If you’ll notice, we have the three geographical regions of North Carolina in our logo. The blue wavy lines represent the east, the trees are there for the Piedmont and the mountain obviously represents the western mountainous region of the state. We are a statewide organization and we will getting to know all three regions.

The red road represents the journey of life. It’s not straight, there are often many twists and turns. Road is in our name and we travel a lot. The curves in the road are somewhat feminine because we do focus our work on helping women and their families along the road to justice.

The rising yellow sun in the distance represents hope and new beginnings.

Food stamp sign in local store window

As we all know, when times are tough people will do things that they never would normally consider just to get by. The economic climate which we all now face has pushed many otherwise law abiding citizens to the edge, creating a few criminals in the process. One way in which this can happen is through fraud. Fraud is defined as a false representation of a matter of fact – basically a lie. Usually fraud is committed to achieve an outcome that is otherwise impossible. For instance, someone may claim to have a disability so they can qualify for medicaid assistance that would not otherwise be available.

In the case at hand a Wake County woman, Lauren Brewer, was recently arrested and charged with food stamp fraud and receiving medical assistance through fraud. What was her lie? Mrs. Brewer allegedly lied to social workers, stating that she was divorced and lived alone, when in fact she was happily married and living with her husband. How much did this simple lie cost the government? Almost $34,000.00! Mrs. Brewer is alleged to have defrauded tax payers of $27,506 in government medical assistance and $6,572 in food stamps.

This little white lie will ultimately cost Mrs. Brewer either a lot of money or an extended stay in her local federal corrections facility. Unfortunately she is not alone, as the continued economic downturn has put many families into financial situations where risking it all seems preferable to the alternative. Thankfully there are programs like Roads to Justice which can help families understand their options and avoid resorting to criminal behavior.

We are kicking off our first ever fundraiser. We plan to raise $5,000 by November 10. We’ve worked so far using our own funds, but the time has come to kick it up a notch. We’ve been able to accomplish a lot, but with your help, the results will be amazing!

You can donate via this website using Paypal or you can send us a check at P.O. Box 9563, Chapel Hill, NC 27515.

Since we are a nonprofit corporation and our 501c3 status is pending approval, your donations will be tax deductible the moment we receive our tax-exempt status notification. If you have any questions, please contact me at jennifer @ roadstojustice.org. (Please leave the spaces out of the email address- spaces were included to deter spambots. Thank you.)

In 2002, Sesame Street introduced an HIV positive muppet in South Africa and Kenya. Kami’s struggle with the loss of her mother to AIDS as well as her own illness might seem like a rough topic for a children’s program, but with so many children similarly suffering, doesn’t it make sense to give them someone to relate to?

So many children in the U.S. going to bed hungry, we’ll be watching to see how children respond to this new character.

Few people in North Carolina or the rest of the country have not been touched by the recent economic downturn, but this slump has hit rural areas, including rural North Carolina, particularly hard.

Endemic Rural Poverty

Most urban and suburban dwellers have in their minds a certain romanticized image of rural America. They think rural areas are “idyllic, healthy settings in which people experience few significant stresses or problems.”  The reality of rural America is considerably less romantic.

As Professor Katherine Porter wrote in Going Broke the Hard Way: The Economics of Rural Failure, 2005 Wisc. L. Rev. 969, 1015-1018, rural people are more likely to be poor than urban residents. Furthermore, while urban poverty is frequently alleviated with an upswing in the economy, rural poverty remains constant. When the economy has a downturn, rural areas are hit even harder than urban ones.

Lower Wages, Higher Expenses, Less Wealth

Rural poverty remains a problem for several reasons.  The biggest problem is a lower wages in urban areas.  Many people believe that most rural Americans work in an agricultural field, such as farming, ranching, or forestry. The truth is that very few rural residents work in agriculture.  The majority of rural workers work in manufacturing and the service industry, much like people in urban areas. The problem is that good jobs are even harder to come by. Unemployment is generally higher in rural areas. Educational levels in rural areas are, on average, less than those in urban ones. As a result, higher paying jobs that require higher levels of education are less likely to be located in rural areas, and if they do, they are less likely to help the local population.  Additionally, the lower population density makes rural areas less attractive to many businesses as there are fewer customers in a given area.

Not only do rural dwellers have lower wages, but they also have higher expenses. Although housing costs are generally lower in rural areas, transportation costs are significantly higher.  With no public transportation and long distances to jobs and shopping, rural residents spend more money purchasing and maintaining their vehicles than do urban residents. Rural residents also pay significantly more for health care.  They pay more for out-of-pocket care and they pay higher insurance premiums. They also frequently pay more for food and utilities.

The total effect of lower wages and higher expenses is a dramatic reduction in the total net wealth of rural residents.  Rural residents on average have less equity in their homes and vehicles than urban residents.  Less wealth and less equity mean less of an ability to weather a financial crisis. For example, an urban dweller with equity in his home can obtain a home equity loan to meet basic expenses during a temporary downturn. She could sell her car and use the equity to pay debts, or to purchase a less expensive car and rid herself of a troublesome loan. Rural residents have considerably less of an ability to do this.

Fewer Solutions Available

Not only do rural dwellers have greater problems with debt, but they also have more trouble finding legal help. With the recent changes of the Bankruptcy Reform Act and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), personal bankruptcies have become more complicated and fewer general practitioners in rural counties are handling them. A rural dweller with large debt problems will frequently have to make multiple trips to a distant city to find a lawyer who focuses their practice in this area. This involves more time off work, more expense for child care, and larger transportation expenses than for people living in a city.

Additionally, in this current era of budget cuts, rural areas do not have the population density or the political influence to keep the help that was once available, as seen by the recent cuts to Legal Aid and the complete elimination of several rural offices.

This is why organizations like Roads to Justice North Carolina are critical.  R2JNC’s mission is to provide legal education and services to the people who need them most, but have the least access to them.

Another friend of mine volunteers at a food pantry. He told me the other day that a lot of people come in for food, but then turn much of the food away. The food that is being turned away is the healthier, more basic components of a home cooked meal. One woman asked him of a can of beans, “What am I supposed to do with this?” She wanted to know why she couldn’t just get a gift card to McDonald’s. The young mother had never learned to cook and wasn’t interested in learning.

These two examples are not uncommon. I want to acknowledge that it can be very hard to empathize with people who are struggling when they don’t seem to be interested in helping themselves. To be honest, it is demoralizing and frustrating. In the first story, you see a woman working a low wage job with an attitude so poor you wonder if she’s even worth the low wage she’s paid. In the second example, there’s another woman who should be grateful that she’s getting any help but wants everything handed to her, oblivious to the fact that what she wants is actually harmful to her young family.

I don’t want to ignore these experiences. American History is full of stories of young, poor, hard-working people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. This hopeful story still inspires us today. However, when the people we come in contact with do not live up to this ideal, we harden our hearts towards them and no longer see them as people like ourselves.

I won’t ignore the fact that some people living in poverty have some cool stuff.  When I lived in Section 8 housing, I had a DVD player and a computer. I didn’t pawn every possession before I got some assistance from the government. I needed a computer to get through college. I don’t know how much a DVD player that had barely survived two curious girls through toddlerhood could have gotten me, but honestly, it didn’t occur to me to sell it. If you want to talk more about it, please contact me. I believe our understanding of each other needs to improve.

Some say the poor just need to work harder. The quick answer to that is that it’s hard to find a job right now- the job market has suffered to sever reduction in size. However, I think we need to acknowledge something many people are seeing in their own communities. There are people who have jobs, but seem to take them for granted. They have bad attitudes, don’t do their job, and are rude. I’ve wondered myself, “He gets paid for this?”,  ”Doesn’t she ever want to get a promotion? Shouldn’t she work a little harder?”, and especially, “Doesn’t anyone take pride in their work anymore?”

It’s hard for one side to argue that all we need are jobs to improve people’s lives when we see that there are lazy people out there, rich and poor. It’s dishonest to say all rich people got their money by working hard and that poor people are lazy. It’s equally dishonest to say that working hard isn’t important or that no poor people are lazy. By acting as though things are clear cut, either that people need to work harder or that people just need jobs is reducing the conversation to a very childish level where nothing is going to improve.

Treating people living in poverty as victims is counterproductive. It removes their sense of agency and responsibility. The words responsibility and blame are sometimes used interchangeably, responsibility having an empowering effect while blame is extremely negative and full of shame. Our leaders offer only two options-  blame the poor or treat them as hapless victims. It is solving nothing. We are all to blame for our situation. Let’s take responsibility and get to work!

This post is the result of personal reflection that I wanted to share. Many years ago when my older daughter was being treated for cancer, we received many gifts of stuffed animals- no where near 1000, but more than my sick baby daughter could really appreciate. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but what I really could have used was a home cooked meal or a break from the hospital. I don’t want to malign the organizations that raise money to give teddy bears to sick kids, but there are other things that may be more effective and cost about the same, or even less. I see the same thing now for women who are diagnosed with breast cancer.

Of course there is no rule that we have to give anyone anything, especially strangers. Maybe you’ve been in this predicament with family. Maybe as a young person, struggling to get your career going, you received a very generous but ultimately useless gift. Of course you appreciated it and really, that’s life. You hopefully recognized that you are lucky to have someone care about you.

Problems arise when there are strings attached to gifts, when the gift maker wants to be seen as a great benefactor and responsible for your success, or when you still are left wanting but precluded from asking for appropriate help. The generous gift maker can be left feeling devalued, bitter or even angry about the unused gift.

We regularly make donations to the Goodwill with clothing that my girls have grown out of. I’m pretty sure they get used, but it’s obviously a benefit to me as well because I don’t have to worry about what to do with excess stuff. I am sure the bananas were given for similar reasons. A grocer had bananas they could no longer sell, but it seems a waste to chuck them in the garbage. So why not donate them? There’s really no problem here. It is true that now CADV’s office is full of fruit flies and I have no idea if they actually had time to do anything with the bananas before they became inedible. Still, they take what they can get and I know they are grateful.

They problem for me is when a person or a company wants credit for these throw away gifts, and I’m not talking about a $20 tax deduction for donations to the Goodwill. It makes sense to sweeten the pot for people who could just as easily throw their old clothes  or bananas into the garbage. However, entities are taking advantage of tax deductions for throw away items or misleading people about the nature of their philanthropy. 1000 bananas is no substitute for real financial support. At a personal level, those who donate throw away items without recognizing that they also received a benefit,  or without a sense of humility or shared humanity, can become smug, bitter, cynical, hopeless or apathetic.

Charity is a gift from the heart. There are many reasons to give, and not all of them are selfless ones. As long as we understand that, I think we’re OK. We can have a personal investment in the success of a family member we help, we can have guidelines for how we’d like our donations to be used. We also have to be open to understanding that we don’t always know what’s best for others. Ultimately, we should also be open enough to offer what people actually need and not what is easiest to give.

Arrogant attorney stereotypes aside, there is a problem with the legal profession. Lawyers are constantly sharing news about the job market for lawyers and it isn’t good. In fact, the Great Depression wasn’t this hard on lawyers. Many lawyers are willing to work for someone else for free just to get experience. I’ve been that sole practitioner trying to help folk who can’t afford it. I wanted to help, but giving assistance away for free has costs- lawyers have overhead too.  Young lawyers are working in non-legal areas so they can pay their student loans or put food on the table, but people need lawyers and can’t find them. This is a broken system.

The fact is that there is a lot of work for lawyers, but not a lot of jobs. What we do at R2JNC is try to turn lemons into lemonade by facilitating pro bono activities for lawyers. We want to bridge the gap between those who can help and those who need it.

Roads to Justice NC’s fundamental goal is to help women to solve problems for themselves. Most people understand that problems are multifaceted, but normally lawyers keep their solutions within a legal framework.  We are able to work from as many different angles as necessary with the benefit of understanding the legal issues. Sometimes legal solutions are best, but often they aren’t. We’re here to help women find out what works best for them.