Monique Rosas feels like she is, “drowning and gasping for air.”
The 26-year-old single mother of a 4-year-old son, Makai, was living out of a tent in January of this year, despite entering the job field as a line-cook after completing a sobriety program.
Rosas receives $577 dollars each month from CalWORKs, but it is not enough to afford housing, and she said she typically has around $100 to last her the final 15 days.
“I dreamed about having a family and working and providing for (my) kids,” Rosas said.
“You don’t dream about getting government assistance and doing it on your own and not having housing.”
The Clairemont resident and parent advocate was part of a panel of people who spoke in front of Chula Vista’s Castle Park High School on May 17, during an early-morning rally which kicked off a state-wide bus tour to end child poverty in California.
Sweetwater Union High School District Superintendent Dr. Karen Janney was a part of the panel, and said she was “grateful that a SUHSD school was chosen to kick off the tour.
“We know that working together brings us better results, and we’re just grateful that everyone is here today to fight for this common cause,” Janney said.
The bus tour was led by the End Child Poverty in California Coalition, and featured Conway Collis, co-chair of the Lifting Children and Families Out of Poverty Task Force, which aims to eliminate deep poverty within four years and cut overall child poverty in half within the next 10 years.
“We needed something so that Californians would become informed about the crisis, because we knew that if they became informed they would want to change it,” Collis said.
According to the website, endchildpoveryca.org, one in five California children live in poverty, while 450,000 children live in deep poverty, which is when a family earns less than $12,500 annually.
“We’re really covering the state, because this is something that needs all of us, it’s something we all have to be involved in,” Collis said. “Child poverty is throughout the state of California, so it’s something that we all have to address together and that’s what this bus tour is about.”
The task-force was created following the 2017 approval of Assembly Bill 1520, which stipulated that a task-force should be formed to advise the state on plans and strategies to reduce child poverty, and to ultimately submit a detailed “End Child Poverty Plan.”
That plan was created and given to the state at the end of 2018, and included program suggestions and more than 15 pieces of legislation to help implement the strategies.
Additionally, California Governor Gavin Newsom put aside $3.4 billion for programs suggested by the plan in his May budget proposal, which is still under review.
“When Californians pull together around something we can do great things,” Collis said.
The plan includes child tax credits, guaranteed access to early care and education for children living in poverty up to the age of eight, expanded voluntary home-visit programs, expanded access to Medi-Cal health care, increased support for foster care families and youth, rental subsidies for families affected by homelessness and/or poverty, and more.
California State Senator Ben Hueso, who represents Imperial County and San Diego’s border regions, spoke at the event, and told a crowd of students, parents, supporters and assembled media to dream big.
“I just wanted to come here to tell all of you don’t be afraid to dream, you’ve got to dream. But you’ve got to also work. Don’t be afraid to work,” Hueso said. “Get a dream, get a plan and work on achieving your dreams. If I would have dreamed bigger dreams I probably would have achieved them as well.”
Hueso relayed a story of how budget cuts kept him from attending UCSD’s graduate school of architecture back in the 1990s, after it was forced to close, and said he now wants to be part of the solution.
“My educational experience was interrupted by a decision that was made at the state level,” he said. “Now I’m a state senator involved in making those decisions looking out at all of you saying, ‘I don’t want your future to be interrupted by our decisions.’”
Other speakers at the event included, among others, Manpower San Diego President & CEO Phil Blair and South Bay Community Services Department Director of Communications Patty Chavez.
