Why is it so hard to find help for the new poor?    It is because they have yet to be honored to view the child welfare roadmap to recovery.  That is correct.    Child Protective Services will swoop in because "failure to provide for the necessary needs of the child" is child abuse and neglect.

What you have here is this story is a family who may soon find out how to navigate the system of poverty through court ordered services which will be absolutely useless.

For America's new poor, help can be hard to find

Mayer Family No Longer Homeless: SETH AND RONICA MAYER SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCES OF BEING HOMELESS

When your stomach and wallet are equally empty. When your three children sleep next to your wife in a shelter. When you play piano for pennies on a downtown sidewalk. That’s when you know you are poor.

It’s a twisted realization for a family that once earned $100,000 a year, owned a BMW and never gave a second thought to a Starbucks stop or Cheesecake Factory lunches.

“Life on life’s terms,” Seth Mayer says. “It will shake you down sometimes.”

During one of the worst economic periods in U.S. history, many Americans have experienced financial destruction and the stress of making ends meet. More than one out of every six Tennesseans (1.1 million) lived in poverty in 2010 — a 2.3 percent increase from 2008 — and those getting by with the help of government assistance, social services and nonprofit support continues to rise.

After years of financial security, many have to learn how to be poor.

But who teaches them about food stamps, local soup kitchens, filing for unemployment, seeking government assistance? The answer is, people in this community teach one another.

The day Seth Mayer arrived in Nashville from Arizona, with nothing but his keyboard under his arm and a bag on his back, he turned to a homeless man on the street and asked where he could get a hot meal. The people who fed him told him where to find shelter. Those who housed him suggested other resources for social service support.

For every successful lead, he also encountered challenges and dead ends. Services were scattered across the city. He and his family, who soon joined him, had no transportation and little money for food, much less money for the bus.

Government and nonprofit leaders who work with the city’s poor admit there’s room for improvement in how organizations communicate with those newly in need, but once initiated into the city’s systems, the Mayers, and others like them, discovered Middle Tennessee has a wealth of resources and a generosity of spirit.

And, as the Mayers learned how to be poor, their lives became richer.