Poverty impacts youth development because poverty creates a need for low cost youth development. Many workers who live at the poverty level cannot afford childcare or afterschool care because their wages are not even enough to live on. This creates a need for youth development because it provides children a place to learn and grow that is safe and stimulating to their young minds. Youth in poverty may not receive an education that is engaging and child focused, but a youth development group can truly focus on the youth and what they are interested in. Poverty creates a need for youth development because youth need a place where they can be heard, much like YIA, and this is something that students in areas of poverty do not have in schools. Schools do not focus on providing youth with agency, they focus on getting through the school year. Youth development allows youth to broaden their horizons and discover their unique skill sets.

            Blaming the victim is something that runs rampant through this article. Ullucci looks at the schools and how they view students of poverty as “charity cases”. Teachers react with sympathy and avoid challenging students in this position. Students can be oppressed by teachers without the intention of this. Teachers do not know that they are doing these things, but they happen regardless.

            

            The population that I am interested in working with is a college aged population. The interesting thing about this is, that I will not necessarily know the economic background of the students that I work with. These students will not receive things like discounted lunch, nor will they be attending an after school program focused on low-income students. This group will receive financial aid but that is not something that a student affairs professional would know. This knowledge may develop through interaction with the students but it will not be there at face value. But this could in some cases lead to major stereotyping. A student affairs worker could make assumptions based off of a person’s ethnicity, race, clothing, etc. that they are from a low-income family. But this would not always be true, but this assumption would foster a negative relationship. This simply makes me think that student affairs workers at a college level must by hyper-aware of not stereotyping because of how absolutely off their assumptions could be. Steretyping is never an appropriate thing to do, but I can see it being something that would be popular in this field because of the lack of prior knowledge of the students involved. The following image is not something that I support but it is something that I feel is poignant to the conversation. It presents a good question and one that student affairs deals heavily with: can stereotyping exist in our world? This may be satirical or it may be people asking for their freedom to stereotype...what does this say to you?