Bridges Out of Poverty training is a comprehensive approach to addressing poverty that looks at the impact of economic class and the dynamics that cause and maintain poverty from the individual to the systems level. This training provides a theoretical framework and concrete tools a community needs to prevent, reduce, and alleviate poverty.
The Bridges Out of Poverty training assists employers, community organizations, social-service agencies, and individuals and provides powerful tools for change. Participants will create a mental model of poverty, review poverty research, examine a theory of change and analyze poverty through the prism of hidden rules of class, resources, and language.
Explore this approach being used by hundreds of communities across the U.S. as well as other countries. Learn with the St.Joseph County Bridges Out of Poverty team, one of the earliest adopters of this model that is applying these ideas for innovative and cross-sector approaches to break the cycle of poverty in our community.

Bonnie Bazata is the first executive director of the St. Joseph County Bridges Out of Poverty Initiative (SJC Bridges). She has extensive experience in a wide range of culturally and economically diverse organizations. Prior to her work with SJC Bridges, she was the Associate Director for the Center for Women's Intercultural Leadership (CWIL) at Saint Mary's College, and before that, the Assistant Director for the Pima County Youth Opportunity Movement in Tucson, Arizona. In both settings she helped start up programs that gained national recognition for their impact and achievement.
Bonnie grew up in Cassopolis, Michigan, a rural community with both racial and economic diversity. She holds an MA in bilingual/ multicultural education from the University of Arizona and a BA in political science and communications from Antioch College. She was a recipient of a Watson Fellowship studying Gandhian nonviolence in England and India.
For her work she has been awarded the Citizen of the Year award in 2009 from the Northwest Indiana Region of the National Association of Social Workers, the St. Joseph County Jobs with Justice award in 2007, an Indiana Torchbearer award in 2006 from the Indiana Commission for Women, and in 2006 a community service award from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation of St. Joseph County.

Day 1: Wednesday, July 22nd
8:30 - 9:00 AM - Registration
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM - Why Poverty Matters: A Guide for Youth Development Practitioners
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM - Lunch on your own
1:00 PM - 3:30 PM - Why Poverty Matters (Continued)

Day 2: Thursday, July 23rd
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM - Registration
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM - Moving Through the System : A Day In Your Life On Assistance

This unique experiential learning event blurs the lines between the "haves" and the "have- nots." Using Goodwill's unique role-playing and a simulation activity, participants are transformed into people living on the fringes of society, taking assistance from the state, and living lives of daily struggle to get by in the system.
Goodwill and SJC Bridges recognizes that educating people from our community to the realities of living on public assistance is a far better way of changing misconceptions and prejudices that may be rooted in lack of understanding. "Moving Through The System: A Day In Your Life On Assistance," is a powerful vehicle for informing people about the pitfalls and challenges which must be confronted daily by those living on public assistance.
Participants will be given new persona, new lives, and a variety of tasks that must be met for the day. A typical persona will be a single parent trying to make a life for themselves and their children. Special challenges that people in poverty confront every day will interrupt them and often confound them.
Each participant will navigate the "Welfare Village" with food stamps, items to pawn, I.D. and welfare money. Their challenge is to survive their day on their limited resources and their own ingenuity. In no case is life a bed of roses, unless walking on the thorns counts as appealing!
St. Joseph County Bridges Out of Poverty Initiative brings leadership from our Getting Ahead program to serve in the role of "gatekeepers," the people at agencies who determine whether you will or will not meet your goal.
At the end, a debriefing session with those Graduates along with Goodwill and Bridges staff provides for some candid and real-life experience to inform the day's event.
For those who have participated in "Moving Through The System" their own views of living on public assistance are forever changed.