A couple months ago, I got an email announcing the formal launch of the website for POOR Magazine’s Race, Poverty, & Media Justice Institute. I’ve been meaning to write about POOR Magazine and why I think they’re so amazing, and I really recommend checking out both of those websites, especially if you live in or around the Bay Area.
I first heard of POOR a few years ago when I joined the organizing committee for Making Money Make Change (MMMC), a national gathering for young, lefty rich people to talk about challenging classism and giving away money. A friend of mine recommended Tiny, a.k.a Lisa Gray-Garcia from POOR as the MMMC keynote that year, but it was too late in the planning and it never panned out. The next year (still on the MMMC organizing committee) I read Tiny’s book Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America – an awesome memoir-style analysis of poverty and oppression – and loved it. I started reading the POOR Magazine website and got really excited about their work.
POOR Magazine is a grassroots arts and media justice indigenous organizing project run by folks who have survived poverty, racism, homelessness, police violence, border fascism, incarceration, etc. They write and publish articles, do speaking engagements, lead workshops and trainings, have a radio show, create community events, and report on and organize around a lot of different issues affecting their communities in the Bay and elsewhere. After reading Criminal of Poverty and lots of articles on the POOR Mag site, I was really hoping they could come to MMMC and share their brilliance there – their analysis about poverty scholarship and social justice funding so desperately needs to be heard by folks with privilege/resources.
Then I went to the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta last summer, attended a couple of POOR Mag workshops, and got even more excited about them. They have an amazing way of movement-building through storytelling and art, and got all the workshop participants to explore things like state repression, economic injustice, and police violence by delving into our own histories and experiences and then creating on-the-spot performance pieces about them. The Social Forum itself was inspiring and demanding in a way that left no time for rest, food, or sleep, and by the time I dragged myself up to the little corner of the convention center where the folks from POOR had set up camp, I was hungry, exhausted, and kind of cranky. By the end of the two workshops, I was on the verge of doing improvisational slam poetry in front of group of total strangers – which is very unlike me, to say the least.
A whole crew of folks from POOR ended up coming to MMMC that year and blowing people’s minds with their awesomeness. They are revolutionary, compassionate geniuses who don’t take any shit and are not afraid to say so. It was great to have them in that space, bringing a challenging and uncompromising analysis about wealth and poverty. If you ever have the chance to go to one of their trainings (or bring one of their trainings to your organization!), see them speak, or support their work, I obviously recommend it. I feel really lucky to have gotten to work with them.