Travis Reitsma wants to know why people choose panhandling to deal with extreme poverty.
Reitsma is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at the University of Windsor.
After exhausting his options for funding at the university, Reitsma had to rely on the kindness strangers to purchase new equipment, software, and gift cards to compensate those he interviews.
In what one might call an ironic twist, he started a Go-Fund-Me page in late June to raise $600 to cover the 40 interviews he'll need to conduct.
"Research is expensive and finding funding is very difficult, so as a last resort I kind of just threw it up," he says.
Reitsma says he's gathered close to $2,200 in support of his goal to better understand poverty in Windsor.
He told AM800 News an incident involving a city councillor he witnessed in downtown Windsor back in 2013 inspired the study.
"The city councillor was being quite belligerent to the panhandler saying 'there's no reason you need to be out here, there's plenty of city services that can help you,'" says Reitsma. "It sort of made me realize there's not only a stigma against panhandlers, but people have fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to have to panhandle, or what it means to be that poor."
He says exploring why people beg on the streets hasn't been studied extensively.
"I didn't see a lot of studies that looked specifically at panhandling as a coping strategy. There are a few of them, but most of them deal with people who are homeless, or just generally very poor," Reitsma says. "I want to understand why people choose to go to non-traditional means of making money when the traditional ones don't work out."
The stereotype that all panhandlers are drug addicts or drunks isn't something Reitsma will ignore.
"I want to understand everything I can about what it's like to be poor in a country that has a lot of wealth," he says. "Obviously there's a lot of people who are addicted and struggling with addiction, usually there's underlying reasons for that, whether it's trauma or the trauma of just not having enough money. That's also a coping mechanism for poverty, to turn to drugs."
Reitsma says it will take several months to gather data for his dissertation.
He plans on donating funding not used in his research to local organizations fighting poverty.