+ Accomplishments
+ Civil Rights
+ Community Land Trusts
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Executive Director
+ Lynn Lewis

Lead Organizer
+ Sam J. Miller

Housing Organizer
+ Adrian Antonio Paling

Office Manager
+ Anika Paris

Leadership Development Coordinator
+ Veronica Tirado

Youth Organizer
+ LaMont Badru

Outreach Maestro
+ Patrick Cooper

Communications
+ Marina Ortiz

HOA Instructors
+ Sojourner Hardeman
+ Zena Murphy

Picture the Homeless
2427 Morris Avenue
Bronx NY 10468
Phone:(646) 314-6423

The Canners' Campaign grew out of our Civil Rights Committee.   The difference between the cost of renting an apartment or a room, and how much money poor folks have in their pockets, is the biggest determining factor in the ever increasing numbers of homeless New Yorkers over the past 30 years.   Many members of Picture the Homeless are subsistence workers: street vendors, day laborers and canners.  Many of them describe how, back in the day, they could rent a room with the income from canning or other subsistence work.  Today, they are squeezed out of even the cheapest end of the housing market. Learn more about the Canners Campaign.

Soon after we moved into our first office space at Judson Memorial Church, and got a phone number and answering machine, we started getting calls from (mostly) moms stranded at the EAU, who had been determined ineligible for shelter, their belonging in garbage bags on the sidewalk, not knowing where to go.  What this means is that workers determined that families requesting shelter “weren't really homeless” and really had somewhere else to go. The fear and outrage in their voices was palpable.  Some of the most critical issues were that families were continuously denied shelter and told to return to unsafe, overcrowded and even abusive conditions, including domestic violence survivors.  Children weren't able to attend school, and conditions inside the EAU itself were filthy, dangerous, and excruciatingly uncomfortable, with the serving of spoiled food commonplace.   The building itself violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.  We held organizing meetings in the corner McDonalds and a nearby park, and one summer, over 200 families decided to walk out and march – saying that they would rather sleep in the street with their children than stay in the EAU.  Their demands included an EAU in every borough, and improved conditions for families seeking emergency shelter.   Learn more about the Emergency Assistance Unit Campaign.

One of our earliest actions was trying to get onto Potters Field to memorialize homeless folks buried there back in 2000.  This is the final resting place of many of our members and their friends and loved ones and homeless and poor folks that we don’t even know, but whose humanity we acknowledge.  As often stated by Picture the Homeless members, it is a prison for the dead whose only crime is being poor.  In August of 2004, Picture the Homeless received the devastating news that one of our organization’s co-founders, Lewis Haggins, who had been missing for months, had been buried in Potter’s Field on Hart Island.   His body lay in the city morgue from December 2003 until February 2004 and during that time, no fingerprints or attempts to identify his body were made, so he was buried as a John Doe.  Learn more about the Potter's Field Campaign.

Since their introduction in 2004, Picture the Homeless has been fighting to fix Bloomberg's flawed rental subsidies for homeless people. In 2007, the Administration bowed to pressure and abandoned the most problematic of these subsidies, "Housing Stability Plus" - only to replace it with another bad program that keeps homeless people in substandard, overpriced apartments. The “Advantage” programs are administered jointly by the city's Human Resources Administration (HRA) and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), leading to bureaucratic ineptitude that constantly subjects subsidy recipients to the risk of eviction. DHS refused to acknowledge the plan's failures, and the Mayor continued to get good press for his homeless policies, so our members decided to prove them wrong. Learn more about the Rental Subsidies Campaign.