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Indybay Feature

13th Annual Homelessness Marathon

Date:
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Time:
4:00 PM - 4:00 AM
Event Type:
Radio Broadcast
Organizer/Author:
Robert Norse
Location Details:

The 13th Annual Homelessness Marathon will be broadcasting this year out of Detroit, MI nationwide. It'll actually run 14 hours rather than 12 hours, but indymedia log-in doesn't have a way of stating this directly.

The broadcast will start at 4 p.m. Pacific time on February 23rd and end at 6 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, February 24th.

The 13th Annual Homelessness Marathon will originate from 12025 Woodrow Wilson Street in Detroit, a building in the Cass Community Social Services complex (http://www.casscommunity.org).

Homeless people will be gathered there so that they can speak directly to the nation. The broadcast will also feature the voices of diverse experts, callers from around the country and, if possible, politicians.

The general call-in number for this broadcast will be 877-NOBODY-8. People who are homeless, formerly homeless or afraid they're about to be homeless may also call 877-LEFT-OUT.

At any given moment, there are at least 13,000 to 14,000 homeless people in Detroit, of whom 60% are families with children. Shelters there cannot keep up (in 2002, well before the current economic crisis, the shortfall was already estimated at 7500 beds per night), and the situation is completely out of control.

For example, Alternatives For Girls, a Detroit non-profit that tries to keep homeless young women between the ages of 15 and 20 from a life on the streets, reports that last year it had to turn away 800 otherwise qualified candidates for shelter because no beds were available.

Worse yet, the framers of Detroit's "10 Year Plan To End Homelessness" acknowledge that their plan will not accomplish its stated purpose. The plan's "Expected Ten Year Outcomes" include, "Increasedfunding dedicated to long-term solutions" and "Increased numbers moving into permanent housing" but there is no expectation that homelessness in Detroit will actually come to an end.

In other words, Detroit's plan to end homelessness is actually a plan to leave thousands of people on the streets!

"We chose Detroit," explains the Homelessness Marathon's founder, Jeremy Weir Alderson, "because it is the center of America's meltdown. American jobs were shipped abroad with nothing in place for the American workers who were losing them. Surely the American people ought to look at what created this social disaster and ask if the nation might not be better served on a different course."

WHFR, 89.3 FM in Dearborn, Michigan, the radio station of Henry Ford Community College, will be the on-air host of the broadcast. Other participating Detroit area radio stations will include WHPR, 88.1 FM, in Highland Park, Michigan, and CJAM, 91.5 FM in Windsor, Ontario.

The Homelessness Marathon will also air on around 100 American radio stations and will be simulcast, in part, over the 45 or so Canadian radio stations carrying a parallel Canadian Homelessness Marathon, now entering its eighth year. The broadcast will be made available to stations free of charge over the Public Radio Satellite System, the Pacifica satellite Ku-band and through a webcast.

Acclaim for the Homelessness Marathon can be found at: http://homelessnessmarathon.org/2008/09/thank-yous-acclaim.html

Robert Norse of Santa Cruz HUFF (Homeless United for Friendship & Freedom) will be hosting two hours of the Marathon:

Hour 6 from 9 to 10 PM on Tuesday 2-23
A Double Testimony Hour, featuring Mike Rhodes, editor of the Community Alliance newspaper in Fresno, California, Brian O’Neil, a Detroit musician who lived homeless to understand what it is like, and Anthony Dixon who is trying to start a shelter but getting no help from the city.

Hour 12 from 3 AM to 4 AM on Wednesday 2-24.
Subjects will be: “Burying Homeless Dead – In France” and A Double Testimony Hour, featuring Conn Carol, blogger at “The Next Right,” and Peter O’Driscoll, executive director of ActionAid USA.

Call-in's are invited.
Added to the calendar on Mon, Feb 22, 2010 6:30PM
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Jeremy Alderson (poster--Robert Norse)
Mon, Feb 22, 2010 6:39PM
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