OU Tulsa is hosting a simulation this week to show high school students what it is like to experience poverty.

Ninth and 10th-grade students from Tulsa Public Schools are put into family scenarios, then faced with tasks like buying groceries, paying bills and taking kids to school along with challenges like broken down cars.

“We wanna transform people’s perspectives, and we wanna see that shift from people seeing poverty as a personal failure and more of as a big issue that’s going on in society and the inequality that exists. And that people are often faced with a lot of barriers that are way outside of their control,” said Nic Dubriwny, OU Tulsa Faculty Coordinator.

Program coordinators also want to promote careers in social work through the experience.