Poverty Escape Room Brings Home the Realities Low-Income Families Face

Now more than ever, it’s crucial for nonprofits and anti-poverty activists to work to help members of their communities understand the reality of living in poverty, rather than relying on the stereotypes they might see in the media or have grown up believing. In South Dakota, the John T. Vucurevich Foundation is funding a series of poverty-related escape rooms in which participants have to grapple with how to use scarce resources or how to maneuver around a benefits cliff. Created by Morgan VonHaden of the South Dakota Statewide Family Engagement Center, housed at Black Hills Special Services Cooperative, the escape rooms have gained national notice as a way to spur important community conversations. VonHaden and Olson spoke with Spotlight recently; the transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Morgan, why don’t we start with some background about you and your organization.

I’m the Deputy Director for Community and Family Services (CFS) at Black Hill Special Services Cooperative. We’re an educational cooperative and we have five different divisions, one of which those is CFS, and through that we reach families and communities throughout South Dakota, all the way from cradle to careers. And then as a whole in our educational cooperative, we have other divisions that support school districts, individuals with developmental disabilities, health and human services, and workforce development. We are a very unique educational cooperative and very comprehensive.

And how did this Escape Room idea come about?

I have been working with families in the crisis of poverty for almost 20 years now. And I also am an only child, and I love games. And I used to bring in this big poverty simulation where we would need to commit three hours and have a hundred people there with 20 stations around the room. I thought that was amazing, but some of my administrator friends were like, “Morgan, we know that this is important, and we love what you’re talking about, but we can’t commit to that. Can you just come and talk during a staff meeting?” So, I found this as an opportunity to say, ok, challenge accepted. And I was talking to my office mate, and I said what if I shared this grandma story?

I had been working with this grandma very closely at the time, and I thought, what if we created an experience where we see if people could survive in Grandma Leah’s shoes. So, I visited with Grandma Leah and asked her if I could share her story, and she just laughed at me, saying why would you even want to do that? And I said, because I don’t know if I could make the same decisions that you do. You’re a single grandma, you’re raising your boys and people need to understand that if you boys didn’t show up to school, maybe it’s because you also have a doctor’s appointment, or you needed to do something for your new grandbaby, or you only had so much gas. There are all these factors in your life that we just don’t know about.

She laughed at me, but we started sharing the story of Grandma Leah, and that’s the heart of the Escape Room. It’s 90 minutes long and we talk about the conditions of poverty in whatever community we’re in. What does that mean? Where do those numbers even come from? The actual Escape Room experience is 27 minutes long and then the rest of the time is a debrief of how the participants felt. The conversations that come out of it afterwards are incredible, because we know we can’t fix or change poverty in 90 minutes, but we can start the conversation. And I’ve actually seen it happen where one person attends, and they share with another person, and they share with another person. And we start to see that ripple effect, and policies have been getting changed at a local level and at a state level. It just makes my heart swell every time we get to do this.

And now we have a team trained of about seven facilitators who can go out and do it, so it’s not just me. And I never once thought when I was sitting in my office that we would get to experience it on a state level. I’ve gotten to gotten to go to other states at a national level, and then I get to sit here with you and share Grandma Leah’s story.

So, how many of these have you done, Morgan?

I’ve been doing the Grandma Leah story for seven years. And like I said, it started off small, within our school district, and then through the partnership with the Vucurevich Foundation, we’ve been able to take it to another level. Last year, I think I did 27 escape rooms, and we connected with almost 1800 people.

And have you done them outside the state?

We have, and what’s been cool is you’re bringing in outside people and that allows you to get the biggest bang for your buck. We write this beautiful report on action steps that are realistic to the community, but also down to those micro levels of individual organizations. What are things that you can do to make it better for the people who come in the door?

And where are some of the places that you’ve done it out of state?

We went to South Bend, Indiana, to North Dakota, and even to Hawaii.

Wow, that’s fantastic. And am I correct in that the escape room approach to this is sort of unique to you folks? I know there’s lots of places that do the simulations that you had been doing before, but I had not seen someone doing this as an escape room experience.

As far as I know, it’s very unique to us. Before we even started developing this, you do your due diligence to make sure you’re not stealing anybody’s idea. And we never found anything similar to this that anyone else was doing. Grandma Leah’s story is very unique to us because it, it was based off of one grandma’s story.

And we’re not locking people in a room. We can be in a classroom, or we can be in an auditorium. But everyone has a key. They’re stationed around the room, and you have to just make these decisions. And then if you can fill out your key, that’s how you escape. And typically, only maybe a quarter ever actually escape.

So, give me an example. Let’s say I’m a participant. I come into the room. What would happen?

You would come and sit at a table and at some point, I’m going to put everyone into family units of two or three or four people. And during the first 20 to 30 minutes, you are really going to learn about poverty, just so we have the same common language. If it’s with a school district, we’re talking about what is Title 1? If it is helping organizations, we’re talking about what does income qualify mean.

Then after about 30 minutes, we go into the story of Grandma Leah. I always narrate the story, or sometimes my mom will also be the narrator as Grandma Leah, just to give it a new voice. I will then give a very bare bones instruction about the escape room process, because in real life, there’s a lot of rules and you may not always know them all. I’ll introduce them to the small town or large town, depending on where we are, that will be part of the simulation and then I’ll talk about the stuff you have in your home, which is a packet of DVDs, some gas, and $8.

I’ll also over what’s available in their town, which is normally a gas station, a pawn shop, a school, a helping organization, a food bank, a big box store, and a WIC office. They’re going to have to go to all these places or make decisions on how to get to these places. And then, in terms of time, each hour in the simulation is three minutes long. At the end of the day, they have to be back at their table.

And you will see people just fall to the floor during those 27 minutes, saying oh my gosh, this is so hard. Or you’ll see people hustling on the sides, or you’ll see people like just running across the room. You’ll see people who are frozen. All these different emotions are happening. Then they’ll come back to the table and then we start having a debrief. The first question I ask every time is, how are you feeling right now? And every single time, people say I’m frustrated, I’m mad, I’m stressed out, it’s hopeless. And then we unpack what all of those words mean to them and the conversation just flows from the audience.

You mentioned WIC—are they making decisions about what programs to accept help from? Or is this more using the resources you have just to get places?

In this one is, they’re just using the resources in that moment. Everyone starts off with a WIC appointment time and they have to get there on time. They have to figure out how to get diapers. They have to figure out how to get food to make it through the weekend. If it’s a school day, are you going to drop your kids off at school? There’s also a friend’s house in this experience that you can use.

And Jessica, I want to let you jump in from a funder standpoint. What was attractive to you about this idea?

Jessica Olson:  I think we found some partners that kind of speak our language. Our founder, John Vucurevich, immigrated at the age of eight from Yugoslavia, and became a businessman and banker in South Dakota. And that’s how he gained his wealth. But he stayed true to some of his roots and some of the hardships that he faced and was a philanthropist that provided support to vulnerable families. And so, we use a lot of language here at our foundation of helping families, one family at a time, that face low-income barriers. We certainly recognize that many of our nonprofits have been around much longer than we have and bring expertise and stories and compassion to help bring this experience to life for folks. And so, we recognize ways that we can lend our support to bring awareness to the community of these issues.

This is a great experience for our non-profit community, but also for employers, board members, volunteers. I think it is really an amazing experience when you see a business owner have an “a ha moment” where they recognize maybe some of the struggles that an employee was experiencing, but they didn’t understand at the time. It just creates really rich conversation. At one of the escape rooms, I was at with Morgan, we had a pharmacist, a retired dentist, a board member, and someone with pretty intense lived experience. And I would like to think that there were healing conversations that took place amongst community members who never would’ve interacted in that way. I like it when a group of folks from many different walks of life are just trying to understand one another. We actually have continued our partnership with Morgan and her team and this last year we entered into a partnership of helping to fund the creation and pilot phase of a cliff effect escape room.

That’s such a great idea

Olson: Employers don’t necessarily understand when they give a raise to an employee and a few months later that employee is no longer there that the raise may have kicked the employee of some key assistance programs.

Morgan, I’ll let you share about the other escape rooms that they’ve created, giving them a kind of toolbox of different scenarios that they can bring to the community.

VonHaden: Just so you know, we have a great sense of humor. So, the cliff effect simulation is the Luke and Lorelai story, and there are three girls and what they experienced through the cliff effect. And then we have Charlie’s story, which was done in partnership with Lutheran Social Services, and it’s talking about healthy relationships and aging out of the foster care system. But it’s not just for kiddos in the foster care system, it’s for any young person. And we talk about healthy relationships and what does that look like? And if you lose your ID, what do you need to do? Who are your support people? And then even balancing a checkbook, which I’ve also learned is kind of a foreign word. Those are the three that we have completed right now and the other two that we have in the works are around disability awareness and substance abuse.

It may be part of all of these, but I would think an escape room about how to find important documents could be really useful.

I had shared at the beginning that I’ve been working with families in this crisis of poverty for about 20 years now. And at the very beginning, I was living in Rapid City, and I remember sitting in conversations and it came up about IDs, because at that time to get an ID in Rapid City was very difficult. If you don’t have a place where you live, you can’t have mail. Which means if you don’t have two forms of mail, you can’t get an ID. And you can’t get a PO box until you get an ID. I just remember thinking, what if our organization filled that gap and if you were a resident without a home, you could use our mailing address. And that was game changer for our community. But it all started with a conversation.

Olson: I think some of the wins too are kind of trying to get this work upstream and we’ve had a few awesome partnerships. I think of our family medicine residency clinic, which sends physicians going through their residencies to our programs and it becomes part of their training. And one of the stories that we’ll hear from them is they’ve been working with a patient who maybe has a special diet that is prescribed and they come back two months later and they’re not being compliant with the diet. After our trainings, they may not just ask whether this is a compliance issue but is it instead a resource issue? Do they have transportation? Do they have the funds to get the specialized diet items?

I know recently, Morgan, your team had a full session with just physicians in another community in South Dakota. And at the last one, we had a group of students from one of our universities coming through that are going to be teachers. Our goal is to get upstream with some of our future professionals and some of those key systems, like the medical system, the educational system, to understand that there can be complicated reasons why parents didn’t bring their kids to school today. How can we get to the why? Where can compassion come in, to understand and be helpful to break some of those barriers.