Financial insecurity and a mother’s battle spotlighted at Women’s Philanthropy Fund breakfast

Class was in session for the early-rising crowd of nearly 700, and the lessons served as a wake-up call for anyone who hadn’t gotten a caffeine kickstart.

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A ballroom breakfast gathering in one of the most affluent counties in the nation might have seemed like an odd location to talk about the realities of living paycheck-to-paycheck or without a home. But the audience members at the Hyatt Regency Irvine were enthusiastically receptive. After all, they attended Orange County United Way’s annual Women’s Philanthropy Fund Breakfast on Thursday, May 21, to help their community.

And after the attendees were challenged with a sobering exercise about tough day-to-day financial decisions, they heard from a mother who escaped domestic violence and worked cleaning homes to care for her daughter, who “learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”

“For many, struggle is almost completely wrapped in shame,” said author and featured speaker Stephanie Land, whose book “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive” was adapted into a 2021 Netflix limited series starring Margaret Qualley. “We distance ourselves from stories of hardship.

“As a defense mechanism, we distance ourselves from people who live in poverty because poverty is a really scary and vulnerable place to imagine.”

Perhaps it was a little easier for some to imagine than it would’ve been before they arrived.

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When the United Way’s United for Financial Security team walked the crowd through its “Paycheck to Paycheck Experience” — asking the audience to make a struggling family’s spending decisions on everything from caring for an ailing pet to clothing kids — eyes were opened as most found they would end up in debt.

Land made it clear that those types of struggles could happen at any time, but the current federal approach toward social safety nets adds to the difficulty.

“Due to cuts in our current administration and what they’ve done to these programs, if I were in the same situation today, I would have to survive on even less,” Land said. “These programs made it possible to use my limited income for rent because the rent always ate first.

“No matter how hard I worked, it never felt like it was enough or that I was enough,” she added. “And this became my unwitnessed existence as I spent all day polishing another’s so that theirs would appear perfect.”

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