You don’t know me but reading my blog gives you some insight into who I am right now. Who I was before remains a mystery at least for a little while. My lives are starting to collide with old friends discovering my blog and new friends discovering my life. On my blog I reveal bits and pieces at a time but it is focused on my life now, not what came before, so I will share a few things that came before so that you can learn a bit about me, the person, not just the blogger.
- In 2011, I lost my house to foreclosure and was featured on Tavis Smiley as part of the Poverty Tour. Watch the Episode.
- My community organizing work is featured in several books including Social Problems: A Service Learning Approach and A New and Unsettling Force: Reigniting Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign
- Prior to my recent battle with anxiety and agoraphobia, I traveled all over the United States talking about the issues faced by families living in poverty, living in Appalachia, and living on minimum wage. I have met with Kennedys and Rockefellers as well as many political leaders.
- I am considered by many as an expert in the field of rural organizing around poverty issues. (I am currently working on a book on the subject)
- I got extremely burnt out mentally, physically, and spiritually in 2014 and had to walk away from the organizing work, so I started a blog.
Now you know a little about what came before. Yes, I miss it, the organizing work, but right now I am focussing on what makes me happy and that is writing.
Check out my About Me page to learn a little more.
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That is so amazing to hear about all the things you’ve done and the places you’ve traveled to! I’m glad you listened to yourself and gave yourself the time to step away from all the organizing work so that you could recharge!
Best of luck to you on your book! :]
Thank you.
WOW! You’re sort of a celebrity for the lower class people. I have heard on the news that the middle class percentage is declining based on a family of 4 income. I used a calculator to see if my husband and I were middle class and not surprisingly we are in the 30% lower classed! However we don’t qualify for any state help, yet the income stays the same and everything including food goes up!
I wish you the best with your future endeavors and helping the lower class, poverty level families that need it.
Thank you for sharing with us! Congratulations on everything that you have achieved (which looks like a lot!) and I wish you all the best in the future. I, too, have agoraphobia but have managed to climb over it as a hurdle so I can still occasionally do things I love doing, like going to conventions.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s amazing to see from this how your life has progressed and how you’ve kept moving forward. It’s rather inspiring for me as 2014 was also the year that I also burnt out especially mentally and emotionally. Your post was very insightful .
We never really know what others go thru. Thank you for sharing 🙂
Thank you for visiting my blog. Nice to meet you.