A childhood of poverty has provided Ashley Varner with a firsthand perspective for her job.
She is a community organizer for the Central Missouri Community Action Agency (CMCA) in Cole and Moniteau counties.
"I am tasked with the objectives to communicate and speak to any and all sectors of our community to identify needs in the community as it is effective to poverty and then address those needs with community resources," Varner said about her job. "The explanation of my position is so broad that it doesn't really give you a good feel for all the things that I truly do."
Varner and her organization administer programs and mobilize groups with the goal of combating poverty, or at least to abate the effects of poverty at the local level.
"Typically there is no typical day," Varner said. "I will say I try and keep the main hours, you know the eight to five. But a lot of times I have evening meetings and I have meetings on the weekend. I am really at the discretion of the community. I work for CMCA, but I answer to the community."
She assembles groups composed of doctors, faith based organizations, school board members, elected officials, business owners and more to create community action teams (CAT), she said. There are two in Jefferson City: one based around the needs of public transit and the other, the community service committee, is based around family development.
This is her first year as the CMCA community organizer, but she has worked with the agency for four years prior. In her five years she has seen both uplifting and deplorable situations, and learned a lot about what a community is.
"When you work for a community it's never done," she said. "A community is this living breathing animal that is always changing, and the needs can never be met. It is not a job where I can wake up tomorrow and go home tomorrow night and the job is done."
In her first four years at the CMCA, Varner served as a family development specialist. A part of that job is visiting families that were on some sort of temporary assistance and were not attempting to attend the educational or job training programs.
These visits would come on average about once a month, but what she saw in them would stay with her forever. She described situations with fouls smells, pest infestation, and unsafe housing conditions. She added that she did not know all the answers as to why those situations existed, or how to fix them, but she did her best to try.
"I don't know that there is a very specific one, or the worst ever that stood out to me," Varner said. "I would say that it is heartbreaking, just not being able to change
somebody else's life for them. I can not change the decisions that you make. I can't change your behavior, but I can provide you with the resources to get information and education to just help to get you back on your feet."
Varner was born and raised in a small town in northeast Iowa. She was the youngest of three children who grew up in poverty. Her mother and father both suffered with addiction and were divorced before she was born. Her mother did her best to raise the children while trying to educate herself with night classes from the community college and with income from government assistance and babysitting during the day.
"She did what she had to do to get by," Varner said. "And I can remember very distinctly living in a home we so comfortingly called the bug house, because we would literally play with the grasshoppers and crickets in the our house."
Her mother passed away when she was seven and she was sent to live with her father, whose previous relationship with her mother she described as domestically violent. But luckily he was not the only person in her life, she had grandparents and others help raise her, and she is a firm believer in the old adage "It takes a village to raise a child."
"When you come from a home that is dysfunctional you develop cooping skills and resiliency," Varner said. "You learn about life a lot faster than maybe your kids you go to school with, or people you meet. I would say that having that experience growing up has given me some very motivating reasons to not live the life of poverty, in the sense of helping others and bettering my life so that my children never have to know what poverty is."
She said her childhood helps bring a lot more to the table for combating poverty and is one of the main reasons why she does what she does.
"I think it is important to talk about poverty," Varner said. "I think there are so many myths about it . When we interview folks for jobs at CMCA one of the questions we ask is that why are people in poverty, because ... you have to consider how people would answer that question, because that is what dispels myths and stereotypes about it."
Varner has other questions that she asks herself and anyone who could answer them. She asks why peope look down on single mothers with three parttime jobs and a GED, and call them lazy. She asks the system is set up to fail. She asks why the average amount of financial assistance given to those in need is not even enough to cover rent. She asks why does the public transportation system not cater to those who work late shifts.
"It is not just Jefferson City, it is not Cole County, it is more a societal issue," she said. "But I see it locally all the time, I see so many of those individuals that are really hard working, that are really trying and that are constantly putting out fire after fire after fire ... I want our elected leaders our community leaders to open their minds to that it (poverty) is real and what it looks like. A lot of folks have never experienced poverty, or they don't know anybody in poverty. It is very real and it is alive in our community and that is why it is so important."