The Moth just released this behind-the-scenes video from our “Home: Lost and Found” program last year, in which Seattle residents learned how to tell their personal story of homelessness. Beautiful, poignant and a lesson for us all as we watch Fritzina and others find their voice.
See more about our project with The Moth
This time it’s different.
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Partnering with Seattle Art Museum for the screening of “Inocente” allowed us to reach a new audience of art lovers. Here, they give Inocente a standing ovation at the conclusion of the film. Photo by Steve Schimmelman.
Republished from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog, April 7, 2016.
A young woman of color takes the stage. With a quick prop change and shift of her posture, she becomes several different characters: a young military veteran, a successful business executive, a street paper vendor, all of whom have been hit with homelessness. Continue reading
Between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2016, over 1,000 volunteers set out to count the number of people outside, unsheltered in King County during the 36th annual One Night Count. In preparation for this day, I along with our fierce project manager, Catherine Hinrichsen, and previous Digital Design Project Assistant, McKenna Haley, worked through the month of January to create a visual element to represent the One Night Count results for our partners at All Home. Continue reading
Thursday, Jan. 21, join us virtually, or in-person at Seattle University, to learn how to use social media skills to effectively advocate for affordable housing and other social justice issues. It’s our fourth annual “Social Media for Housing Advocates” workshop, and you can watch online — or join us in person at Seattle University. Continue reading
Wandering around the streets of downtown Washington, D.C., and trying to find the building where I interned for the summer, I passed by eight people on the streets. A cacophony of voices—begging and pleading for someone to help—overwhelmed me, as did my inability to help them on my own. I had been in the District for less than 24 hours and already witnessed the plight of people who are homeless in excruciating detail. No matter where I walked, I continued to hear the same calls:
“Excuse me, do you have any change?”
By Catherine Hinrichsen, project manager, Seattle University Project on Family Homelessness
The crashing ocean waves were the score to my quest on a Saturday night five years ago, at a quiet seaside housing development on the Washington coast. I excused myself from our little multi-family gathering around 10 p.m. to go stake out the central office, in search of an Internet connection. Though it was after hours and the building was closed, the wifi was still on. I lugged my heavy, ancient laptop to a pillar with a ledge and propped it up, typing into the search bar “www.seattletimes.com”… Would it be there? And what would it say? Continue reading
Sharing the Depth of the Human Experience: “Portraits of Homelessness” at the 2015 Global Street Paper Summit
By Lindsey Habenicht, Project Assistant, Seattle University Project on Family Homelessness
Editor’s Note: Seattle University hosted the International Network of Street Papers (INSP) Global Street Paper Summit June 24-26, 2015, which welcomed more than 120 journalists from street papers in 22 countries, including Seattle’s Real Change. Our assistant, Lindsey Habenicht (above), is spending the summer as an intern for one of those papers, Street Sense of Washington, D.C. Before she left Seattle, Lindsey attended the Summit as a street paper communicator and volunteer blogger. This is an adapted version of Lindsey’s post for the Summit.
The narrative of what homelessness is and is not is often uninformed, uneducated, and even unknown completely. While many are aware of the issue of homelessness, they remain unaware of the person: the veteran, the child, the musician, the artist, the entrepreneur, and the like.
“Why is that?” asked Rex Hohlbein of Facing Homelessness. “How could [we] be so disconnected from the simple and obvious fact that homelessness involves real people with real suffering?”
Keynote speaker Rex Holbein started the Facebook page “Homeless in Seattle”’ in March of 2011 to share something beautiful about each person living on the street. Photo courtesy of facinghomelessness.org
Rex was the keynote speaker at the Global Street Paper Summit’s opening night event, “Portraits of Homelessness,” June 24, which told stories through more than 100 works of visual art, films and audio recordings. Continue reading
Written by Denise Miller, Firesteel Advocacy Coordinator
A Tacoma mom remembers being evicted from her home, and looking for a tent for her family of five. A Seattle teenager describes the challenges of doing homework while living in a car. A South King County11-year-old reflects on losing friends when they learned she didn’t have a home. These are just a few of the stories captured by the StoryCorps “Finding Our Way: Puget Sound Stories About Family Homelessness” initiative last summer, and now featured on a new section of our website.
I’ve been talking about the “Finding Our Way” project for almost a year now. Last spring, as we began inviting people to sit down with a loved one and share how homelessness has affected them, I wrote about how personal stories can build bridges between people and drive social change. Over the summer, I shared some of the most moving moments from our recording days. At Thanksgiving, I posted gratitude for the brave men, women and children who participated in the project and gave permission for their stories to be used for advocacy.
Now it’s time to invite you to listen to and share audio clips produced from the recordings. Our new StoryCorps page currently features five short stories that help listeners understand how homelessness affects families in our community, and we’ll continue adding stories over coming months.
Read more at the Firesteel website here.
projectonfamilyhomelessness.org 