International Contacts and Poverty

            I have been working on the podcast alternative.  However, I am still waiting to hear back from the professional, Peter Paulus.  He is a researcher for Good Healthy Schools in Germany.  The premise behind Good Healthy Schools is that we need to keep children and teachers healthy in order to have a healthy society.  But what he has learned over the course of his research is that education is the key to promote healthy living.  Therefore through partnerships across agencies and communities, schools are able to better educate the children about the importance of being healthy and how to be healthy.  As I said I haven’t had luck in him responding to me.  However, I am looking into other international resources and contacts.  Fingers crossed that I actually have luck in my endeavor.

            I have even more bad luck trying to get to the website www.childhoodpoverty.org.  After several Google searches, I found websites and documents that refer to it and then one website that mentioned that the page may not be available after 2007.  Therefore since I am trying to contact people in Germany, I thought I would research poverty in Germany.  I was apprehensive at first because I remembered during the global economic crisis, that Germany stood strong through it all.  However, my research has pointed me into a different direction.  At the end of 2013, it was discovered that the government standing that Germany’s economy is doing well is actually not accurate.  The poverty rate in Germany is dramatically increasing and is at its highest point ever.  The reports the government used were based on research that was based on numbers in previous years.  But I was astonished at the fact that Germany is at its highest poverty point. 

            Another insight is that poverty is appearing in regions.  Germany is broken down into states and certain states are showing poverty increases.  The areas impacted most by poverty are located in East Germany, which doesn’t surprise me as much, due to conditions from the Cold War.  The trend in Germany is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer because West Germany doesn’t show the increase of poverty levels like East.  It reminds me of what I feel like in America, the rich are doing better and we are just getting poorer.  But I did find it interesting that poverty was across regions especially when comparing the old East and West Germany.

            The third piece of information I gathered was how poverty affected families and age groups.  The biggest rise of poverty occurs in people between 19-25 and lowest in 46-55.  I found this to be interesting but the reasoning behind it makes sense.  The younger people are just coming out of education (probably with school loans), entering the work force at lower levels (which means making less money), and people this age are moving out on their own without parents to support them as much.  These three factors lead to increase in poverty levels.  The adult with less poverty are ones that have been working for years, built up their pay and positions, and usually have kids that are older and/or have left the house.  They have more money and less expense coming out.  It makes perfect sense.  Also families showed trends in poverty.  Obviously those with the highest risk of poverty are single parent families.  We see this in America.  It is hard to financially manage a family on one person’s income.  I was raised in a single parent house.  Times were hard and we were lucky enough to have other family support.  The other type of family that is of greatest risk of poverty are two parent families with 3 or more children.  I admit at first that shocked me, and then it made sense.  The more children you have, the more money it will take to take care of them.  I also shouldn’t be surprised since both my husband and I work and we are barely scraping by with one child.  I couldn’t imagine 2 other children.  I did find the poverty trends interesting and enlightening. 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/06/germ-j06.html

http://www.inequalitywatch.eu/spip.php?article113