Voices of Hope

Kieara Keys is a Voice of Hope.   A Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Scholarship winner, Kieara has experienced homelessness throughout her young life.  Despite her and her family's struggled with poverty, she preserved.  In Fall 2007, she began her freshman year at Joliet Junior College in Illinois.  

Johnnie Lee Savory epitomizes the struggle for justice and the power of hope.  In 1976, Johhnie was fourteen and living in Peoria, Illinois, when he became a victim of the criminal justice system.  Convicted for a double homicide he did not commit, Johnnie was sentenced to fifty to one-hundred years in prison.  With the help of some amazing people and organizations, such as the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, Johnnie won his right to parole on December 19, 2006.

While he continues to fight for the release of DNA evidence that can definitively prove his innocence, Johnnie has also become a leader at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.  Using his own experience to empower others, Johhnie helps advocates for the rights of ex-offenders, many of whom suffer from homelessness.

To learn more about Johnnie’s story, and how you can help him fight to clear his name, please visit his blog at http://justiceforsavory.blogspot.com.

 

Bryan Riddle embodies perseverance in the face of tragedy. As a child, Bryan was in the foster care system. Though his foster mother adopted him and loved him deeply, Bryan was left homelessness when she died during his senior year of high school. In spite of these struggles and traumas, Bryan graduated from Christian Fenger Academy in Chicago, won a Golden Apple Scholarship, and received one of the 2007 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Scholarship Awards. This fall, Bryan will be a freshman at Northern Illinois University, where he will he prepare for his career as a future teacher.

In this episode of Word on the Street, Wayne turns the commonplace idea that job programs, economic growth, and care systems are the ways to end homelessness on its head. Wayne argues instead that these solutions are really part of the reason why homelessness is so entrenched in our society.

In this episode of Word on the Street, Wayne talks about the meaning of opportunity as he reflects on an Action Forum he attended which was sponsored by the From Poverty to Opportunity Campaign: Realizing Human Rights in Illinois. To learn more about this Campaign, please go to www.povertytoopportunity.blogspot.com.

This is the inaugural pod column of The Word on the Street, by Chicago Coalition for the Homeless organizer, Wayne Richard. In this week’s column, Wayne talks about the experience of homelessness, the false assumptions that prevent many of us from seeing people who experience homelessness as full human beings, and what we can do to fight not only our society’s systemic lack of resources in terms of living wage jobs, affordable housing, and adequate healthcare, but also the lack of love we as a community have for people suffering from extreme poverty.

In this episode of Voices of Hope, John Maki interviews Kianca Fincher, one of the 2007 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless College Scholarship Recepients. Ms. Fincher discusses her experiences of being homeless in high school.