NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — As Circles of Hope Reno County prepares to begin a new class next month, Jason Probst talked to Hutch Post about what a new Circle Leader should be ready for when they come in to the class.
"We're not a crisis intervention place," Probst said. "We want people to be not, you know, completely stable necessarily, but we need to have reliable transportation and that's defined as any way to get to work. We need to have employment and we need to have housing and that can be defined in a number of ways. As long as somebody's not in threat of being, you know, out on the street, they're going to be stable enough that Circles would work for them. If you're in crisis, there are other avenues in the community that are going to be a lot more effective in helping you, but if you're out of crisis and you're ready to move forward and you're ready to make real lasting change in your life, Circles is going to be a good place to look."
Giving a hand up out of poverty has a lot to do with changing the way people think about themselves.
"Poverty is a very complex problem that has a lot of sources," Probst said. "It doesn't have one necessary source and people can find themselves in poverty from a number of a number of ways, but one thing that we work on is budgeting, we work on having a vision for your life. One thing we found with people, especially if they come from generational poverty or chronic poverty, is that they have they've never had the chance or the opportunity to actually build a vision and a dream for their lives. A lot of us in middle class have long had ideas on what our life would look like. When you've been in survival mode and your parents have been in survival mode and your grandparents have been in survival mode and that's all you've ever seen, you don't allow yourself much opportunity to have a vision for your life. We talk to people about having a dream and a vision and then we partner them with allies who can help guide them through a system like a middle class system that they may not be entirely familiar with."
Making sure that Circle Leaders have agency is important. They need to be in charge of their growth.
"We have a 12-week training program that goes through some of that," Probst said. "The allies don't actually teach necessarily, but they're there as friends and they're there as a supportive member of a community for them. The reason we call Circle Leaders, Circle Leaders is they're the ones in charge of their journey. We're not saying at all, come like here's somebody who knows how to live life, come live it the way they're going to show you. The Circle Leaders are in charge of their journey. We can't compel them or make them do anything and we don't want to. What we want them to do is to say these are the challenges I'm having in my life and these are the ways that this community can support me and then we try to help them do that."
If you need more information on Circles, go to their barbecue on July 27 at Carey Park. You can RSVP to Robbie Fall at (620) 669-7569 or email her at [email protected].
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