Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Amy Jo Hutchison


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Spartaz Humbug! 21:47, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Amy Jo Hutchison

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DEPRODed w/o explanation. Looks to me currently like a WP:BIO1E. She has some coverage in the news for her hearing in local media but no significant, secondary coverage, lacks WP:GNG. CommanderWaterford (talk) 09:54, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. CommanderWaterford (talk) 09:54, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of West Virginia-related deletion discussions. CommanderWaterford (talk) 09:54, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 11:16, 13 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete. Lacks WP:GNG. SunDawn (talk) 14:44, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep per WP:HEY and WP:BASIC, because "If the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined to demonstrate notability" and the article has been revised with sources added, including about her 2017 lobbying in Congress (Herald-Star, New York Times), her 2018 work with the Poor People's Campaign (Associated Press, The Nation), non-local news sources about her 2020 testimony before Congress (ABC Denver 7, Politico), and sources related to her advocacy in 2020 (Times West Virginian) and 2021 (MarketWatch, Charleston Gazette-Mail (co-authored opinion article)). Beccaynr (talk) 04:09, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * WP:HEY is not a policy but anyway the sources added you are listing only do report about her work in a trivial way, this is not sufficient to establish Notability. CommanderWaterford (talk) 09:53, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment I referred to WP:HEY as a way to suggest that I had substantially revised the article to address the concerns raised in the nom. Also, I disagree that the sources report and comment on Hutchison in a trivial manner, particularly due to how triviality is described by note 7 in WP:BASIC, "Non-triviality is a measure of the depth of content of a published work, and how far removed that content is from a simple directory entry or a mention in passing ("John Smith at Big Company said..." or "Mary Jones was hired by My University") that does not discuss the subject in detail," and due to the depth of the following coverage, according to WP:GNG, "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material."

A Wheeling mother and social advocate says working parents facing the elimination of the Children’s Health Insurance Program next year may have to leave their jobs so their children continue to have insurance coverage through Medicaid. Amy Jo Hutchison, a northern region organizer for Our Children, Our Future — a grassroots organization seeking to end child poverty — will speak to senators in Washington today to urge them to reauthorize the C.H.I.P. program before it expires Feb. 28. The event has been authorized by First Focus, a bipartisan children’s advocacy organization. Hutchison said she plans to share with the senators her story about C.H.I.P.’s importance and will bring with her the stories of many working parents in West Virginia. She will be accompanied by her daughters, Grace and Makayla. Hutchison describes herself as a working mother who went back to college at age 45, obtained a bachelor’s degree and did what is expected of her to be a productive citizen. “If the C.H.I.P. program is not reauthorized, there are going to be many parents who won’t be able to ensure children and can’t afford the private marketplace,” she said. “Some of us will have to quit jobs so that our kids can get Medicaid. That is the exact opposite of what parents on C.H.I.P. want. There are working families who can’t afford insurance. That’s why the C.H.I.P. program was created.” Hutchison explained the program “fills in the gaps” for parents who don’t qualify for Medicaid assistance, but find traditional insurance options unaffordable. The C.H.I.P. program is income-based. In her job, Hutchison speaks to working parents in a 20-county region in northern West Virginia, and she said they have “some pretty heavy stories.” Hutchison said one mother told her of her child who is a Type 1 diabetic, and the cost of insulin without insurance comes to $3,000 a month. The mother told Hutchison her family could use their income tax refund to pay the medical bill for a month, but beyond that they would have issues. Another mother has a son with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. In addition to medication, C.H.I.P. pays for needed counseling. The mother is looking to leave her job to receive Medicaid benefits, according to Hutchison. “It’s the only way to give him the life he deserves,” Hutchison said.

With more and more states running out of money for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, parents took their case to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, pleading with Congress to provide money before their sons and daughters lose health care and coverage. [...] Amy Jo Hutchison came to Washington with her daughters, 10 and 13, from Wheeling, W.Va. As an infant, her older daughter was blind in one eye, and CHIP helps pay for regular visits to a pediatric ophthalmologist, Ms. Hutchison said.

As organizers rekindle an economic justice effort the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was planning when he was killed, they are looking at people like Amy Jo Hutchison to lead the way. Hutchison, 46, is the single mother of two daughters, ages 14 and 11. She’s on Medicaid, and her daughters are enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides low-cost coverage. She has a full-time job and a bachelor’s degree. And she’s white. “People perceive me as solidly middle class,” said Hutchinson, who lives in Wheeling and is one of the campaign’s leaders in West Virginia. But she describes herself as living on the “high end of poverty.” “There’s never a month when two flat tires wouldn’t cripple me,” she said in a phone interview Monday. [...] It’s also important that those who live in poverty are working directly with the campaign to improve their lives, said Hutchison, an organizer with an anti-poverty group called Our Children, Our Future. “We’re not generally given the space to come together and take a stand,” she said. “We’re constantly fighting for our dignity.”

A goal of this contemporary movement is to flip the dominant narrative of poverty in America from one that demonizes the poor to one that questions the morality of current public policy and the elected officials who craft it—a status quo in which 140 million people struggle to make ends meet, 54 million people work jobs below a living wage, 14 million are on the verge of not being able to afford their water bills, 4 million are homeless, migrant children are caged at our border, and black families continue to be ripped apart by mass incarceration.

The Nation spoke with some of the activists who came to Washington this weekend and who now plan to carry on the work of the Poor People’s Campaign for months and years to come. They are at the forefront of this decentralized movement, which emphasizes state-based campaigns led by directly impacted people.

[...]AMY JO HUTCHISON, WHEELING, WV: BUILDING A COALITION OF MOMS TO PROTECT THE SAFETY NET

Amy Jo Hutchison, 46, has lived in West Virginia her entire life and “never spent a day out of poverty on some level.” “Unemployed poverty or working poor,” she said. “And when I was unemployed, SNAP [food stamps] helped me feed my kids. You just can’t do it without the safety net sometimes.” A single mother of two girls, ages 14 and 11, Hutchison has a bachelor’s degree and previously worked as a Head Start teacher. She is now an organizer for Our Children, Our Future, which is spearheading a campaign to end child poverty in a state where about 30 percent of children under age 6 live below the federal poverty line. Hutchison does some lobbying and policy work at the state level, but said her “passion is organizing low-income moms.” “They have it in them,” Hutchinson said. “Sometimes people just need someone to say, ‘Hey, I believe in you. Let’s do this together.’” Her work organizing directly impacted people to protect the safety net was a natural fit with the Poor People’s Campaign, which is focused on breaking through historical racial divides that have kept white people in poverty from working with people of color in poverty. “Politicians have set it up to keep us pitted against one another—from Jim Crow on,” said Hutchison. “To change that you have to have boots on the ground—have conversations and establish relationships so you can begin to say, ‘Look, we’re all in the same boat.’” These conversations include Trump voters, who she says believed him during the presidential campaign when he said he was bringing coal back. “Since I’m directly impacted I can go in there and say, ‘I know what this is like, and we’re being hoodwinked,’” said Hutchison. Hutchison organizes in 20 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, and her approach is to find a contact who can get her “a foot in the door” in a new community. Her goal is to set up a meeting with five mothers, which will lead to a referral and another meeting with five more, and so on. It’s a model that has helped the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign establish a formidable presence at the state capitol over the past six weeks, as residents fight to protect a safety net that is under constant threat. Earlier this year, the governor imposed work requirements for food assistance, despite the state’s own study suggesting that it doesn’t help workers find employment; during a nine-county pilot project, there was also a spike in demand at food pantries. But recently, with the help of low-income mothers testifying at the state capitol, the legislature raised SNAP eligibility from 130 percent of the poverty line to 200 percent. “That was a huge win,” Hutchison said. “With that we bring in thousands of working poor to make them SNAP-eligible since they aren’t paid enough to make ends meet.” Now Hutchison has her sights on working with the Poor People’s Campaign on voter registration and mobilization, continuing to grow the coalition of mothers, and resisting the latest proposals from congressional Republicans to cut food assistance, children’s health care, and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

On February 9, Amy Jo Hutchison faced lawmakers in Washington D.C. “I was really fidgety. I was scared to death,” she said. Hutchison spoke before a House subcommittee hearing on poverty in America. “I have one chance. I’m like one out of 86 million folks for whatever reason who was chosen to do this, and I had one shot,” said Hutchison. She talked about the nights she went to bed hungry, nights she had to nurse her gallbladder with essential oils and eat ibuprofen “like Tic-Tacs” because she didn’t have health insurance. It resonated with tens of thousands of people who have watched and shared it online.

“There’s always a shame that comes with poverty regardless of the level of poverty,” Hutchison said. She knows what it’s like to be on government benefits. Her children receive government assisted health insurance. “Now I’m solidly working poor. I make too much to make any benefits but it’s a struggle to make it check to check,” Hutchison said. When she faced Congress, she didn't hold back. “I also read that each senator was authorized almost $40,000 for state office furniture and furnishings and this number is increased each year to reflect inflation,” she said to the members. “That $40,000 a year in furniture is $360 more than the federal poverty guidelines for a family of seven." “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on me, and shame on each and every one of us who haven't rattled the windows of these buildings with cries of outrage that a government thinks their office furniture is worthy of thousand dollars a year and families and children aren’t,” she said. Hutchison has since launched RattleTheWindows.Org. She’s been flooded with the stories of the same struggle. She shared a story of a parent of a child with diabetes and other auto-immune diseases. She says the boy put himself in ICU because he didn’t want to tell his parents he had run out of insulin. He's been flooded with stories of the same struggle. Hutchison's next step in fighting poverty is the census. A recent study said West Virginia relies the most on the money at stake. “Any government assistance program, SNAP, WIC, CHIP, TANF, I can’t even imagine the effects on the people who would be harmed by that,” she said. Hutchison spent less than six minutes in front of Congress. “I'm not asking you to apologize for your privilege but I’m asking you to see past it,” she said to lawmakers. She believes it will take much more time than that to help those struggling like her. “We shouldn't be so out of breath from chasing the American dream,” Hutchison said.

— The hearings are part of a two-day series, “A Threat to America’s Children,” to assess the impact of the administration’s actions on child poverty, housing, hunger and health. On Wednesday, Amy Jo Hutchison, an organizer with the Healthy Kids and Families Coalition in West Virginia, testified during a hearing on the administration’s proposed changes to the poverty line calculation. The federal poverty guidelines say Hutchinson isn't poor, but she said she has “two jobs and a bachelor’s degree" and still struggles "to make ends meet." — "I’m not poor, but I cashed in a jar full of change the other night so my daughter could attend her high school band competition,” she said. “I had to decide which bills not to pay to be here in this room today. Believe me, I’ve pulled myself up by the bootstraps so many damn times that I’ve ripped them off."


 * Also, the 2020 and 2021 sources linked above help further support that this is not WP:BLP1E, because not only are there multiple events that Hutchison has received national news coverage for, Hutchison did not otherwise remain a low-profile individual, because she "Has given one or more scheduled interviews to a notable publication" as "a self-described "expert", or some other ostensibly (or would-be) notable commentator," (e.g. Times West Virginian 2020) and "has participated in an attention-seeking manner in publicity for some other concern, such as a cause," e.g. MarketWatch quoting her 2021 appearance at a Poor People's Campaign rally and the 2021 Charleston Gazette-Mail (co-authored opinion article). Beccaynr (talk) 16:24, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Keep. Obviously notable as a result of coverage in secondary sources.--Ipigott (talk) 10:21, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Jack Frost (talk) 12:32, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep The article has been substantially improved since nomination and I believe Beccaynr has established a basis for notability above. Sauzer (talk) 12:59, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment Additional sources that could be incorporated: 'A national scandal:' AOC says the US is 'in denial' about the number of Americans actually living in poverty (Business Insider, 2020), 'We've kept the whole damn country running': Pandemic deepens divide between haves and have-nots in U.S. (CBC, 2020), SNAP increases helping those struggling in virus pandemic, but what’s the future of program? (ABC 7, 2020), Rural hunger: West Virginia braces for federal program changes (Farm and Dairy, 2020), Marion Co., WV, officials discuss importance of 2020 census (Fairmont News, 2020), Everyone’s Story Matters: The Value of Listening (WVU, 2021), 'Raise the Wage' Moral Monday protest to occur (Press Republican, 2021). Some of these sources also include biographical information, which is sometimes related to Hutchison's advocacy. Beccaynr (talk) 23:22, 21 March 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.