Sharing Our Stories: An evening of experience and ideas from folks who have been homeless & their allies — Tues. & Fri., March 16 & 19

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tuesday, March 16, 7 p.m.
Live Oak Friends Meetinghouse (Quakers)

1318 West 26th St. (inside North Loop between Durham & Ella)

Friday, March 19, 7:30 p.m.

Houston Institute for Culture

708 Telephone Road (at Lockwood) (inside the Tlaquepaque Market, next to bohemeos coffeehouse)

 
The Understanding Poverty Project (UPP) continues its exploration into poverty and homelessness March 16 and 19 with the “Sharing Our Stories” panels^{: “}An evening of experience and ideas from folks who have been homeless & their allies.” Moderated by Joseph Benson and Ann Walton Sieber.

We are all so separated. We don’t often get a chance to know each other, all we diverse people — even we Houston neighbors traversing the same city streets, looking at the same skyline, reading the same headlines. We get to know other folks from similar backgrounds, similar schools, similar jobs, similar hobbies. But as for knowing people who fall outside this circle of familiarity, we’re left to guessing, stereotypes, the occasional news article.

Most people are concerned about homelessness, but few know what to do about it. We have questions and guesses. Do homelessness people want to be homeless? Should I give money to pan-handlers? How many mentally ill people are on the street? How many veterans? Can anything be done? Is there anything I can do, short of giving money (that won’t take over my life)? Might I end up homeless myself?

There are no clear answers, but we with the Understanding Poverty Project think an excellent place to start looking for the answers is to listen to those who have been there. We’ve invited people who have lived on the street to come tell what it was like for them, what was especially hard, what helped them, what support they wished had been there, what changes they’d like to see. We’ve also invited people who are allies to the homeless: Dr. David Buck who founded and heads Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston; Scot More, who went from being homeless to running the Community Outreach services for the Coalition for the Homeless; Joseph Benson, who went from being homeless to being a leader in the consumer advocate movement.

Co-sponsored by SEARCH, Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston and the Live Oak Friends Meeting

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About the Understanding Poverty Project

The Understanding Poverty Project is a long-term art and reporting undertaking by photographer Ben Tecumseh DeSoto and writer Ann Walton Sieber — with the inspired assistance of the UPP Collective — a humanistic inquiry into the life stories of those who have experienced homeless and the conditions in society that produce homelessness, documenting the effects of trauma on the street as well as the effects of understanding, help, and hope in changing all our lives.
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Ann Walton Sieber is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Images from the Understanding Poverty Project

View 55 images by Ben Tecumseh DeSoto, from the Understanding Poverty Project. These were part of the exhibit that Ben and I had at DiverseWorks September 2008 (UPP at DiverseWorks), and they are currently available as a traveling exhibit around the city and the country.

http://www.zendfoto.com/
(Go to Portfolio -> Understanding Poverty 55 Exhibit Images)

The difference between a flower girl and a lady

I keep coming back to an interview that Ben DeSoto and I did with Dr. David Buck, who is the founder and executive director over at the excellent Healthcare for the Homeless of Houston. Although David’s experience and accomplishments are almost ridiculous (he volunteered with Mother Teresa, for goodness sakes!), I really like his sort of nerdy eager way of talking about what he’s passionate about, which is how to empower people on the streets enough so that they don’t end up in one of his medical clinics.

To begin with, Dr. Buck strongly feels that one of Houston’s biggest problems is that most of the homeless organizations here do not have anyone on their boards who has actual experience of being on the streets.

“You [need] people who are formally or are currently homeless that would serve on the board. So that someone’s not seen as ‘oh he's the problem’ — but they're a part of the solution. So they start to identify themselves as part of the solution. And that's

“Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.”

When George Orwell was a young man and still a comparatively unknown writer, he spent several years in destitution in Paris and then outright homelessness in London, tramping about from flophouse to flophouse. The first book he published was about this experience, Down & Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. It is one of my benchmark books and I have read it many times and pressed it on many friends. Here is some of what Orwell had to say about what he saw and what he experienced:

“It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your 
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely

Under the Pierce Elevated

We set out January 16 to talk to some people on the street.

It was a hard day for me, because it was the birthday of my mother, who had passed away unexpectedly 18 months earlier. Her presence and her loss still shadow me hourly. It was rocky for my photography partner as well, as he tries to persevere and raise a young family despite his changeable work situation. He’d just had a setback, so was anxious and wanting to administer the medicine of busy hands and good work. I was crying and shaken, but pulled myself together and bundled in the car, game to face whatever fate and the cold wind placed in front of our lens and our pen.

It was a cold day, and still damp from the rains that had poured on the city all night long. With Ben driving, we circled over to where the freeways crisscross on the south and east of downtown. Ben is drawn to this area, for the Pierce-Elevated freeway had served as a 24/7 refuge for the city’s homeless throughout the 70s and 80s, sometimes 200 people at a time. There used to be a public park under the freeway. What a quintessentially Houston thing, a park under a freeway.

"The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street," by Giorgio de Chirico