Picture the Homeless

By Lynn Lewis, 2018
Listen to this edited audio piece through OHMA’s SoundCloud channel

The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project documents the groundbreaking work of this NYC based homeless led organization through the stories and analysis of its homeless members, staff, board of directors and allies.  This piece is an introduction to the work of Picture the Homeless and highlights the experience and meaning of Picture the Homeless to the narrators.   They are, in order of appearance, Marcus Moore, Sam J Miller, Nikita Price, DeBoRah Dickerson, William Burnett and again, Marcus Moore.

Lynn Lewis is the founding Executive Director and former civil rights organizer of Picture the Homeless. She was instrumental in developing Picture the Homelessness’s organizing methodology and through that process, helping to build one of the only grassroots organizations led by homeless folks in the U.S.  for 17 years.  None of their many organizing wins would have been possible without also shifting the dialogue within social movements to end police brutality and for housing rights in recognition that homelessness is a racial and economic justice issue and a product of social inequality.    

She is a founding board member of the E Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust as well as a board member of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust.  Her work has been foundationalin catalyzing the growing Community Land Trust movement in New York City as well as moving City government to invest in this model – because it is not only important to dismantle unjust systems, it is equally essential to construct alternative models.  Lynn is a published author and has worked in the social justice movement for 35 years in a range of capacities in organizations and initiatives led by poor people in New York, Florida, revolutionary Nicaragua and Venezuela and is looking forward to learning how to collaboratively document the histories that poor people’s movements are creating in ways big and small through Oral History. She is bilingual in English and Spanish and is currently a consultant forsocial justice community organizing groups in NYC, and is a former Revson Fellow at Columbia University.