Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Philadelphia Weekly: Fighting Against Foreclosures
ShareThis
Homeowners take a radical stance on foreclosures.
By Daniel Denvir
Posted Feb. 16, 2010
Original Article: http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Fighting-Against-Foreclosures.html
Kensington Welfare Rights Union Coordinator Galen Tyler was on the march in 2000.
Ray Sanchez is three months behind on his mortgage payments. The North Philadelphia native is confident that Bank of America, which took over his mortgage after subprime connoisseurs Countrywide Financial went south, will soon move to foreclose. But Sanchez isn’t looking for an apartment or thinking about crashing with friends—he’s not going anywhere.
“I couldn’t just give up all my hard work. The house is basically my dream come true,” says 30-year-old Sanchez, who was laid off last year after working four years at Home Depot. “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.“
Standing up to save his home, Sanchez has joined a movement of homeowners that are preparing to resist foreclosure—and face arrest if need be. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is currently reaching out to property owners across the city and linking them up with neighbors who are in a similar predicament so that they can resist en masse. If the police come to evict them, homeowners and community supporters will employ non-violent civil disobedience and refuse to leave the property.
The Campaign is a national organization that grew out of Philly’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union, whose housing takeovers and protests during the economic boom of the ’90s drew national attention to the plight of the working poor and homeless. With the foreclosure epidemic now dragging even middle-class families into crisis, Philadelphia is once again poised to become the epicenter for the radical housing rights movement.
“It’s like a finger in the dam,” says the Campaign’s executive director Cheri Honkala, discussing an expected surge of home foreclosures. “And it’s going to burst.”
The foreclosure crisis has already forced millions from their homes and brought the global economy to its knees. In January alone, 88,000 people had their homes repossessed, a 31 percent increase from last year. By this June, an estimated 5.1 million Americans are expected to be “underwater,” according to The New York Times, meaning they will owe more on their home than the property is worth.
Activists say Obama has gone soft on banks that refuse to modify loans, occasional tough talk notwithstanding. Now, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign says grassroots action is the only option left.
“People always say ‘Cheri doesn’t work within the system,’” says Honkala. “Well, the system doesn’t work.”
Honkala, 47, has been an irritant to Philadelphia officials over the past decades. The brash and energetic founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign has led building takeovers and established tent cities full of the homeless and poor. After leaving the city for two years, the formerly homeless mother of two and longtime welfare recipient is back in town and busy organizing homeowners facing foreclosure—and she knows what she’s doing.
The Kensington Welfare Rights Union was founded in 1991 to protest for the rights of welfare recipients, demonized in the media as lazy welfare queens. Honkala and the organization were immortalized in Inquirer reporter David Zucchino’s 1997 book The Myth of the Welfare Queen .
The Union’s first action was to take over an abandoned welfare office at the corner of Front and York, which they turned into a community center—until police arrested them. Many arrests would follow: in houses, apartments, churches and at the Liberty Bell. Honkala says the Union has secured housing for hundreds of Philadelphia families, many of whom have also been arrested in protest actions. Honkala has been arrested over 80 times.
During the late ’70s Honkala became pregnant at age 16 after years bouncing around the Minnesota child welfare system. She and her 8-year-old ended up homeless and sleeping in her car until a drunk driver totaled it. Hearing that the government kept the heat on in publicly owned properties so the pipes wouldn’t freeze, she moved into an empty house owned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was arrested so she moved in to another. And then another.
Honkala has spent the last two years organizing back in her native Twin Cities, helping five local women resist foreclosure and organizing raucous protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention. Having established a new Campaign chapter, she returned to Philadelphia in August and is working out of offices in a Fishtown Lutheran church.
Housing activism in Philly slowed down in her absence, and Honkala says the powers that be are not happy she’s back.
“When I came back to the city, I went down to the foreclosure court,” says a bemused Honkala. “They ID’d me and escorted me out.”
In an ironic twist, Honkala says the city offered her work as a housing counselor after hearing of her return, a job she unsurprisingly refused.
“She just got back into town. Let’s offer her money so she doesn’t do the crazy shit she does,” says Honkala, laughing as she imagines what people in City Hall must have been thinking.
Philadelphia has received accolades for its foreclosure prevention program, which has helped keep a number of homeowners off the street. But while she concedes the situation in Philly is slightly better than in most cities, Honkala is not impressed. “What Philly has done is put you on life support even though they’re eventually going to pull the plug.”
The political and legal climate to resist foreclosures couldn’t be better. For one, almost everyone hates the banks. Secondly, the courts seem to be coming around. Banks packaged mortgages into complex securities and sold them off during the housing bubble. It made them a lot of money in the short run, even though it eventually brought down the economy. But in their rush to make big money, many banks didn’t keep accurate records of property ownership, and courts have recently ruled that if a bank can’t definitively prove that it owns a home, it can’t foreclose on it.
By Daniel Denvir
Posted Feb. 16, 2010
Original Article: http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Fighting-Against-Foreclosures.html
Kensington Welfare Rights Union Coordinator Galen Tyler was on the march in 2000.
Ray Sanchez is three months behind on his mortgage payments. The North Philadelphia native is confident that Bank of America, which took over his mortgage after subprime connoisseurs Countrywide Financial went south, will soon move to foreclose. But Sanchez isn’t looking for an apartment or thinking about crashing with friends—he’s not going anywhere.
“I couldn’t just give up all my hard work. The house is basically my dream come true,” says 30-year-old Sanchez, who was laid off last year after working four years at Home Depot. “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.“
Standing up to save his home, Sanchez has joined a movement of homeowners that are preparing to resist foreclosure—and face arrest if need be. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is currently reaching out to property owners across the city and linking them up with neighbors who are in a similar predicament so that they can resist en masse. If the police come to evict them, homeowners and community supporters will employ non-violent civil disobedience and refuse to leave the property.
The Campaign is a national organization that grew out of Philly’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union, whose housing takeovers and protests during the economic boom of the ’90s drew national attention to the plight of the working poor and homeless. With the foreclosure epidemic now dragging even middle-class families into crisis, Philadelphia is once again poised to become the epicenter for the radical housing rights movement.
“It’s like a finger in the dam,” says the Campaign’s executive director Cheri Honkala, discussing an expected surge of home foreclosures. “And it’s going to burst.”
The foreclosure crisis has already forced millions from their homes and brought the global economy to its knees. In January alone, 88,000 people had their homes repossessed, a 31 percent increase from last year. By this June, an estimated 5.1 million Americans are expected to be “underwater,” according to The New York Times, meaning they will owe more on their home than the property is worth.
Activists say Obama has gone soft on banks that refuse to modify loans, occasional tough talk notwithstanding. Now, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign says grassroots action is the only option left.
“People always say ‘Cheri doesn’t work within the system,’” says Honkala. “Well, the system doesn’t work.”
Honkala, 47, has been an irritant to Philadelphia officials over the past decades. The brash and energetic founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign has led building takeovers and established tent cities full of the homeless and poor. After leaving the city for two years, the formerly homeless mother of two and longtime welfare recipient is back in town and busy organizing homeowners facing foreclosure—and she knows what she’s doing.
The Kensington Welfare Rights Union was founded in 1991 to protest for the rights of welfare recipients, demonized in the media as lazy welfare queens. Honkala and the organization were immortalized in Inquirer reporter David Zucchino’s 1997 book The Myth of the Welfare Queen .
The Union’s first action was to take over an abandoned welfare office at the corner of Front and York, which they turned into a community center—until police arrested them. Many arrests would follow: in houses, apartments, churches and at the Liberty Bell. Honkala says the Union has secured housing for hundreds of Philadelphia families, many of whom have also been arrested in protest actions. Honkala has been arrested over 80 times.
During the late ’70s Honkala became pregnant at age 16 after years bouncing around the Minnesota child welfare system. She and her 8-year-old ended up homeless and sleeping in her car until a drunk driver totaled it. Hearing that the government kept the heat on in publicly owned properties so the pipes wouldn’t freeze, she moved into an empty house owned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was arrested so she moved in to another. And then another.
Honkala has spent the last two years organizing back in her native Twin Cities, helping five local women resist foreclosure and organizing raucous protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention. Having established a new Campaign chapter, she returned to Philadelphia in August and is working out of offices in a Fishtown Lutheran church.
Housing activism in Philly slowed down in her absence, and Honkala says the powers that be are not happy she’s back.
“When I came back to the city, I went down to the foreclosure court,” says a bemused Honkala. “They ID’d me and escorted me out.”
In an ironic twist, Honkala says the city offered her work as a housing counselor after hearing of her return, a job she unsurprisingly refused.
“She just got back into town. Let’s offer her money so she doesn’t do the crazy shit she does,” says Honkala, laughing as she imagines what people in City Hall must have been thinking.
Philadelphia has received accolades for its foreclosure prevention program, which has helped keep a number of homeowners off the street. But while she concedes the situation in Philly is slightly better than in most cities, Honkala is not impressed. “What Philly has done is put you on life support even though they’re eventually going to pull the plug.”
The political and legal climate to resist foreclosures couldn’t be better. For one, almost everyone hates the banks. Secondly, the courts seem to be coming around. Banks packaged mortgages into complex securities and sold them off during the housing bubble. It made them a lot of money in the short run, even though it eventually brought down the economy. But in their rush to make big money, many banks didn’t keep accurate records of property ownership, and courts have recently ruled that if a bank can’t definitively prove that it owns a home, it can’t foreclose on it.
Labels: Cheri Honkala, Countrywide, Galen Tyler, KWRU, Obama, PPEHRC
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Philly Protesters Seize Street to Demand Housing Rights
ShareThis
by Jeff Rousset | Philly Indymedia Center | 12.05.2009
Original Article: http://phillyimc.org/en/philly-protesters-seize-street-demand-housing-rights
Police watched as more than 100 people blocked a busy intersection at 6th and Market yesterday, near the Federal Building, to call attention to the nation's housing crisis.
Police watched as more than 100 people blocked a busy intersection at 6th and Market yesterday, near the Federal Building, to call attention to the nation's housing crisis. Speakers questioned national priorities, with President Obama sending 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan as thousands of Americans continue to be pushed into poverty and homelessness. The group, organized by Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, demanded a moratorium on evictions, and vowed massive nationwide civil disobedience at the end of January if Obama has not taken adequate steps to address the housing issue.
Protesters gathered at the Federal Building at 11 am holding signs and banners, wearing colorful cardboard houses, beating drums in rhythm, and chanting “What do we want? Housing! When do we want it? Now!” Lead by about a dozen disabled individuals in wheelchairs, the group marched to the intersection of 6th and Market and picketed in a large circle, blockading the entire intersection, before converging on the south side of the intersection and blocking traffic across all of 6th Street. A number of people spoke to the gathered crowd, including two women whose homes were recently foreclosed.
“I was renting a home and received a letter stating my house was going up for foreclosure because the owner had not been paying his mortgage. A week later the sheriff was knocking on my door giving me five minutes to leave,” said Starleen Pringle, a longtime resident of Philadelphia.
Pringle said she was forced to immediately leave her home of three years, along with her nine year old daughter and seven year old son, even though she already paid full rent for the month.
“I wasn't even allowed to get school clothes for my daughter the next day,” said Pringle. “They said, 'If you touch or take anything we're gonna lock you up.'” She had to make an appointment to later return to her house and collect all her belongings under a sheriff's supervision.
“Every 15 seconds in this country someone's home is foreclosed!” announced Cheri Honkala, one of the rally organizers, and a national organizer for the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC). “We want to know what the government is going to do for these people!”
PPEHRC organized similar rallies across the country and demanded that the Obama administration make housing its top priority and increase the federal government's funding for affordable housing to the $83 billion dollar level it was at in 1978.
Honkala criticized the government for bailing out banks and corporations, and spending tens of billions of dollars to escalate war, while neglecting the swelling masses of Americans who are living in poverty and homelessness.
“Bail out the people, not the banks!” the group chanted in unison.
Another Philadelphia woman whose home was recently foreclosed spoke on the megaphone. “I'm homeless with my children,” she said with both her daughters, aged two and four, by her side. “I'm living in my car now. I want the government to get me a house so my kids don't get taken away from me by DHS.”
PPEHRC is demanding that Philadelphia immediately take measures to house its entire homeless population, which numbers around 4,000 people on any given day.
Last month dozens of people gathered at City Hall with the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to pressure Mayor Nutter to provide housing for the 8,000 people living in Philadelphia with HIV/AIDS who do not have access to adequate housing, one of the worst records for AIDS housing in any American city. People who are disabled and/or living with diseases are particularly hard hit by the nation's lack of housing and health care.
As the economic crisis continues to strangle poor and working Americans, the numbers of homeless keep rising in Philadelphia and throughout the country. Meanwhile, many of the banks that received billions of dollars in federal taxpayer bailout funds are the same ones evicting people and taking their homes. The banks keep posting high and even record profits. The people keep paying the price.
PPEHRC and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union announced that if President Obama does not adequately address the housing crisis there will be massive civil disobedience planned at federal buildings across the nation at the end of January, including Philadelphia. The highly energized crowd seemed fearless and ready for this escalation, even with police officers watching closely.
As one of the speakers said to the crowd, “The war is not over there in Afghanistan. It's right here in America!” The nonviolent soldiers seemed determined to keep fighting for economic justice until all their demands are met, and everyone has access to adequate housing.
The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign is a national coalition of over a hundred groups building a multiracial movement to unite the poor and fight for economic justice and human rights. Their website is http://www.economichumanrights.org
The Kensington Welfare Rights Union, according to their website, is “a multiracial organization led by poor and homeless families organizing for Economic Human Rights in the poorest district of Pennsylvania.” Their website is http://www.kwru.org
Original Article: http://phillyimc.org/en/philly-protesters-seize-street-demand-housing-rights
Police watched as more than 100 people blocked a busy intersection at 6th and Market yesterday, near the Federal Building, to call attention to the nation's housing crisis.
Police watched as more than 100 people blocked a busy intersection at 6th and Market yesterday, near the Federal Building, to call attention to the nation's housing crisis. Speakers questioned national priorities, with President Obama sending 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan as thousands of Americans continue to be pushed into poverty and homelessness. The group, organized by Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, demanded a moratorium on evictions, and vowed massive nationwide civil disobedience at the end of January if Obama has not taken adequate steps to address the housing issue.
Protesters gathered at the Federal Building at 11 am holding signs and banners, wearing colorful cardboard houses, beating drums in rhythm, and chanting “What do we want? Housing! When do we want it? Now!” Lead by about a dozen disabled individuals in wheelchairs, the group marched to the intersection of 6th and Market and picketed in a large circle, blockading the entire intersection, before converging on the south side of the intersection and blocking traffic across all of 6th Street. A number of people spoke to the gathered crowd, including two women whose homes were recently foreclosed.
“I was renting a home and received a letter stating my house was going up for foreclosure because the owner had not been paying his mortgage. A week later the sheriff was knocking on my door giving me five minutes to leave,” said Starleen Pringle, a longtime resident of Philadelphia.
Pringle said she was forced to immediately leave her home of three years, along with her nine year old daughter and seven year old son, even though she already paid full rent for the month.
“I wasn't even allowed to get school clothes for my daughter the next day,” said Pringle. “They said, 'If you touch or take anything we're gonna lock you up.'” She had to make an appointment to later return to her house and collect all her belongings under a sheriff's supervision.
“Every 15 seconds in this country someone's home is foreclosed!” announced Cheri Honkala, one of the rally organizers, and a national organizer for the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC). “We want to know what the government is going to do for these people!”
PPEHRC organized similar rallies across the country and demanded that the Obama administration make housing its top priority and increase the federal government's funding for affordable housing to the $83 billion dollar level it was at in 1978.
Honkala criticized the government for bailing out banks and corporations, and spending tens of billions of dollars to escalate war, while neglecting the swelling masses of Americans who are living in poverty and homelessness.
“Bail out the people, not the banks!” the group chanted in unison.
Another Philadelphia woman whose home was recently foreclosed spoke on the megaphone. “I'm homeless with my children,” she said with both her daughters, aged two and four, by her side. “I'm living in my car now. I want the government to get me a house so my kids don't get taken away from me by DHS.”
PPEHRC is demanding that Philadelphia immediately take measures to house its entire homeless population, which numbers around 4,000 people on any given day.
Last month dozens of people gathered at City Hall with the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to pressure Mayor Nutter to provide housing for the 8,000 people living in Philadelphia with HIV/AIDS who do not have access to adequate housing, one of the worst records for AIDS housing in any American city. People who are disabled and/or living with diseases are particularly hard hit by the nation's lack of housing and health care.
As the economic crisis continues to strangle poor and working Americans, the numbers of homeless keep rising in Philadelphia and throughout the country. Meanwhile, many of the banks that received billions of dollars in federal taxpayer bailout funds are the same ones evicting people and taking their homes. The banks keep posting high and even record profits. The people keep paying the price.
PPEHRC and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union announced that if President Obama does not adequately address the housing crisis there will be massive civil disobedience planned at federal buildings across the nation at the end of January, including Philadelphia. The highly energized crowd seemed fearless and ready for this escalation, even with police officers watching closely.
As one of the speakers said to the crowd, “The war is not over there in Afghanistan. It's right here in America!” The nonviolent soldiers seemed determined to keep fighting for economic justice until all their demands are met, and everyone has access to adequate housing.
The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign is a national coalition of over a hundred groups building a multiracial movement to unite the poor and fight for economic justice and human rights. Their website is http://www.economichumanrights.org
The Kensington Welfare Rights Union, according to their website, is “a multiracial organization led by poor and homeless families organizing for Economic Human Rights in the poorest district of Pennsylvania.” Their website is http://www.kwru.org
Labels: Affordable Housing, Cheri Honkala, Foreclosure, KWRU, Obama, Philadelphia, PPEHRC, Starleen Pringle
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sojouners Magazine: Eyes & Ears
ShareThis
Eyes & Ears
Seeing is Believing
Source: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0911&article=seeing-is-believing
Creating a better world first requires an act of imagination.
by Danny Duncan Collum
One day this past July I abandoned my blueberry patch to drive to Louisville and sit in a gathering of artists and activists—black, white, and Latino—who all said they wanted to help change the world. There were teenage rappers from the Mississippi Delta and young video artists from southeast Louisiana. It was a workshop session at the national conference of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.
The campaign, made up of more than 90 organizations around the country, aims to “unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty … through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job.” Some of the campaign’s affiliates do things such as mass occupations of property to prevent home foreclosures. The campaign itself marched on the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis last year and is planning a march from the Mississippi Delta to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. They seem to be picking up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign that fell after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
Not long ago, talk of changing the world, much less abolishing poverty, would draw, at best, a cynical snort. But that was before “yes, we can” and all that. Today, hope is still a four-letter word, but you can say it in public again. But as we near the end of the first Obama year, it is also becoming painfully clear that even electing a smart and sane former community organizer—with big majorities in Congress to boot—was not enough to change the world. The last time I checked, big money still held the upper hand in Washington. There’s been a lot more help to mega-banks than to foreclosure victims. The smart and sane solution on health-care reform (single-payer) never even got a hearing, while the insurance and pharmaceutical companies were stroked and placated at every turn.
But presidents don’t change the world. People do. Presidents are pulled along behind great waves of popular uprising. That’s what happened during our last Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt knew it. That’s why he once famously told a group of progressive activists that he agreed with their proposal. “Now,” he said, “go make me do it.” And that’s what happened again in the 1960s when the civil rights movement forced President Kennedy to become a better man than he ever meant to be.
The Poor People’s Campaign meeting I attended this summer focused on the role of artists in a grassroots movement for economic human rights. Again, looking back at those two great periods of social change in the 20th century, they both were accompanied by a renaissance of popular art. Writers, artists, actors, painters, and photographers all had a place in the New Deal and the labor movement that fueled it. In the 1960s, African-American religion and music fueled the civil rights movement and all the ripples of social change it inspired. Acting for a better world requires, first and foremost, an act of imagination. You have to see the potential for change—in yourself and in your community. That act of the imagination can even lead one to see, as one rapper put it in Louisville, “that capitalist society is not eternal.”
That’s why, to the Poor People’s Campaign organizers, the arts aren’t just an add-on to political action. They are powerful motivators that can crack the shell of our American isolation.
Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing writer, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Seeing is Believing. by Danny Duncan Collum. Sojourners Magazine, November 2009 (Vol. 38, No. 10, pp. 55). Eyes & Ears.
Seeing is Believing
Source: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0911&article=seeing-is-believing
Creating a better world first requires an act of imagination.
by Danny Duncan Collum
One day this past July I abandoned my blueberry patch to drive to Louisville and sit in a gathering of artists and activists—black, white, and Latino—who all said they wanted to help change the world. There were teenage rappers from the Mississippi Delta and young video artists from southeast Louisiana. It was a workshop session at the national conference of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.
The campaign, made up of more than 90 organizations around the country, aims to “unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty … through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job.” Some of the campaign’s affiliates do things such as mass occupations of property to prevent home foreclosures. The campaign itself marched on the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis last year and is planning a march from the Mississippi Delta to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. They seem to be picking up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign that fell after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
Not long ago, talk of changing the world, much less abolishing poverty, would draw, at best, a cynical snort. But that was before “yes, we can” and all that. Today, hope is still a four-letter word, but you can say it in public again. But as we near the end of the first Obama year, it is also becoming painfully clear that even electing a smart and sane former community organizer—with big majorities in Congress to boot—was not enough to change the world. The last time I checked, big money still held the upper hand in Washington. There’s been a lot more help to mega-banks than to foreclosure victims. The smart and sane solution on health-care reform (single-payer) never even got a hearing, while the insurance and pharmaceutical companies were stroked and placated at every turn.
But presidents don’t change the world. People do. Presidents are pulled along behind great waves of popular uprising. That’s what happened during our last Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt knew it. That’s why he once famously told a group of progressive activists that he agreed with their proposal. “Now,” he said, “go make me do it.” And that’s what happened again in the 1960s when the civil rights movement forced President Kennedy to become a better man than he ever meant to be.
The Poor People’s Campaign meeting I attended this summer focused on the role of artists in a grassroots movement for economic human rights. Again, looking back at those two great periods of social change in the 20th century, they both were accompanied by a renaissance of popular art. Writers, artists, actors, painters, and photographers all had a place in the New Deal and the labor movement that fueled it. In the 1960s, African-American religion and music fueled the civil rights movement and all the ripples of social change it inspired. Acting for a better world requires, first and foremost, an act of imagination. You have to see the potential for change—in yourself and in your community. That act of the imagination can even lead one to see, as one rapper put it in Louisville, “that capitalist society is not eternal.”
That’s why, to the Poor People’s Campaign organizers, the arts aren’t just an add-on to political action. They are powerful motivators that can crack the shell of our American isolation.
Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing writer, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Seeing is Believing. by Danny Duncan Collum. Sojourners Magazine, November 2009 (Vol. 38, No. 10, pp. 55). Eyes & Ears.
Labels: Building the Unsettling Force: A National Conference to Abolish Poverty, Martin Luther King, Obama, PPEHRC, Sojourner Mazagine
Friday, September 11, 2009
Six arrested at Rosemary's House
ShareThis
Six people were arrested today at Rosemary Williams home today during a raid by Minneapolis police. Police carried Rosemary's belongings onto her front lawn.
The police raid late this afternoon happened at the same time that a birthday party for Rosemary's young grandchild was to be held.
Rosemary and her family are among several members of the Minnesota PPEHRC who are actively resisting foreclosure of their homes in the Twin Cities.
Stay tuned for more information and updates.
The police raid late this afternoon happened at the same time that a birthday party for Rosemary's young grandchild was to be held.
Rosemary and her family are among several members of the Minnesota PPEHRC who are actively resisting foreclosure of their homes in the Twin Cities.
Stay tuned for more information and updates.
Labels: Mayor Rybak, Minneapolis Police, MN PPEHRC, Obama, Rosemary Williams
Police Raiding Rosemary Williams Home
ShareThis
Friday September 11th, 3:30 PM CST:
Rosemary Williams' home is currently being raided by the Minneapolis Police Department. This is occurring as the Twin Cities prepares for President Obama's visit.
Although this raid is occurring late on a Friday afternoon on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we will not let them hide this crime.
The Foreclosure 5 in the Twin Cities will soon be taking their struggle to Washington D.C.
Please contact the offices of President Obama and Minneapolis Mayor Rybak demanding a Moratorium on Foreclosures Now!
For more information, call Minnesota PPEHRC at 612-940-1040 or Lynette Malles at 651-497-4644.
Rosemary Williams' home is currently being raided by the Minneapolis Police Department. This is occurring as the Twin Cities prepares for President Obama's visit.
Although this raid is occurring late on a Friday afternoon on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we will not let them hide this crime.
The Foreclosure 5 in the Twin Cities will soon be taking their struggle to Washington D.C.
Please contact the offices of President Obama and Minneapolis Mayor Rybak demanding a Moratorium on Foreclosures Now!
For more information, call Minnesota PPEHRC at 612-940-1040 or Lynette Malles at 651-497-4644.
Labels: Mayor Rybak, Minneapolis Police, MN PPEHRC, Obama, Rosemary Williams
Monday, June 8, 2009
1400 Letters to President Obama about the Right to Housing Collected by CHAM
ShareThis
CHAM Deliverance Ministry has been organizing the homeless and their allies to fight for housing as a human right in Silicon Valley since 1990. We operated a family shelter at First Christian Church from 1997 to 2009. We have marched, demonstrated, studied, conducted classes and workshops, led economic human rights trainings, organized the homeless to testify, done housing takeovers, led civil disobedience, participated in coalitions, built alliances with unions and health care advocates, and led religious services. We believe our advocacy, along with others, has been responsible for construction of several hundred more extremely low-income housing units than would have been built otherwise in the San Jose area.
We recently collected over 1400 Letters to Obama that are visible on the internet (with photographs) at http://housingisahumanright.blogspot.com.
We have been affiliated with PPEHRC since 2002, and are active in California PPEHRC.
We recently collected over 1400 Letters to Obama that are visible on the internet (with photographs) at http://housingisahumanright.blogspot.com.
We have been affiliated with PPEHRC since 2002, and are active in California PPEHRC.
Labels: CHAM, Obama, Right to Housing, Sandy Perry
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]