Walking a Mile in Another Person’s Shoes: How do Resources Affect How We Respond to Challenges?
by Nicki Pozos
I often hear from water and wastewater utilities that they have a hard time finding inequities in their work because they do so much of their work equally—they deliver the same treated water to every person in their community and design and maintain their system equally according to level of service goals. When we are indeed delivering equal services, we have to pay attention to the difference between equality and equity. Even when we achieve equality in our services, we will often still see disparate outcomes for different individuals or groups—inequity.
When we are on our hunt for inequities, we need to think about the lived experience of people we serve, especially when that lived experience differs from our own. I’m not going to lie—this is really hard to do! We are limited by our own range of experiences and we don’t have a lot of practice seeing things from another person’s perspective. Part of engaging in equity work is exercising this muscle!
Inequities can emerge in many different ways. In this post I’m going to talk about access to resources. So many of our systems are build around an assumption that people all have access to the same resources, including:
Bank account with some ‘float’ to cover costs while waiting for reimbursement
Credit card, with available credit
Easy access to the internet
Access to a vehicle or convenient transportation
Consistent address to receive mail
Insurance and a system that allows you to easily find information on your provider and coverage when you need it!
Let’s look at an example. Say you experienced a sewer overflow into your basement due to surcharging of the City’s sewer. Let’s say the City is responsible, so will eventually cover the cost. But what happens to you in the short term as you are responding to the situation and navigating City systems?
For many of us, the first step would be finding a hotel to stay in! But what if you didn’t have the funds to cover the hotel, or you have the money in your account but no credit card. Did you know it’s hard to even book a hotel without one? Maybe, instead, you need to stay with friends, but they live farther away from your kids’ schools. Without reliable transportation, how do you keep them in school?
It’s not just about financial and physical resources. Customer assistance and other programs for low-income customers often require a very high level of executive functioning. Indeed, the level of executive functioning needed to navigate a customer assistance program typically far exceeds the requirements to set up a utility account at the same agency. Some executive functioning and related capabilities include:
Ability to manage and track information and documents (Tax returns? Copies of your past utility bills? Verification that you qualify for SNAP benefits?)
Ability to manage appointments and deadlines
Ability to communicate effectively in writing and in person
We tend to be so worried that ineligible people might get access to these programs that we end up creating a lot of barriers and hoops to jump through!
I hope this post has you thinking about the work you do and how access to resources impacts the way individuals and communities interact with your work. Of course, access to resources is just one source of inequities. In future posts I’ll talk about two others—disenfranchisement from government and walking through the world as a visible ‘other’. See you then!