 Hi, welcome to CTN member highlights. I'm Leslie McVane, and I'm here today with member WMPG in the studio with Jeremy Alderson. Hi, Jeremy. Hi, pleased to be talking to you. Thank you. Well, Jeremy's the coordinator of the homeless marathon, the director. No, no, no, director. My title is far more exalted. I'm the director. Well, that sounds. You just don't wear a ring so you don't have to kiss it. Now, Jeremy, you've been doing this for 19 years. Were you the brains behind this event? Well, I really wouldn't claim to be the brains, because it really has to, depends on whether you think it's a smart thing to do or not, you know? I mean, I've been hitting myself in the head with a hammer for so long. I don't know what's left up there. But the short answer is yes. So why did you start doing this? You know, it was never my intention to do this more than once. I had been homeless. I had a very mild form of homelessness, but I spent a year couchsurfing back in the early 80s. It's not something you forget. That was traumatic in itself. And of course, if you're out on the streets or something, it's much, much worse. And I was doing a radio show on W E O S in Geneva, New York. And during that show, I was, for years, I was covering homeless issues. And then my station manager said that there was extra time. I could, if I wanted to do a longer broadcast, I could. And I just thought I would spend the time on something I really cared about. I practically, nobody heard the first broadcast. Honestly, it stank. I didn't think it was any good at all. I mean, I have never even listened to it again because I got, oh, that was embarrassing. But the funny thing was people really liked it. People really were supportive. And it's a concept, it turns out, that everybody understood. You're gonna go out and you're gonna talk to homeless people and be out in the cold, which we were at that time, and dramatize their plight and let their voices be heard. Everybody was behind that, no matter how badly I did it. But after that first one, I got the idea, okay, I'll do it again. And I would like to say we've done a much better job ever since, but we got our feet wet that first time. Now, you traveled to different parts of the country to broadcast this. How do you choose those cities? It's no one way. It's a combination of factors, just like anything else. Of course, we wanna have a radio affiliate there that we can work with. We want to have access to homeless people there. So if the place is in the middle of nowhere, we have no one to talk to. And we would like to also be someplace where we can highlight some aspect of what's going on with homeless people, where there's some issue to look at. So you put all that in the hopper and you kind of sift through and you just kind of make a decision. It's not, there's no magic to it. Now, you've been working with Jessica for a number of years here at WMPG. And is this the first time you've chosen Portland as a city to broadcast from? No, actually, we were originating from Portland in 2003. This is the first time we've ever been back in the same city twice. But we're doing something different this year. Usually what we do, our standard format, which is to broadcast, first of all, for 14 hours, which we're not doing this time, only four. And we put our booth, we put a broadcast booth out on the street someplace where there are homeless people. We either close off a street where homeless people might be or we're outside of a shelter or wherever we would be. We choose different kinds of locations. And then we know that the homeless people are there and they talk to us and we spend the night freezing depending on where we are. But this year, we're in the studio and we'll have homeless people in the studio. But most of the homeless content will come from correspondence around the country in Phoenix, in South Dakota, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, all over the place. So are there examples of mistreatment at the hands of the authorities that you can cite? Yes, all the time. Whether it's a public building and somebody's just trying to fit someplace, it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter if you're a little kid sitting with your mom because you can't find a place at any shelter in Philly. They will chase you out of there. So over these 19 years, what have you seen change as far as the questions or the concerns of the people who are living on the street? I'm not sure their concerns have changed at all. Their concerns are very immediate. They're trying to survive. But our concerns as a society or my concerns for this society have really changed a great deal. People ask me, what have we accomplished? And the answer I always give is that the combined efforts of all the homeless advocates in the country for 30 years have just seen things get worse and worse. We're moving backwards. And something that people really don't understand at all in this country is that the de facto homelessness policy of the United States today is to assault homeless people and destroy them if they can. Homeless campments are rousted, torn up, the belongings of homeless people are thrown away so that people will lose if you got nothing and you lose your tent or your sleeping bag or worse your ID so that you can't get if you have a veterans check or a social security disability check, you can't get it or you lose your medication, things that can take months to regain. And this is what now city after city is doing. And this cannot be an accident because they all get their money from HUD. I'm not telling, saying that HUD tells them to do this, but HUD has the power to say, we don't like the way you're acting. And HUD does not do anything. After years and years of advocates telling HUD, you can't let this keep going on. HUD finally relented and they have a 200 point system where they evaluate how cities get money for their various homeless programs of which there are many with acronyms and so forth, but housing or whatever it is, rapid rehousing or supportive housing and so forth. And out of that 200 point scale, the question of criminalization, the question of if you do harm to homeless people so that you shorten their life spans, that gets two points. That's 1% of the total, 1%. Now if you go and you kill somebody and you go to a judge, that's not 1% of your sentence, that's the thing. And no one should be under any illusions when you take away the means of sustenance from a homeless person, you are very likely dramatically shortening their lifespan. You are putting them at severe risk and HUD simply doesn't care. The federal government doesn't care. And after pressure from advocates, all they've done is wink at it. This should not be going on. It's a disgrace. Taking away everything, the very little they have to hold on to. Very little. You've also, they throw away like your last picture of your dead mother or something. They just throw, they don't care. They treat homeless people like they're not human beings. And it's heartbreaking, it's shameful. And I think that the reason, a lot of the reason it goes on is that most Americans just don't understand this is how it really is. I think you're right. Well, we're now in the disc library at WMPG with Carolyn Sylveas. Hi, Carolyn. Hi. Now, you just told me you were formerly homeless. Yes, for a period of 10 months, which seemed like an eternity. Well, and tell me what that was like and how did that come about? Well, it came about through a misunderstanding. It was just a series of a mess. And ended up, when I first became homeless, my daughters took me in, alternating between their apartments and whatever, either between their homes, actually. And, but both of them were very overcrowded, okay? I neither of them really had room for me. Mother-in-law in the house is never a good idea, but the main problem was that every time I would look for an apartment and I would say, I'm homeless, they say, oh, you're not homeless, you're living with your daughters. Services were completely unavailable as long as I was with them. So we sat down, the three of us had a nice long talk and they said, mom, you're not gonna get anywhere until you're actually physically in a shelter and I agreed with that. And so after Easter, they brought me to Florence House shelter. And that was a little scary because I had never been homeless before. I had no idea what to expect. Fortunately, I fell in with some of the most wonderful people, Florence House is a spectacular shelter. The food is fabulous. The people, I was in with a bunch of people all on the same boat with me. We all understood each other. The other residents tried to be as kind as possible. It was really, it was an experience and I learned such a great deal about homelessness that I never knew before. And Florence House is for women only, right? For women only, yes. So that was a little bit easier to accept. Yes, yes, yes, it was. The other shelters that are co-ed are scarier, much more dangerous Florence House is able to protect its clients and it's a great deal of privacy kind of thing that they give you from the outside world. And being with other women in the same situation, women kind of bond with each other in a lovely way. Sometimes, yes, it wasn't a great deal of that. It was, when you put 40 women in one room, okay, there are gonna be fights and arguments and whatever and that's always something you have to deal with. But on the whole, these ladies were wonderful to me and the staff is spectacular. They went bent over backwards to help me in any way they could. So what did you have to do in order to get housing eventually? Well, I applied everywhere. But the housing situation in Portland is at the stage where the demand is so great that you go on waiting lists. And waiting lists and waiting lists. And they notify you when you're fifth on the list that could mean you've still got six months to go, you know. It's very difficult. Is it up to you as the person waiting to keep checking back? Absolutely, but the staff there will also help you with that. So they are very good. So they make sure you don't get forgotten. Mm-hmm. One of the things that really astounded me when I got to Florence House was the number of elderly people there. Homelessness affects the elderly as much as it does the young. There were, oh, God, at least a third of the population of the shelter was over 55. There were two ladies there at Florence House at the time that I was there. I think they're still there, who were over 85. This is not the way to spend your senior years. Over the years, you've met a lot of homeless people all over the country. Has there ever been a movement in any of the cities or collectively across the country to create their own shows on public access, radio or TV, to have an ongoing forum for discussion of what they're dealing with and what their needs are and what people are doing to help them or to work against them? Yes, there have been. And I think, actually, this is one of the very few things that have come that I can point to. When you do radio or television, you don't know who's listening. You may have inspired someone and you hope it don't bear fruit. But in terms of the tangible results, every now and then, some radio station or somebody starts a show where they deal with homeless issues because we kind of show them, well, you can actually talk to homeless people. It's not a problem. They're accessible and so forth. And there have been these kinds of ever. It's also independent of us. And there are people who are organizing. There's homeless rights organizations all over the country. But that said, it's not so much. It's kind of few and far between. I'm now with Jessica Lockhart, the program director at WMPG. Hi, Jessica. Hi, Leslie. How are you? I'm fine. I'm really glad to be here. Now, the first thing I did when we were setting up here was try to move this camera. And everyone said, don't touch it. Why is that? So we are doing a radio broadcast. But we are also doing a video, a live video feed. USM is providing the cameras. And we're going to be, you can see this radio broadcast if you go to YouTube. So it's the 19th annual homelessness marathon. We've been doing this 19 years. And today is the 19th. So it's pretty cool. That's really cool. So 19 years. And you've been involved the whole time? I've been involved for about 10 years plus. Jeremy Alderson started this. And here at WMPG, we said this is unbelievable about 10 years ago, 13 years ago. And we started carrying it. And the marathon goes to different cities. So we're so excited it's here in Portland this year. It's huge that it's here. I was confused by that. Because I thought you were just doing a segment here. Right. We've always broadcast the marathon over all of these years. But that's maybe it was over in Cincinnati. Maybe it was in California. And we were just taking their signal. But now we're sending the signal to all the radio stations around the country. And you've actually traveled to some of these cities. Do you travel every year? Yes. I've been co-producing this program because I believe in it so much. And with my position here at WMPG, I felt I could reach out to other program directors to say, hey, why don't you air this program like we're airing it? So when you do this every year, what's the feedback from your audience? Well, the feedback. We get lots of calls during the show. And it's great when we hear from people from Maine that we know our listeners are listening. Feedback, I think, is our mission is to give voice to people who don't get a voice on regular radio. And a lot of people say that they appreciate that we're airing this once a year special. Yeah, it gives people a little insight as to what the homeless people in their neighborhoods are dealing with. Yep, it's a tough situation. We love that we get a chance to actually talk to homeless people, hear their stories. And it's going to be exciting tonight because we're going to be asking them about, what do they think about President-elect Trump? Tomorrow, we're broadcasting this the day before the inauguration, so live. And so it's going to be an exciting night. And to let them have a voice about what their concerns are regarding the new administration. I think it's wonderful. Right, so we're happy. We're just really happy that we've got a chance to do this. It's a big deal here for WMPG. Well, it's a big deal for us to be here. Thank you so much. You're welcome, thanks. You mentioned that over the last 19 years that you've been doing this, that things are getting worse, not better. Has there been a direct sort of scale line going up to being worse? Or has it been up and down, depending on the year or the administration? Because you've been very. No, I would say it's a pretty one-way street. And one of the reasons we do this show is that a lot of what you hear about homelessness is just disinformation. You could be living, listening to the Ministry of Truth in the Soviet Union. The HUD does a point in time count every year where they show how many homeless people, allegedly, there are. You might as well believe in unicorns if you believe in that count. It is completely fake. Maybe the people who do it and the volunteers are well-intentioned. But there's a couple of reasons why it's not good. And yet, it's creating an impression among people that maybe the numbers are going down. First of all, because of all the attacks on homeless people, they hide. Somebody from authority comes around looking for, where are you? So I can count you. They don't want to be found a lot of them. But the other reason why you know it's not right is that there's a second homeless count that's being conducted by the Department of Education. They have somewhat different criterion, a criteria which is that they consider people who are doubled up in the same apartment, like you've lost your housing and you moved in with your family. They consider those people homeless. And in point of fact, a percentage of the people who double up will eventually just be out on the streets. And a percentage will regain their housing. But they're all in a precarious situation. Why the Education Department cares is that even if they eventually regain housing, they tend to move first to this relative and that relative because people are not set up to take in so many people. And that interrupts education. Well, the homeless count done by the Department of Education of homeless children is skyrocketing. It's impossible for that count to be skyrocketing while the HUD count is going down. And in the Department of Education, they see the kids on a daily basis. So they actually know. They're not dealing with people who are hiding from the man. They're really seeing it. So the HUD count is just plain phony. And that's one of the ways that we assure the public that there's nothing to worry about. And this goes back, if you go back to Ronald Reagan, I wrote my first article on homelessness back in the Reagan administration. And he was telling people, oh, it's the problem is the homeless people don't know where the shelter is. There's plenty of shelter. There's not enough shelter anywhere. And even if I thought shelters were any good, it's just never been true. And then there's been a big move to make you think all the homeless people are mentally ill. And it's because they got out of mental institutions and don't take their medication or their own drugs. This is also not true. Hi, I'm in the front office now at WMPG with the broadcast in the background and the telephone ringing and people coming and going. And I'm here with the advocacy outreach person from Preble Street, Thomas Potosik. Hi, Thomas. Hi, good to meet you. It's good to meet you, too, because your job is really important. I like to think so. Can you explain to the audience exactly what you do and how you do it? Yeah, for the most part, I run a speakers bureau at Preble Street where we're really trying to get people who have personal experience of those struggles, be it homelessness or poverty, hunger. And we want to help them find their voice and be able to use their voice in Augusta when there are bills that we either want to support or try and fight against, as is often the case, unfortunately. And just get them comfortable with their story and just how important it is and how impactful it is and how necessary it is. Yeah, I think when people hear other people's stories, it just makes such an impact on them. Yeah, the numbers are useful, too. I mean, those especially at the legislative level, I mean, there are some people that kind of need to see that. But the numbers don't have a soul. And they don't tell really the inside and the depth of the story. And so any person that has that personal experience can speak from that personal experience. And it can be very, very impactful. And it gives us all a face to remember. It's fascinating. And people do need to know what's going on. And I think this marathon is a great way to go about it. We're looking forward to hearing more as we go along. And really nice to meet you. And thank you for doing this here in Portland. Well, thank you so much. And if I may leave your viewers with one last thought when you hear the term homeless people, remember, the operative word is people. Thank you. Thank you.