and often partial. As both a pastor and a historian, I'm interested in what those edits might tell us about what stories we're telling today, and how we can tell truer stories, both to and about ourselves.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few more chapters of this story to assemble. Share your feedback with him as some already have done at knapsack77@gmail.com (all responses will be kept confidential unless you specifically ask otherwise).
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