Reasons

Growing up in a middle-class family in the Salt Lake City suburbs, life was somewhat easy for me. The son of a lawyer/medical clinic director and a schoolteacher, I don’t think I worried much about what we had or didn’t have. Life was good.

Things continued on that path after high school. While we had to bleed, sweat and scratch for every nickel and dime to put myself and my wife through school, it still didn’t feel any different from growing up. We worked. We studied. We prayed like heck our dollars would stretch. But life was still good.

Enter our current situation: I left my job to get an MA from Arizona State and packed up my wife, kids and everything we had to head down south to the Valley of the Sun. Once we got there, good paying jobs were hard to come by, and we felt this “spiritual” pull that my wife needed to stay home with the kids anyway.

So here we are: going to school, living in a rented house 45 miles away from campus in a little town that’s not even in the same county as Phoenix, and attempting to live off student loans and  government assistance.

This blog seeks to look at the diverse stories of those who use the government assistance programs, namely Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps). Hopefully, if I can get people to talk to me, I will tell their stories — the ones who genuinely need help as well as those who misuse the system — on this blog. In addition, I will also be blogging about personal experiences my family and I have while enrolled in these programs.

Being on assistance is not a joking matter, and I’m not doing this just as an “experiment”, as has happened before with bloggers, and other journalists. I’m doing this because I think the public needs to know what goes on and how those who don’t know how to get help, can.