“I was a 16-year-old pregnant girl and my dad had been laid off and my baby daddy wouldn’t talk to me,” she said. “And I’m a sophomore in high school.”

Jessica Moroney, a senior from Augusta, played the part of a pregnant teenager during a poverty simulation Monday.

Her character attended high school, cared for her younger siblings and shopped for the family’s groceries.

“Just trying to get the bills paid, we didn’t have enough money for groceries the first week,” Moroney said. “The only way we had enough at the end was an error at the bank. They gave us $200 extra . and my dad never found a job. He looked every day.”

Students gathered in the Tate Student Center Monday and simulated poverty by facing unemployment, teen pregnancy, language barriers and single parenthood – all in the span of two hours.

The event was the University’s fifth poverty simulation, held as a demonstration for students in a family resource management class and a freshman seminar.

“The things that we talk about in class are broad things that influence family resources,” said Sharon Nickols, a professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences who organized the event.

Participants are assigned a family and a particular character. Some families had a father who was laid off from a well-paying job, a mom who worked full time, a pregnant teenage daughter and two younger children. Some had an older sibling who took care of three younger siblings because their father was in jail. Others included single parents, grandparents raising their grandchildren, elderly people on a fixed income or “sandwich families,” in which adults were responsible for their parents as well as their children.

Whatever the situation, simulators must find a way to pay for food, housing, utilities and transportation while juggling child care, employment and other family obligations. The simulation covers a month of time in 15 minute intervals. Each interval represents one week.

“We try to represent all types of situations that families might find themselves in,” said Sharon Gibson, a public service associate in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “All families have one thing in common. They are struggling to make ends meet.”

Gary Woodhurst, a senior from Augusta, played the role of a father who had been out of a job for four months. He had a wife who worked full time as a receptionist and three kids, including a teenage daughter who was pregnant.

“I had to go see if I could sell something at the pawn shop, go apply for food stamps or go apply at the unemployment office,” he said of his weekly routine. “But I guess I was overqualified. They could never find anything for me.”

He ended up stealing a TV and selling his wife’s ring for $25 to make ends meet.

Through the poverty simulation, “the students get an understanding of the challenges that families have in getting the resources they need in life to meet their basic needs,” Nickols said.

When people think of families managing resources, she said, they usually only think of money management, but families must also manage their time and human resources. The poverty simulation helps students recognize the management planning process and highlights the role of values in determining how families utilize their resources.

Poverty simulations have been held across the state and the country.

“We probably do close to 20 a year,” said Gibson, who conducts simulations around the state. “This year we’ve already done 10 since January, but with these economic times that makes sense.”

Woodhurst and Moroney said the poverty simulation was a good idea, but it did not fully demonstrate the experience of living in poverty.

“There’s nothing you can do in a conference room that can really capture the reality of living in poverty,” Moroney said. But, she said, the program did a good job of incorporating all aspects of life in the simulation.

“I didn’t think it was too realistic,” Woodhurst said. “But I think in a microcosm it paints a good picture of poverty. It’s a frantic scramble to meet your family’s needs.Just for an hour it was

stressful.”

“Poverty and homelessness in Athens in particular is a big issue, so this is bringing awareness.”

He said students could learn more about poverty by participating in service organizations to help those in need.

“This program is not supposed to be an answer, it’s an awareness program,” Gibson said of the poverty simulations. “We hope that [students will] look at the situation they’re in and look at the world in a different way.”