Episode
Start With Why
- Podcast
- I Believe
- Published
- Apr 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1868
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/start-with-why
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Summary
The apartment is cold. Outside, sirens. Somewhere down the block, gunshots. This is Hunting Park, North Philadelphia . The sounds of Hunting Park don’t stop because a mother is trying to feed her children. At the kitchen table, two kids are eating. Whatever was in the cupboard, she put it on their plates. Her son is going blind and needs a doctor. Her daughter is small and hungry. She knows. She sits with them. She is holding a piece of paper. Sometimes a pizzeria menu. Sometimes whatever paper she could find. A flyer, a receipt, anything. She reads it. Studies the pictures, if there are pictures. Asks herself what she would order if she could. She calls this read eating . Her name is Barbie Izquierdo . Years later, she will tell advocates what this was. Her stomach had been empty long enough that the brain had learned to feed itself on images. “I was feeding my brain,” she said, “when I couldn’t put food into my stomach.” She had a job. A full-time job, through her advocacy work. She had done what everyone told her to do. Get off assistance. Get back to work. Climb the ladder. She climbed. Her paycheck put her two dollars an hour over the SNAP threshold . Two dollars. SNAP ended. The childcare subsidy ended. The cash assistance ended. The children’s free and reduced-price school meals ended. Three separate systems, each one operating according to its rules, each one executing those rules without error, collectively produced the outcome in the cold apartment with the pizzeria menu. No corruption. No villain. No malfunction. The machine worked just like all bureaucracy works. “Just enough,” she said, “to feel like you’re still poor but not homeless.” The neighbors sometimes brought a can of beans. A cup of rice. Whatever they could spare, which was never much, because t…