young people and the cycle of poverty

 

I got the inspiration for my book from a Banksy image of a small girl holding a balloon with the title “no hope“. I interpreted the image to represent children in poverty originally down to the imagery alone and after some research also by the location of the graffiti. It was created on a crumbling garden wall in Southampton and was painted over with white paint within a week of it being created. 

This art inspired me because of the powerful message it portrays, while still holding an air of simplicity also because I believe it to be a brilliant piece of artwork. I got the images inside my book from thinking of what would suit the pages content and either drawing that or researching the theme and looking at images related to it. 

 My book is different because it’s on a topic no one else wrote about, also because its written in the form of a spoken word piece / poetry.

 The theme I’m trying to express through my text and images is the cycle of poverty. How ridiculous and unjust it is that the amount of opportunities you get in life is based upon your parent's income, post code or your community's facilities. In my opinion all children should have the same opportunities in life.  

The reason I wrote this was to challenge the argument some make when talking about the cycle of poverty that anyone can go from “rags to riches”. I can see how that is an easy statement to make when you’ve been born into a nurturing stable environment. Although people are a lot less likely to make such a statement if they haven’t had the best facilities in life so far. For example if there secondary school didn’t offer a higher level Math's or Irish , they’ve had to take up job to help with bills which interfered with school studies, they’ve become homeless at a time and had nowhere to study without interference, or for a many multitude of reasons to do with one's economic status that effects education . 

My point is we do not have enough facilities for the youth of this country that’s living in poverty and we can not expect conditions to change until we fulfill those demands.