Poverty Resistance Inc.
Mary Anne Budenske, executive director
440 S. Wolcott
Casper, Wyo. 82601
(307) 266-9928

The story of Poverty Resistance is really the story of Mary Anne Budenske, a curly-haired, plain-spoken woman who never expected to know much about homeless people ... until she became one.

Budenske, a Colorado housewife and mother, had made a fair amount of money in real estate when she gave up her career there and moved to rural Wyoming, under pressure from her family and her husband's, to try to save a failing marriage with a man who'd repeatedly gone through drug and alcohol treatment only to fail to stay sober.

When the marriage finally fell apart, she and her baby packed their few belongings in a pickup truck and headed for Casper, where she ended up living in the truck for a few days, discovering that the welfare system she had always thought was there to help people in need wasn't there for her at all, and learning the fine art of "dumpster diving" from a pair of people she lovingly calls "winos," gentlemen named "Brother Wine" and "Terp," short for terpin hydrate, the codeine-laced cough syrup that was his drink of choice.

By the time her first AFDC check, a generous $185, came around six weeks later, Mary Anne and Brother Wine and Terp had formed a fast friendship, discovered that a truckload filled with aluminum cans would net them $25 to share, and learned the best dumpsters in Casper (behind the largest grocery stores) for reliably finding quality leftover food, which they had begun sharing with a couple of dozen other poor people who lived in a row of rundown buildings on the single block that passes as Casper's "Skid Row."

Impressed by the way that Casper's down-and-out had evolved a close network of sharing information ("When the North Casper Food Bank got in fresh ground beef, everyone knew it") and help ("whenever anyone found extra food, they'd invariably pass it around"), it occurred to her to organize them. And before long, operating as a team, the little band of homeless people were scavenging more food than they could eat by themselves (once even scoring on nearly a half-ton of still-useful frozen vegetables), and supplementing their cash income by turning over scores of still-useful items found in Casper's trash for sale at the local consignment store.

Mary Anne eventually got a job as resident manager for the single-room occupancy apartment building that now houses Poverty Resistance's operations (a job she qualified for by successfully evicting 15 Hell's Angels from an upstairs apartment), and everything seemed surprisingly optimistic, at least by the standard of jobless and near-homeless people, until the state Department of Family Services started to take an undue interest in their activities.

Mary Anne, who with her "wino" friends had taken over operation of the consignment store when its operators left town without giving notice, had begun "hiring" street people to work there, paying them with vouchers they could use to buy items from the store.

Learning of this, the local branch of the state welfare office announced that she would have to start keeping books on her "employees," reporting the value of vouchers given them, and that this information would be used to reduce their food-stamp and welfare allocations.

Appalled, she decided to seek non-profit status for the group, only to discover that workers at the local Legal Aid office rudely declined to do the work for them.

This prompted Budenske to two strong actions that would change her life and the face of the street scene in Casper. First, she scraped up $150 of her own money and hired a private lawyer to incorporate Poverty Resistance as a non-profit. Second, radicalized by her encounters with the welfare system and Legal Aid, she scrapped her plan to seek a master's in journalism at Casper College, instead entering law school at the University of Wisconsin at Laramie, a commitment that required her to commute 140 miles each way, near-penniless and pregnant with her second child.

Attending law classes during the week and returning to Casper to work with Poverty Resistance on weekends, she and her two fellow board members (a self-described "wino" and an old radical organizer who calls himself "the last living Wobbly," they have evolved into a lean, flexible storefront organization that provides direct services and raises hell.

Essentially supporting itself with an average monthly income of $3,000 from its thrift shop, Poverty Resistance operates a "food bank" (actually a food pantry) that serves 300 families a month; emergency housing for up to two weeks for people who've lost their permanent housing; a large community garden that helps stock the food bank (and a co-op running four more gardens for four other emergency-food providers); a clothes closet that provides three new sets of clothing annually for school children (and their parents) eligible for free school lunch; and, through Budenske, who has now finished law school, the kind of tough legal advice that Legal Aid will no longer provide.

Budenske says it's not easy to organize poor people. She's had some luck mustering clients to testify in a successful bid to increase Wyoming's AFDC standard and in rallying around pro-choice efforts, but has almost despaired of effectively organizing the city's poor people to register and vote.

Meanwhile, though, Poverty Resistance continues in the belief that food and shelter are the keys to self-reliance, because a person who must spend all his effort worrying about where the next meal and that night's sleeping place are coming from is in no position to worry about looking for a job, getting off drugs or alcohol, or getting his life put back together.

Using legal assistance to get people the welfare benefits they deserve is a key to that, Budenske says, adding that she doesn't always buy the argument that poor people should try to get OFF welfare. After all, she says, only half smiling, if Chrysler Motors can ask the federal government for billions, why SHOULDN'T a poor person claim the $365 a month in AFDC that she has coming.

"The Chamber of Commerce and lawyers teach businesses how to survive and take advantage of the system," she says. "Why shouldn't poor people get the same kind of quality legal advice? If a business entrepreneur learns to avoid paying a dime in taxes, other business people respect him and pay good money to go to seminars and learn to do the same. We feel that poor people should have the same right. Trading poverty on welfare for a job that pays no more than welfare doesn't work. We've replaced slavery with something worse ... we cut people off at the knees and then blame them because they can't walk."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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