Lynn Lewis

[00:00:00] Greetings and introductions, Anthony Williams, cofounder of Picture the Homeless, interviewing Lynn Lewis.

[00:00:27] Anthony [Williams] and Lewis [Haggins] met Chino [Garcia] at CHARAS, he asked if he could invite a friend to Picture the Homeless’s first meeting there, movements for social justice are led by people that are directly affected.

[00:02:54] I was very excited, several of us on the board of the National Coalition for the Homeless were talking about organizing, the majority of the people were not.

[00:03:48] Organizing homeless people, tenement buildings in Chicago torn down, people became homeless, hanging out in fast food places for free coffee refills, they don’t want to be here all day, they wanted housing! A lot of amazing groups came out of CHARAS, Picture the Homeless being part of this landscape of organizing.

[00:05:37] That first meeting at CHARAS, I had my son with me, a big circle of empty, folded chairs, everything has to start somewhere, a lot going on at the time, Giuliani was mayor, a big police crackdown, Amadou Diallo murdered.

[00:08:03] I came back to New York, had left in 1985, went to Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, and lived down there, the part of New York that I lived in, in the early eighties, was a radical place, the Lower East Side.

[00:08:35] Back in New York, Giuliani's mayor and Bratton is police chief, and I'm like, “Where am I?” Gentrification had just taken over a lot of neighborhoods. I couldn’t live in the Lower East Side anymore. I went into that meeting with all those thoughts in my head.

[00:10:03] CHARAS history, Chino had been leader of a gang in early sixties, transferred those skills to working for community, there were all these vacant buildings, they took that vacant school building.

[00:11:34] Planned shrinkage, people around the city reclaiming spaces, people standing up, saying, "No! I want something better." Chino was a founder of CHARAS, they were supportive of organizing, grassroots people, political and cultural groups meeting there.

[00:13:23] Moved to the Lower East Side in 1980, lived at Cooper Square, met Chino, started to go to CHARAS, there was a whole network of folks. Being in that space means you're part of a larger movement. Chino and Armando mentored lots of people.

[00:14:15] Tompkins Square Park, I was not living in New York when the tanks rolled out, people sleeping in the park, tents, the Union of the Homeless, the convention at Riverside Church, the park was part of the history of radical organizing in the Lower East Side, members of Picture the Homeless, were there.

[00:16:57] Cops go with gentrification, rents go up, in the early eighties, a lot of vacant buildings, open-air drug sales, but you never saw police, people on the Bowery, burning fires in empty oil barrels, trashcans, they needed to clear out Tompkins Square Park.

[00:18:25] Dinkins was mayor, even when he was Borough President was trying to do something progressive about the housing crisis, it's not a homeless crisis, it's a housing crisis.

[00:18:42] Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, slashed the federal HUD budget by seventy-some percent, explosion in homelessness, not everyone is a paycheck away from being homeless, homelessness is about poverty, race, and gender.

[00:20:06] Who is homeless, tent-city people in Tompkins Square Park, the neighborhood gentrifying, money no longer coming in to New York from the federal government for public housing, for Section 8.

[00:20:31] All those SROs, all that is gone, people have less places to go, so they're in public space, I came back in ‘98, things were very expensive on the Lower East Side, when they reopened Tompkins Square Park, it had a curfew.

[00:21:22] The minimum wage was around $4.15 an hour, even with a fulltime job, where are you going to live on that? You're going to be homeless! Unless you had something already, how do you get back on your feet?

Lewis: [00:22:02] People saying Dinkins was creating homelessness, people were going into the shelter system because that’s how you got housing. If you're doubled and tripled up, and the only way to get housing is to go into the shelter system, that didn’t make any sense, and still doesn’t.

[00:23:21] Introduced Anthony to Ron [Cassanova], he talked about working with the city opposed to arguing and yelling at the city. It's about power because the city is going to serve the interest of wealth. The power of poor people is their numbers.

[00:24:13] Being in meetings and talking to the city, how many protests, and how many phone calls, and what you need to do to even get those meetings, if you don’t have numbers and people educated about their rights and knowing how to claim them, it doesn’t matter if you're yelling from the outside, or you're inside. They don’t have to listen.

[00:25:08] Continuum of Care backstory, when Reagan was president, interest rates went up, a lot of poor people got balloon mortgages, homes got foreclosed, my mom was one of them. They were sleeping in their car and ended up in Jacksonville, Florida.

[00:26:49] Came back from Nicaragua, pregnant with my son, worked as a mental health case manager, no training in mental health, horrified to have so much power over people's lives, group homes taking their whole SSI, giving them twelve dollars a month.

[00:28:21] Funding for street outreach started, my first thought was, "Oh, now they're just going to try to fill up more group homes with homeless people?" I needed a job, and was interested, and started doing that work.

[00:26:57] Every morning we would do street outreach, in Jacksonville, Florida there's hardly any shelter system, people sleeping under bridges, people refusing to go to shelters or group homes, I thought, “How bad can it be, if sleeping under a bridge is better!?

[00:29:46] Continuum of Care, people fighting for funding for homelessness, my thought was, "Why aren't we fighting to restore housing?" The homeless system is not really housing, you're still in the system.

[00:30:33] I helped start the Jacksonville Coalition on Homelessness, was a founding member of the Florida Coalition for the Homeless, was on the board of the National Coalition for the Homeless, am steady talking about housing, people don’t need all these programs, I learned about the Continuum of Care.
 
[00:31:16] Michael Stoops, Mitch Snyder, Stewart B. McKinney, the McKinney-Vento [Homeless Assistance Act] and the Continuum of Care, background on Michael Stoops supporting Anthony and Lynn to travel around the country.

[00:31:57] Came back from Nicaragua in December of ’87 to Jacksonville, doing homeless outreach, seeing this whole system, homelessness is an extreme example of the harms of capitalism. Michael Stoops and Mitch Snyder came to Jacksonville because they were organizing a national march called _Housing Now! _

[00:33:11] Michael was the national civil rights organizer for the National Coalition for the Homeless, they were talking about police harassment. I was seeing police harassment doing street outreach and hearing about it constantly, homelessness is about poverty and poverty is also about race.

[00:34:13] Michael Stoops and Mitch Snyder were on fire, I started organizing a contingent for Housing Now! Some of the service providers wanted the homeless folks from their programs to have to take urine tests to go, it was ridiculous.

[00:35:06] Stewart B. McKinney was a congressperson, slept on the streets to win the McKinney Act, people had to struggle for that, homeless people were dying, are still dying. Homelessness kills people.

[00:35:45] A lot of folks providing services to homeless people are from poor backgrounds, they want to help. There's charity and there's justice. The McKinney Act provided an emergency influx.

[00:36:28] The Continuum of Care is a system that communities are supposed to use to plan how money is spent and is supposed to include homeless people as stakeholders.

[00:37:15] FEMA funds a bunch of food pantries and shelters, but the shelter system is no longer an emergency system. You get stuck because there's no housing to go to, even if you get two jobs, you can't afford an apartment!

Lewis: [00:38:44] FEMA boards, in a lot of places, morphed into the Continuum of Care, they were doing emergency services' work, and needed more resources because the crisis is getting bigger, agencies that are providing emergency shelter become the natural infrastructure to build more shelters.

[00:39:40] The Continuum of Care is supposed to have homeless participation, clients from these agencies don’t have power as individuals. If you're a client, are you going to vote against them, you maybe retaliated against? The power dynamic is not equal.

[00:40:46] The homeless service system serves the needs of the bigger system, it won’t change the housing market, we're all part of the system, we're all part of this economy, people who are running programs have curfews set up, if you back talk a staff, you get an emergency transfer to another shelter, he shelter system is punitive.

[00:42:01] CUCS hired me in the technical assistance department to teach people about the Continuum of Care. My supervisor asked me to help edit her book, on the first page it said that services are to help “homeless people reintegrate into society.” I said, "Homeless people are a part of society. They're not outside of society!" She got really mad, that job did not work out.

[00:43:02] Giuliani was mayor, Andrew Cuomo was head of HUD. The Continuum of Care identifies gaps in the system and then ranks the gaps, it's based on the "type" of homeless people, women, men, couples, families, and it's based on a pathology, like mentally ill, AIDS, substance abuse... It's not, “Oh, you're homeless because you can't afford to pay rent. We're going to help you out.”

[00:44:05] Housing Works and Coalition for the Homeless submitted applications to meet gaps in the system but were also protesting Giuliani, the Department of Homeless Services knocked their ranking down in the application that the city submitted, for political reasons. Cuomo threatened to withhold funding to New York City.

[00:44:49] There was no Continuum of Care board because New York City had a big Department of Homeless Services but it opened it up, and they started having hearings, and that's when I met you guys.

[00:45:16] You were saying homelessness is a business, after that first meeting, you guys came over for dinner, saying, "We need to know who's in charge of these programs. If they knew how things were happening on the ground, maybe they would fix them." And I was like, "Well, I have the names of all those executive directors!" And y’all were like, "Who the fuck are you then?"

[00:45:52] I was consulting around the Continuum of Care, they had me going up to Connecticut, Philly, training people on the Continuum of Care. I had a copy of the Federal Register where it said that homeless people had to be involved and I showed you guys.

[00:46:24] You and Lewis had created an organization. You weren’t chained to a service provider. And as good as the service providers are, there's still that power dynamic, that's why you need a separate organization of homeless folks.

[00:47:27] You showed us how the system worked, I remember going to the first meeting, and came back distraught. “I can't do this.” You kept telling me, "You need to be there. It's important that you're there." Finally, it clicked that I needed to be there, to give our perspective.

[00:48:12] Giuliani wanted to end the right to shelter, and that people should do WEP [Work Experience Program], for shelter beds just like they did with welfare. New York City was spending two-thousand dollars a month for each shelter bed, for single-shelter residents. You said, "They're spending two thousand dollars a month on this fucking cot and locker! But they won't help me pay my rent." Welfare would only pay two-hundred-fifteen.

[00:49:04] Two-hundred-fifteen dollars. This is basic math, if I can get a room, they’ll only give me two-hundred-fifteen dollars a month, but if I go to the shelter, they'll pay the shelter provider two-thousand dollars a month. So, y’all were like, "This is a business!"

[00:49:58] When you go to HRA, you get a printout of how many food stamps you get, your cash assistance, and on the same printout, of what they're spending on the shelter for you. People are mad, because you're stuck in a system, and somebody else is making money off of you, cops come in the middle of the night throwing people against the wall, beating them up, two-thousand dollars a month for you to be controlled.

[00:51:34] We stayed in touch, you guys used to call me because this was before cell phones, I had a phone, I wasn't working as a staff person at CUCS because I had a major issue with my supervisor.

[00:53:54] We had an ideological disagreement about “these homeless people need to be reintegrated in the society." I wasn't going to train people about that, so we came up with an agreement that I would work as a consultant, she wanted to milk me for what I knew about the Continuum of Care.

[00:55:32] I was working, but was home a lot, you guys would call me, I couldn’t call you. We would meet up at CHARAS, at the International Bar where Jennifer [Roberts] was a bar tender, sometimes, you guys would come out to where I lived in Brooklyn, then I moved here to East Harlem in 2000.

[00:56:16] When you talk about housing, and you talk about your independence in housing, permanent supportive housing, the women have leases in Baltimore, but they can't have men stay overnight, they have to give urine tests, and drug tests.

[00:57:02] That's not housing, when we think about housing, we think about I'm going to go in my house, I'm going to open my door with my key. I'm going to invite anybody over that I want to invite! I'm going to do what I want as long as I'm not a danger, I'm not being too loud.

[00:57:57] Anthony and Lewis would have conversations about the people he knew and people that had money. I said, "No, we're not going to do that, Lou, because there's plenty money in the system. This is about our rights! This is about a right to housing! And he said, "By the way, Anthony, what should we call ourselves?" Then I said, "Picture the Homeless."

[00:54:04] When we met you, you were like, "Well, you know, you guys have been organizing for a while. You can get paid for this." And I was like, "Nah, nah…" I was very resistant. One time someone told me, "Well, Lynn organized you."

[00:59:50] I do remember you being really emphatically against getting paid, you didn’t want to replicate the system, you didn’t want to be like those people that are getting paid to be over homeless people, I'm a hundred percent in agreement with that.

[01:00:58] I would hear from you and Lewis, and you and Lewis were out there talking to homeless people. You're putting calls out. But, where were people supposed to meet? How could homeless people find you? Tenant organizing, is you're knocking on doors! When you're organizing homeless people, you got to have a space for them to come to.

[01:02:13] At CHARAS, trainings on the Continuum of Care, a lot of people came. We'd have some pizza or whatever, all that cost money, I started telling you about funding for organizing to fight the system, which is not the same as money to be part of the system.

[01:04:06] I remember telling you about the North Star Fund, it was you and Lewis that got the space in Judson. When we decided to apply for funding, we needed a fiscal sponsor, so we had to go meet with Peter. But Judson gave us that basement space, that's now the elevator shaft.

[01:05:00] All of a sudden we had a place, but how are we going to tell people to come? We gave out flyers, the first meeting, four people came, North Star Fund gave us five-thousand dollars, that's how we started getting money. But we didn’t get paid from that money.

[01:06:00] Speaking with North Star, Irma [McKechnie], Anthony, filling out the application, the reason I knew about North Star, was when North Star started, I think it was in seventy-nine, they funded Cooper Square, Mayor Ed Koch had taken money away from tenant organizing.

[01:07:36] I was a Cooper Square tenant, HPD owned the buildings and were trying to empty them. We didn’t have heat and hot water a lot of the time. It was like a war! Cooper Square got funding from North Star for tenant organizing. I was working at CVH and told the co-directors about Picture the Homeless.

[01:08:43] Paul Getsos at CVH said, "Oh, you can't organize homeless people." And I was like, "Look, the housing crisis is never going to end if homeless people are not organized.” A lot of people thought that, but you guys made sense to me, and I felt like I had something I could bring.

[01:09:53] This was in January of 2000 when I met you. I'd been involved with the national homeless advocacy organizing stuff for ten years, what missing was an army of homeless people. So, Paul Boden, they were doing organizing. But most of the country was not. I had lived in Nicaragua, so don’t tell me people are too poor to organize because they are countries that have had revolutions!

[01:11:04] At CVH when we had the conversation about applying to North Star, I told Paul and Gail, Gail was very supportive, but Gail had been homeless! She was always supportive of you and Lewis, coming by. She was like, "That's great. Good for them."

[01:12:00] So, we go to North Star... Irma McKechnie was an early member of Picture the Homeless, we're talking to them about police brutality, when people would meet people who were homeless, it's a completely different conversation than what people expect.

[01:13:04] People don’t know what to do. Then, here's Picture the Homeless, and you're a funder, or you're a journalist, or you're a anybody, and here's this homeless person next to you, making all kinds of sense, funders were like, “This is different. Nobody else is saying this.”

[01:13:55] Maria Mottola, from the New York Foundation, told me after a meeting at Picture the Homeless, "This is the most exciting thing I've seen in a long time." If we could get in the door, we could get to people. And that's what you and Irma did.

[01:15:05] A lot of people complain about the “foundation industrial complex” but we would apply to people, and say what we wanted, and then it was up to them, we didn’t compromise what we thought was important.

[01:16:28] Paul Boden, is one of the people that I respect the most. One of the things about Paul is you get your work from what's important to homeless people. And in order to know that, you have to do outreach.

Lewis: [01:17:51] That practice is very important, if it's about foundations, you don’t want foundations to tell you what to work on. We're working for homeless folks! Homeless folks are telling us what to work on, not foundations.

[01:19:01] We needed to be very consistent and have the meetings at the same time, on the same day because we are giving out flyers saying we have membership meetings Wednesday nights at six o'clock—so we had to be there. Because it's not like other kinds of organizing where you set a meeting date and then you call everybody, this was in 2000, 2001 and everything was word of mouth.

[01:20:04] In the early days, we'd have maybe six, maybe eight people in meetings. After we did our own survey project, we increased our membership and would have twenty, twenty-five people in the membership meetings.

[01:20:54] It would be chaotic, people in the meetings who didn’t even know really what the mission was, it was a way, hopefully, for them to get it. But there was no guarantee. Sometimes people would be exhausted, falling asleep.

[01:21:19] Francine worked for Picture the Homeless, in front of the bank raising money, for herself. Stuff like that would happen, but it wouldn’t like we want to go beat them up or they're destroying the organization. We just told her she couldn’t that.

[01:21:39] Prince and Jean were there by then, so there was brilliance too. Our goal was to be welcoming, everywhere else that homeless folks went was not welcoming. It was, "Get the fuck out of here. No, you can't use the bathroom." What are you saying to somebody when you say, "Wake up, you need to move?" You're denying their humanity.

[01:22:51] Nathaniel when he came, he was there as the New York Foundation, but he was also involved with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, people that know about organizing, know it when they see it.

[01:23:16] Being welcoming meant we weren't filtering people out of a general membership meeting. Sometimes, they would be amazing, and sometimes it would just be a shit show.

[01:24:42] Our membership meetings could be like that, some but people do have those problems but we aren't going to replicate the system or society and shun them.

[01:25:28] When you're small, people get to know each other, so if someone is not doing well, they don’t have to do it right in front of me for me to know. I made a commitment to Picture the Homeless, which meant a commitment to you, a commitment to Emily, a commitment to Jean.

[01:26:51] In the first meeting at CHARAS, the thing about Lewis, he was kind, and you were powerful in the way that you were talking about what was wrong. I was organized by Frances Goldin and Valerio Orselli. My daughter was three days old. She [Frances] was telling me to come to a meeting...

[01:28:29] I didn’t know what organizing meant. All I knew was I was freezing in my apartment, and I had a baby and here’s somebody that cared enough about me to come to my house and tell me, "You need to come to the office."

[01:29:03] It was a political commitment because I believe that Picture the Homeless and homeless groups that are independent and strong and clear, need to exist, to lead us out of this housing movement mess that we're in.

[01:29:52] Challenges in the early days, including the fact that I was the only white person generally in the organization, if you didn’t show up for something then I would have to carry it and we were both the staff but there was this wack power dynamic because we live in a racist society.

[01:32:05] I didn’t want to be controlling the money. I didn’t want any of that! Speaking in public wasn’t my role, you know? Picture the Homeless was for homeless people to speak, and that's more powerful than for me to do that.

[01:32:46] If we could get Emily early enough, she'd be in the office. I truly loved her, she saw injustice and she knew about organizing because she was organizing for non-traditional trades for women.

[01:34:27] I remember Emily walking me to the subway some days, we'd hug, and we’d both have tears in our eyes, even if things were hard with you, Emily was there, and Jean was there, and John Jones was there, things were growing and blossoming. So, it was never just hard. It was also beautiful.

[01:35:43] If we're really going to be dealing with people, we can't create an organization that's easy for us, and expect them to fit into it. So, there's going to be some stuff, and we got to be ready, and we learn from it. I don’t ever remember saying, "Fuck this, I'm not doing that anymore."

[01:36:35] [Anthony giving background] I remember one time, John Rhodes and me were sitting outside and you came out and you were like, "Well, fuck this. Fuck you!" Because we were doing a lot of shit that was not on the level too, with receipts and manipulation, and shit.

[01:37:20] [Anthony giving background] But you were able to still see the vision and hold to the vision, I remember telling you "I feel like I'm going to make it Lynn, I feel stronger." And that's when I failed miserably in my own perspective. I remember the tears in your eyes that morning when the organization thought somebody broke into your office.

[01:38:29] Stuff had been going on for a while, and we had a steering committee, it was a weird dynamic. I was homeless a long time ago, but I wasn't homeless then, if it's homeless led, I don’t want to be controlling everything! Then add the racial dynamic and there weren't many women.

[01:39:34] When there were problems that they thought Picture the Homeless was creating in the building, they would talk to me—not you. And I was like, “No, I don’t want to be that person." You would borrow money and pay it back when you got paid. We would talk about it, but we would end up arguing because we weren’t really talking about what was happening. We were talking about the symptom of what was happening.

[01:40:41] I was holding money for you here, and you came and got it, you didn’t look good. I was mad because I love you, plus I was like, "Oh shit! Now, I'm going to have to it. If Anthony falls apart, I’ve got to do all this…" I didn’t want to do all of it, and I was afraid that I couldn’t.

[01:41:20] We had gotten the Union Square Award, Judson told us we had to move, we were still at Judson, and had to pack, there was a lot of stress, I remember saying, "Anthony, just hang on until we move because I can't do this." And you were like, "Yes, I'm all right! Anthony is all right!" We weren’t really communicating.

[01:42:15] Jean and I were doing outreach that Monday morning in Washington Square Park and this cop was telling us that she had to arrest homeless people because if she didn’t, she would get an assignment, to another precinct, or another shift and she was like, "Hey, I got to live."

[01:42:51] We go in the church, the wooden cabinet was all smashed, the petty cashbox that's all smashed. I never tell this story! If you hadn’t asked me, I wouldn’t tell it. Both of us were almost crying or maybe we were crying.

[01:43:37] The steering committee knew, and took your keys away, they wanted you to go into treatment, and you were like, "No! I'm not doing that!" A set of keys means you can get out and have a quiet place, and there's a bathroom, keys mean a lot.

[01:44:27] That was heavy, it was an organization, not just you and me, we had what we said we wanted, homeless folks in positions within the organization making decisions and we worked for them.

[01:45:21] I couldn’t not be a part of that. I felt like if I had left, then Picture the Homeless would not exist, after a while. So, if you left, I had to stay. Lewis was gone, and if you were gone, I had to stay because if I also left, who would hold it together? Now, I could leave Picture the Homeless.

[01:45:58] I could have left sooner maybe, it took a while for Picture the Homeless to be sustainable in terms of leadership, and creating a space in the movement, at first it wasn't like that.

[01:46:40] [Anthony on background] I think when people hear about this oral [history] project they need to know everything, and they need to know the good and the bad, and they need to understand the success that came out of the good and the bad. Eighteen years is a long time for an organization to be self-sustaining as a grassroots-organizing group!

[01:47:21] [Anthony on background] I remember seeing that room in CHARAS, eighty-something homeless folks, voting for me and Joe Capestany to become the co-chairs of the consumer advisory committee.

[01:47:43] [Anthony on background] You put a lot of education to what's happening. The whole struggle of homelessness—with the system, and the struggle with people, and people making decisions and deciding on who deserves a house and who doesn’t, it's amazing the people and the expertise from the homeless folks.

[01:48:51] One of the things that I loved about Picture the Homeless was the welcoming, which meant knowledge was passed, in meetings and when people were sitting around reading the newspaper, or having a cigarette break, or standing outside, knowledge is shared.

[01:49:29] Sometimes, it looked like a beauty salon, everybody getting their hair braided, people soaking their feet, because they didn’t have a private space. People having sex in the office, we had to be like, "Uh, no."

[01:50:03] Stuff happening alongside this very deep political analysis, and people being supported, "Hey! You just said all this here. Now, you need to go say that in a press conference." People built community in the space, people could push each other.

Lewis: [01:50:58] We wanted to go to San Francisco with our baddest-ass people, and Emily was one of them. We didn’t tell her she had to go to detox, but she was like, "Well, if I'm going to do this, I got to have myself together."

[01:52:30] It's not because we were a treatment program, but we understood where she was at. We understood where she was at politically and how powerful she was, and we understood where she was at with her challenges, and what we could do to help her overcome those. All of that did not happen in a meeting.

[01:53:12] Getting Emily to the meeting with Linda Gibbs, the Commissioner of Department of Homeless Services, when Bloomberg had that “Seven Deadly Sins and the New War on Public Pests” and we had a press conference.

[01:54:25] Jeremiah Smith, whose passed away, he's quoted in the press release. Emily would get in someone's face! Even though she was like, "They need to talk to homeless people." When you would say, "Emily, you need to be there." "Oh, I don't know…"

[01:55:07] We got a meeting with Linda Gibbs, because they didn’t have housing vouchers, and we had found out they could use FEMA [TANF not FEMA] money for housing vouchers, and they were doing it in Colorado.

[01:55:58] Emily looked terrible, she jumped in the sink, and was washing, you and Jean were banging on the door with the coffee, and I was like, "No, you can't come in. Emily's taking a bath."
 
[01:57:13] Jean had a lot of empathy for her, she's walking real slow with a bad hangover, by the time we got there Emily was in warrior mode, and she sat in the empty chair where we knew Linda Gibbs was going to sit, and she scooted her chair over closer to it.

[01:58:20] Emily was like, "You need to come out on the street with me. You need to stay in a shelter." And she was like, "Well, I have children…” And Emily was like, "Well, bring your children. We’ve got children." We told her they could use TANF for housing vouchers, and that's where the HSP [Housing Stability Plus] program came from.

[01:59:13] I have a copy of that letter because they didn’t know they could use welfare money for housing vouchers. The problem with that though is you have to be on welfare to get it so then people that have jobs, don’t get a housing voucher, it was a wack program.

[01:59:52] She learned some things from us, and we learned some things from that, if we're going to have a big meeting like that then we have to make sure people are going to be okay for the meeting, so that we don’t have to go through all that drama.

[02:01:09] Anthony mentions people breaking into the refrigerators in conferences, because they need to know this, when they're organizing, that these things are going to happen. Just because something is a stereotype doesn't mean it's never true.

[02:02:12] I was talking to a friend of mine who's an organizer with another group and they hired one of their members, and paid them, and then the person changed the check. They were devastated.

[02:02:46] Picture the Homeless is eighteen years old. I was there seventeen years, but the number of incidences that I would say, were bad, I could probably count on one hand, which I think is amazing.

[02:03:53] I feel like there are people who would do perhaps grimy things that just said, "You know what, I'm not going to do that here." There was a level of respect.

[02:04:36] There was a big speaking engagement, we were asked to speak, but our speaker showed up shit-faced drunk, at a big church in Harlem, it took a long time for Picture the Homeless to create a space.

[02:06:03] This person shows up shit-faced drunk, stands up in front of this whole church, and started speaking about Attica with snot running all down their face, I just wanted to crawl out of that church.

[02:06:45] Then the person they came with said, "You—no, no bitch is going to tell us what to do!" Then the person didn’t come back for two weeks to the office and then came in all like, "Oh, okay, I fucked up…" Everybody was just like, "You made us look bad."

[02:07:40] "Look, if we don’t want people to treat us like a stereotype, we can't be a stereotype." It was a lot of, “You don’t have to be perfect, but when you're representing the organization, you have to be this way.”

[02:08:18] When we did the survey project, it was the same thing. There was this kind of enforcing of behavior that people thought was worthy of the organization, so people needed to be prepared. We weren't policing people. It was more like, "Come on, it's common sense…"
 
[02:09:10] Jean did a lot in terms of supporting other people to be prepared, when they went to speak in public. Jean doesn’t try to hold on to all the leadership by himself.

[02:10:11] There was stuff stolen from the office. I don’t think that was the majority of people, and I don’t believe it's because they're homeless, there are people that have homes that steal, heads of corporations that steal millions of dollars.

[02:10:57] We went and stayed in San Francisco for a week together, I had the petty cash on me. I never worried that Emily was my roommate. Emily is not a thief.

[02:11:39] I went not that long ago to San Francisco with two members, and one person has substance issues, and it was challenging. But we didn’t exclude the person and we didn’t gossip about it, with the rest of the group.

[02:12:19] It's good that we show who we are, but not to the extent of embarrassment. It's important for other groups and people that's interested in organizing homeless people to see that, even with the issues, we still can do it.

[02:13:26] Somebody's street homeless, and they may not have an opportunity to change their clothes but the majority of street homeless folks, find ways to keep themselves clean, it's pretty incredible.

[02:14:39] It's not like homeless folks need someone to tell them, "If you're going to a meeting with the commissioner blah-blah, you need to be dressed well." People know that. That's often why they might not want to, something I love about Nikita is he will say to civil rights folks, "Hey, you want to spend the night in the office, and I'll get you a change of clothes?"

[02:15:21] For us to go to the meeting with the Inspector Generation of the NYPD, Nikita had an iron and an ironing board in the office. He had gotten an outfit for Floyd Parks, and ironed his clothes for him. And Floyd did not need to have ironed clothes on to know what he knows. But he did need that iron and those clothes to feel up to going, to sharing what he knows.

[02:16:29] If we're talking to people that want to organize homeless folks, you have to take all this into consideration. And don’t wait for someone to ask, it lets that person know that you know what they're going through.

[02:17:14] I was actually worried when you asked me the first time, "Would you be interested in interviewing me?" I think I was ready. And I was ready for this, and I think it's going to be really, really good.

[02:17:54] I did want to get the history of where you came from, and I think we got that. Like, where did Lynn come from? She didn’t just pop up on the planet, right? Like she wasn't “Beam me up, Scotty” or “Beam me down, Scotty.” So, it's great to hear your experience, your background.

[02:18:41] It's good for people to really see how poor people in this country are treated. I had been poor, I was never in that situation, even if you say, "Oh, yeah, I had this similar experience." But you haven't had that.

[02:19:23] Even though there were some things that happened at Picture the Homeless that were destructive, members were very protective of the organization. that's also one reason why we didn’t have as many issues.

[02:20:29] I went on vacation one time. We had two staff, Damaris and myself and she quit with no notice. I already bought tickets to go to Florida because my children would go with their father during school vacations.

[02:21:14] John Jones was sleeping at Central Park, and coming every day, running the front desk. Even if he doesn’t come Picture the Homeless anymore, that doesn't take away from what he contributed. And when you said to me that we've always had space for you, it's because nobody could take away that you are the co-founder and everything else you also did, no one can take away from me what I've done.

[02:22:00] I honor John Jones for this. I was just beside myself; we would keep the office open on the holidays, we had mostly street homeless members. I said to him, "Can I leave you the keys, and money? You know, the meetings will still happen, and you deal with the food, and just keep all the receipts?" I gave him four-hundred dollars and the keys to the office, when I came back he had all the receipts with dates, he had change, they held the office down. There was no staff.

[02:24:03] It doesn’t mean that some people weren't doing some extracurricular whatever, but there was this vibe of we're not going crazy here because we don’t want to lose this. If the membership needs staff to police them, you're not organizing.

[02:24:59] How can we fight for rights out there and not defend the thing that's going to win us those rights? We have to believe in the group that we're part of, or we're not going to have the passion to go out there and fight, because stuff is going to get hard. You have to create the conditions by which people can show the leadership that they already have. Because people have to believe in you, and it.