Tag: Film Reviews
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Getting online: Website Aims To Make Homeless Visible
Mark Horvath is a nationally renowned housing advocate who has been highlighting the stories of homeless people across the United States using short interviews which he records and posts online at invisiblepeople.tv. Horvath’s concern in initiating his interview project was a conviction that homeless people had been “invisible” for much too long. His goal was…
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Project 50/50: Honesty
We’ll begin with a dose of honesty I believe it to be important to qualify the right people before taking advice. This means that before I ask someone what they would do in a given situation, I take a good hard look at their life. Do they have the experience necessary to make this decision?…
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Haiti: 8 Months Post-Quake
In the aftermath of one the biggest tragedies in Haiti—a country already known for persistent political unrest and economic depravity—the country still lacks the ability to meet basic human needs. Long after the media coverage of the January 12th earthquake has ceased and Haiti’s fifteen minutes of fame appears to have faded, one thing remains…
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A Different Kind of Evil
Who would gun down a child? That’s the question that Im asking myself this week, along with all of Boston. Of course I’m speaking about the shooting in Mattapan last week that left three people dead, including a 2-year-old child, and one person clinging to life in a Boston hospital. The details are in itself…
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To Mend or not to Mend
There is a modern tendency to throw material things away, often seemingly needlessly. If something is broken, our modern world discards it, rather than try to repair it. If this modern trend carries itself into the realm of people, then the poor and downtrodden might be seen as “broken” in some fashion and treated as…
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Geoffrey Neil, writer of Dire Means, which deals directly with homelessness, talks with Spare Change News
Goldfinger: I was homeless and upon reading the section of Dire Means where Mark Denny was being treated as if he was homeless, it really brought me back to how I felt in regards to the way people treated me. How were you able to do this so accurately? What experiences in your life helped…
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A Ray of Hope
It’s funny when you get hope and inspiration, especially when it comes from the unlikeliest of places. A couple of months ago I was contacted by a man named Shimshon Stu Siegel. Shimshon is the Director of a program out of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass called Impact Boston, for which High School students from…
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Leading the Way…to Change?
Mayor Menino and the City of Boston now claim to be “Leading the Way” towards eradicating homelessness from Beacon Hill to Boylston Street and beyond. Last month, the Neighborhood Development department of the Mayor’s office announced the details of a $30M plan to totally eliminate long-term individual homelessness and cut family homelessness by 50%. The…
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Newspapers Past, Present and Future
Gary Gilreath Badge # 7043 I, the writer, would like to take the opportunity to thank all who read my first ever article, which was published in the February 25, 2010 issue of Spare Change News. Your responses to my question of whether to stay or go were quite supportive. So I would like to…
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The Sweet Smell of Success
Success is something to savor and be proud of, especially when the outcome is worthwhile. For a number of people formerly living without a home, a family, or life security, there is much success in once again having it all and having it for all the right reasons. Not everyone ascends out of homelessness and…