CR#8 Imagine yourself living in Marin and making less than 40K a year!
I got the chance to sit down and interview Florencia to discuss about the problem we are facing as Health Hub and the root cause of the problem our community is facing. Florencia told me, there are a lot of family in our community are making less than 40 thousands dollars a year and live in Marin county. That is mind blowing because recently, there was an article talked about you need to make at least 100 grands a year to able to live (more like survive) in Marin county. In my mind, I cannot imagine how are the families going to survive, they have to pay two or three thousands dollars for rent, and transportation, etc. So where do they get money to put foods on the table? They DON’T! Food insecurity is one of the biggest problem in one of the richest county in the country-the root cause for food insecurity is poverty, low income, and lack of education. Lack of education also brought fear to the recipients according to Florencia “especially in the current political climate, there are people afraid of getting help…” Would you imagine to live in Mrin only making 40k or less? For me, I can’t imagine it, because I would spend half of my salary on rent and ulitilities, and the other half is for foods, healthcare and transportation, etc. In the end I would not have any money left to save.
Through out my research, you need to make at least 99 thousad a year for a family of four to meets ends need! That is a lot of money for many families in Marin county because many of them are under the poverty line which only make around 27 thousand dollars a year. With that little of money, how can the families live in Marin? A lot of them will go to non-profit assistance like Health Hub to substitute their food for the week. However, Health Hub does not give out enough food for a family of four for an entire week. Majority of the familes will go hungry and missing meals. In one of my article, it said to live comfortably in Matin you need to make at least 155 thousand dollars a year, for the families in poverty, they would never able to make that much momey. They could not because a lot of them do not speak the language nor have the education to have a career that make 155k a year. Marin county also have a higher rate of proverty than the US alone (17% to 19% compare to 14.1%), which is deceptive because if we think about this, we are in the richest county in the US, people who work and live here own tech companies, people who are CEO of a company, etc. However, the gap is so huge, either you are the millionaire or peasant. There is 10.5% of Marin is food insercurity that translate roughly to 27000 people. The numbers is to high for a county this rich.
Health Hub is fighting food insecurity by handing out foods to families without asking and provide minimal health service for the recipients. However, it is not enough, Health Hub get a roughly 130k dollars budget every year but they have to use that money to pay for salries of 3 people equipments, maintenance and everything else come up. With that little of budget, they can’t do much. I asked Florencia, is it hard to live with such a small salary? She said “ I only get a small share of that 130k budget for my salary, but my love for the community is greater than that.” It touched my heart that people who work at Health Hub are sacrificing so much for the community.
