ROSWELL, Ga. — A traveling museum is powering a message of hope through the metro Atlanta area.
According to museum organizers, the touring exhibit is designed to help people better understand how poverty feels.
Channel 2’s Lori Wilson was at the museum, at its stop in Roswell, to get a look inside and speak to the charitable staff making it work.
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Catholic Charities USA, with funding from the Lilly Endowment, created the interactive traveling museum called People of Hope because all communities, including the metro Atlanta area, have poverty.
In the mobile museum, touch screens let visitors walk in the shoes of those who are most vulnerable.
Leaders from Catholic Charities Atlanta said the work they do is to share that experience.
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“It allows you to make some of the choices that they have to make everyday,” CEO Vanessa Russell, Catholic Charities Atlanta, told Channel 2 Action News. “You see people who are shopping with you who have to make very difficult decisions about what they purchase and how much, and how many times they get to go to the grocery store.”
Russell said people making those decisions are everywhere, in every community and their struggles are happening right now.
Bishop John Tran told Wilson how he’d benefited from Catholic Charities in 1975 when his family arrived in the Untied States after leaving Vietnam.
Now, he’s an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Atlanta.
“Too many of our brothers and sisters live in poverty and it’s important for us to be able to care for them as best we can,” Tran said.
Tran said every year, Catholic Charities Atlanta serves about 11,000 people in need. The organization said it’s work that needs a lot of volunteers, and funding, so it hopes people will not only come to the mobile museum to hear the stories of poverty, but will walk away with more empathy and compassion.
“A third of seniors in the state of Georgia live in poverty,” Russell said. “30% of our children live in poverty or in households that are in poverty.”
After going through the museum, visitors are able to fill out cards telling the organization how you want to help make a difference serving others through volunteering and fighting for the dignity and well-being of the marginalized.
“We want to inspire them to action, inspire them to get involved because when they do, everyone in our community is uplifted,” Russell said.
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