Voices of Hope

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.