While the American economy has been officially out of recession for four years, social service providers told me for a piece I did for the Stamford Advocate that the need for assistance for the least well-off has not slackened. On this day of Thanksgiving, the need for social services is a reminder to give if you have the means to do so and to be grateful for the means that you do have.
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An excerpt of the story:
Robert M. Arnold, president and CEO of Greenwich-based Family Centers, which provides education, health and human services to children, adults and families in Fairfield County, said the economic recovery has been uneven, and people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder have had the lowest level of recovery.
"Things have to get really better up in the middle and the top to lift up the bottom level," Arnold said. "Things haven't gotten that good in the middle and the top to really lift up the bottom level."
Many people are working jobs on which they can barely subsist, Arnold said.
Jason T. Shaplen, chief executive officer of Stamford-based Inspirica, Inc., one of the largest providers of services to the homeless in Connecticut, said that the demand for his organization's services is at a record level. The number of people living in the street in Connecticut has increased 82 percent in the past three years and the number of homeless people in Greenwich and Stamford increased 45 percent in the past year, according to Shaplen.
Nationally, 100 million Americans live in poverty or live within 50 percent of the poverty line, Shaplen added.
Historically, homelessness was connected to people having mental health problems, substance abuse problems or lack of education, Shaplen said. While all those things still cause people to become homeless, the new driver for homelessness is people being unable to find work or make enough money from their work to meet all of their needs, especially in a housing market as expensive as lower Fairfield County's, Shaplen said.
The winter is an especially hard time for people in poverty in Fairfield County because they have the additional seasonal expenses of heating, warm winter clothing and maintaining vehicles that are not in great repair to survive winter weather, Arnold said.
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