But I, being poor, have only dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

                                                --W.B. Yeats

What does it mean to be poor? Why does poverty remain so pervasive? Are people from different backgrounds, age groups or family types more likely to be poor and continue to be so?

There is a general misunderstanding about the very definition of poverty. As standards of living have risen, so have assessments of how much money it takes to support a family. 

The official poverty measure defines poverty lines for families of different sizes and composition and compares a family's reported income to that line to determine if that family is poor. In the simplest terms, poverty is the inability to meet basic needs; people who cannot meet them we consider poor regardless of general living standards.  EQUIP focuses its services on those living within 80 to 200 percent of the poverty line. These are our neighbors who are at greatest risk of losing self-sufficiency entirely and falling into dependence and/or homelessness.

Situational Poverty is characteristically understood as a lack of resources due to a series of particular events such as job loss, illness, a death, divorce, or addiction. With situational poverty, the individual usually keeps the values and behaviors of the socioeconomic class from which they have come.

In contrast, Generational Poverty is defined as having been in poverty for at least two generations. People in generational poverty exhibit certain ingrained patterns of behavior. These patterns are the result of having experienced the effects of poverty over time. The behaviors are part of their culture.

Unfortunately, those living in what may be termed chronic poverty, the perpetually homeless, may never rejoin the mainstream. They are unlikely to make the dramatic changes necessary to rise above their circumstances and often live with a host of limiting issues, such as mental illness, and addiction.

Those Equip serve are the near poor-those working families with children who have experienced a disruptive event such as a reduction in household income, death, illness, divorce, etc., causing financial and psychological burdens that put them at risk for situational homelessness.