Today in America living without a home is considered a crime. Sleeping outside or in a car is illegal, soliciting work or conducting unrecognized work on land that you don’t own or pay for is increasingly criminalized and more and more poor workers, homeless people, welfare recipients, undocumented workers and youth in our country face police harassment, abuse and even incarceration for living in poverty. We would like to uncover the root causes behind these frightening trends happening all over the world and begin a real discussion exploring the harmful impact this is having on poor children, families and adults and elders of color. We also hope to bring national attention to the criminalization of poor people and discuss short and long term solutions to this problem.

In order to provide an accurate portrayal of the real problems encountered everyday by those living in poverty in the richest country in the world, POOR Magazine will provide a panel of innovative and powerful voices from a wide variety of poverty and race scholars, (insiders who have felt these experiences first-hand.) These POOR Magazine scholars are all struggling to come up and out of poverty and have all faced criminalization due to their poverty. We feel that providing these voices in an open forum is much more valuable than providing the voice of an “expert,” who has never been homeless or experienced poverty.

We feel that from begining a conversation with the voices of those who have really experienced poverty and homelessness is the key to finding a solution to this growing problem in our country. We hope participants leave with new knowledge and scholarship from speaking with many people who struggle to survive everyday, either as formerly homeless or currently low or no income. We would like participants to leave with the recognition that living in poverty in America is illegal and considered a crime. We would also like participants, from engaging in a critical discussion and analysis, to be able to address the root causes of poverty and understand the dangerous increase in the criminalization of poverty happening right now. We hope participants leave as more aware members of society with new knowledge on how to form and implement solutions to change the current system.

Partcipants will be engaged by not just listening to the presentation, but becoming part of the conversation themselves. They will also recieve handouts and complete excercies that will allow them to make connections and understand the reality of the criminalization of poverty in America. This will be conducted in English (we may be able to provide Spanish translation as well).

Many of the solutions we will propose are solutions we aleady impement at POOR Magazine, such as People working collaboratively to provide a voice for the people so often ignored in the mainstream media, people living in poverty. Working to infiltrate the mainstream media by producing media campaigns that attract attention to pressing issues and allowing the people dealing directly with these issues to speak. Reframing the news by producing socially conscious online articles, print books and radio shows that don’t hide behind the veil of non-existent objectivity.

In order to achieve these alternatives, we at POOR Magazine train low and no income youth and adults so that they learn how to use their voice to achieve real change. POOR Magazine already does this by providing an innovative, intensive media-training program that teaches people coming up and out of poverty how to be investigative journalists, feature writers and book authors. By giving low and no income people the skills with which to get their voices heard in the mainstream media, we feel that real change can be achieved. We also provide an innovative forum once a month, where people struggling with poverty and racism on a daily basis become newsmakers themselves and help us create media campaigns within the local community. These campaigns work to bring attention to issues often ignored by other media, for example fighting the gentrification and unfair evictions occurring everywhere in the Bay Area. By teaching people to actively participate in the process of creating a media campaign, POOR Magazine is helping to give a real forum to the real experts, the insiders who actually experience these issues everyday. We believe this is one real long-term solution to ending poverty/homelessness in America. We will also propose different, innovative solutions.