Community Campaign for Housing Now
Nancy Nagler, director
560 W. University Ave.
St. Paul, Minn. 55103
(612) 224-8448

A classic example of the shiny face of poverty in St. Paul, this organization has its offices in the Unidale Shopping Mall, a sparkling one-level facility that looks like any other mall until you look closely and realize that the department store is a thrift shop, the "grocery" is a food shelf, and the storefronts house non-profit agencies. The surrounding streets are an ethnic melange of Vietnamese, Hmong and Hispanic stores and trim, modest homes, but you won't see a scrap of litter, a loiterer or a word of graffiti around.

Nagler, the founder of Housing Now, is a longtime homeless activist with strong ties to the national community of advocates for the homeless; she was a good friend of Mitch Snyder's and keeps close ties with his Community for Creative Non-Violence.

Like CCNV, Housing Now focuses on advocacy and lobbying, with much attention given to events aimed at grabbing media attention and, equally important, catching the attention of good-spirited people in the community and enlisting them as vocal activists.

Reasoning that it is easy for people to ignore nameless, faceless poor people but difficult for them to turn away from a human being with a name and a face, Nagler came up with one of Housing Now's most effective activities: "Justice for All" tours in which middle-class (and richer) residents join in small groups with poor and homeless people for walking tours of the city's low-income areas. Without exception, she said, the people come back in tears, ready to go to work.

The group also has organized "sleep-outs," in which well-off people spend several days living in homeless conditions, without money or food, living in shelters and eating at soup kitchens, not bathing or changing clothes. The events not only serve as intense consciousness-raisers, they also draw a large amount of favorable media. (One reporter, the St. Paul Pioneer-Press' Louis Porter, took part in the entire sleep-out, wrote a wonderful story, and says the event forever changed his attitude about poverty in the Twin Cities.)

Another excellent project, the "Theater Program," joins poor children with artists and performance therapists, encouraging them to work out their feelings about hunger, homelessness and poverty in art. Some of the results, including a play and a song ("I need a home") have drawn considerable attention in the Twin Cities and at the Housing Now march in Washington last year.

There's a "Mentoring Project" in which homeless women are matched with young women from the Junior League (of all things!), sometimes simply to chat but other times to advise and assist the poor women with matters ranging from job-seeking skills to makeup, clothing and hair styles.

And, in another lovely example of using two populations to teach each other, Housing Now brought groups of poor kids to visit a local television station (WCCO-6), where they got to meet the anchors and reporters, see the newsroom, and - just as easy as that - win the hard-hearted news people's hearts.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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