RALEIGH, N.C. —
Growing up in poverty is the reality for about one quarter of the children living in North Carolina.
Anthony Simmons knows all too well the impact that poverty can have on children.
“The circumstances are like, it’s hard to come home, you just don’t really have a place to stay or a place just to get away,” said Simmons.
But he found that place while growing up at the Boys Club in Wake County.
Now that he’s an adult, he works as a YMCA youth counselor, trying to help children escape poverty.
“I know it’s a tough situation. I think it just shortens their insight, blinds their insight where they think they can only make it in the ways of their surrounding neighborhood,” said Simmons.
Researchers who study North Carolina’s poverty problem say getting out of that cycle is tough, and it’s getting tougher.
Tom Vitaglione, a health researcher for Action for Children North Carolina, said, “When you have an area in poverty, then you wind up with less access to good schools and medical care, and even good grocery stores aren’t going to go there. And so it’s really a downward tumble.”
A tumble that Vitaglione says can lead children down a troubled path in order to survive.
“Often it turns out to be risky ways to try to make money for the family,” said Vitaglione.
Since the Boys and Girls Club started in Wake County more than 40 years ago, it’s seen its membership grow from 150 members to 4,200 mostly under privileged kids.
“They learn resistance skills,” said club president Ralph Capps.
Capps has fought the problem head on for more than forty years with the Boys and Girls Clubs.
Capps said, “We do a lot of role playing in these classes, and so kids learn OK, if they’re somewhere and someone’s doing something they shouldn’t be doing, how do I get out of it?”
The club offers a way out, with a place to study, play, and mentor the next generation.
Simmons says it’s a choice he wants others to make.
“It’s real clear cut. It’s either black or white, you can go the good way, or you can go the bad way,” he said.