Materials

• Film clips from Minding the Gap and a way to screen them
• Projectable text of the U.S. Constitution Preamble

Learning Goal: After considering the way that economic insecurity plays out real people’s lives, students will examine whether the U.S. Constitution guarantees financial security to the nation’s citizens.

Activity: Promoting the General Welfare

Step 1: Introduce the Film Clips. Explain that financial anxiety is a feeling of fear brought about as a result of not having enough money to meet one’s needs. As students view, they should look for how that anxiety shows up in the lives of the people in the film and how does it impact their choices, decisions, and emotional well-being.

Step 2: Show the film clips, pausing after each to discuss what students notice about the impact of financial anxiety.

Step 3: Shift the focus to thinking about who is responsible to help deal with the impact of economic insecurity and how that might happen. Show the text of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America and give students a minute to read it.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Ask:

Do you see anything that indicates a federal government responsibility to provide financial security to the nation’s citizens (and if so, what’s your evidence)?

What government supports are already in place to help Americans meet their basic needs? (Examples might include programs like SNAP, WIC, or Social Security Disability payments). Do you see anything in the Preamble that would provide a legal foundation for these programs?

Step 3: Working individually or in groups, come up with at least one response to the financial anxiety experienced by people in the film and make your case for why the response will help and why it is Constitutional.

Extended Learning Assignment Ideas

• Create art or music that conveys the message that not having enough money is not a crime nor is it shameful.
• Conduct classroom debates on issues like:

- Fifteen dollars an hour is not a living wage. The government should require a living wage rather than a minimum wage.

- Governments have limited resources—they simply cannot help everyone and should not be required to.

- Federal, state and local governments should be responsible for retaining jobs and employment opportunities that pay decent wages in all American towns.

- State and local governments should be required to provide mental health services for people coping with persistent economic insecurity.

• Examine where (or from whom), in your community, you learn about money. How much are your ideas about finances influenced by advertising or other media? What difference might that make? What could you do to improve financial literacy in your community?
• Investigate ways that your school can budget discretionary funds to support basic student needs like toiletries and snacks. Develop your ideas into a proposal for the school board.
• Do a feasibility study of adding an entrepreneurship program to your school’s curriculum. Present your findings to administrators.
• Study India’s Universal Basic Income Model (http://carnegieendowment.org/2018/02/14/india-s-universal-basic-income-introduction-pub-75501). Create a graphic novel or a storyboard comic that explores the Pros and Cons of this model and that demonstrates how it works. You might create it in the style of a fanzine to show how it would affect the lives of Bing, Keire, Zack, and/or Nina. .
• Write a persuasive essay and/ or report to the United States Department of the Treasury and to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) committee about why you believe this model has the potential to support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Articles 21-25. Be sure to include a conversation on ways in which debt and financial anxiety could be considered human rights violations of the UDHR’s Articles 21-25.