Northwestern University’s Dance Marathon has selected a national homeless organization serving youth as their beneficiary for DM 2010.

The organization, StandUp For Kids, has various programs aimed at preventing child homelessness and helping children who are already homeless. Their Don’t Run Away program puts high school and college students in elementary and middle school classrooms to teach kids how to “remove themselves from abusive situations” without running away from home, according to their website.

They also run a street outreach program to find homeless and at-risk youth as well as outreach centers and transitional housing for youth they find that need their help.

In its 36-year history, DM has almost always chosen to support medical causes and organizations. This will only be their second time supporting a social cause.

StandUp for Kids is based in San Diego, but they have locations in 29 states plus Washington D.C. and Tijuana, Mexico. They have an office in Chicago and are beginning a program in Peoria.

Last year, DM raised more than $575,000 for its primary beneficiary, Project Kindle, which works with kids and families infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.

Check out the official DM beneficiary announcement video.

In the style of Mark Horvath’s Invisible People.tv is D-Nice’s True Hip Hop  video series on Vimeo. D-Nice has about a dozen ten-minute interviews with people he feels represent true hip hop, as opposed to some more famous and mainstream artists. Among these interviews is a homeless emcee in Brooklyn who goes by Sawed Off. His interview happens on the street near the river where he hangs out and is as much about his story of homelessness as it is about his vision of the world of hip hop.

The video is visually intriguing and Sawed Off is a fascinating and honest character. I highly recommend it. Check it out below and check out D-Nice’s Vimeo page for more True Hip Hop videos.

True Hip-Hop Stories: Homeless Emcee from D-Nice on Vimeo.

(via Epic Fu)

Gov. Quinn commits to affordable housing – Chicago Coalition for the Homeless
Gov. Quinn gave a speech last Wednesday about the importance of affordable housing, an issue he supported before becoming governor. He asked citizens to contact their representatives to voice their support for affordable housing in both Chicago and Illinois.

Plan to Charge Working Homeless Draws Fire, Again – The New York Times
As the Chicago Housing Authority implements its work requirement in some public housing developments, New York City has started charging rent for the working homeless living in their shelters.  The rent is being charged under a never-enforced 1997 law where rent can be charged up to 50 percent of someone’s income, which seems high. Not paying rent could result in eviction from the shelter. The new enforcement has drawn lots of criticism.

Marines volunteer at homeless shelter during Maine Week – Cornerstone Community Outreach
Marine Week included a wide variety of activities in Chicago from helicopter raids of Arlington park to basically a human elevator at the Sylvia Center in Uptown. The 24 Marines hauled 200 bags up six flights of stairs to help the shelter reorganize and clean out their basement. More information is available from the official Marine story on the volunteer day.

DeNeen L. Brown of The Washington Post had a long article entitled “Poor? Pay Up.” in Monday’s edition explaining the huge costs that the poor have to pay just because they are poor.

Poverty 101: We’ll start with the basics.

Like food: You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 — $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

The problem of access to food is especially relevant to the poor on the South Side of Chicago where whole sections of the city are without a large supermarket or any store to buy fresh produce. Instead corner food and liquor stores dot most blocks. Expensive food from grocery stores also encourages eating at unhealthy fast food restaurants. The value menu really is a considerable value when put next to corner store prices. Outside of the immediate higher costs of fast food and corner store food is the long term health effects that come from a poor diet. Obesity, diabetes and high cholesterol are all problems that can stem from a poor diet and can later cause huge medical costs.

Brown goes on to give examples of how time consuming doing laundry is when it isn’t available in your home or apartment building and the exorbitant fees that the poor pay to use check cashing storefronts in place of banks. The neon signs and security cameras of these stores are a fixture in many poor Chicago neighborhoods.

I wrote about some of the practical difficulties of being both poor and homeless when I profiled Andrew Green, a homeless teen in Uptown. He made money by washing the windows of a check cashing storefront in a strip mall on the corner of Lawrence Ave. and Sheridan Rd. What wasn’t in the story was that he also faced some of the high fees for items at corner stores. He spent much of his day at the SL Pantry, a corner store like the ones Brown mentions in her story. Green is a constant smoker and when he gathered up enough money he would buy a single cigarette from the SL pantry for $.50, far more than he would pay per cigarette if he bought a pack.

Many corner stores break down packages of items to be sold individually for much higher prices, but it isn’t necessarily a scheme to make more money off their customers. Many poor customers can’t afford to buy a whole package of diapers so they buy just the one they need, even if it is much more expensive than if they bought in bulk.

Brown also makes a good point that these corner and convenience stores aren’t necessarily trying to rip off customers.

Many of these stores charge more because the cost of doing business in some neighborhoods is higher. “First, they are probably paying more on goods because they don’t get the low wholesale price that bigger stores get,” says Bradley R. Schiller, a professor emeritus at American University and the author of “The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination.”

“The real estate is higher. The fact that volume is low means fewer sales per worker. They make fewer dollars of revenue per square foot of space. They don’t end up making more money. Every corner grocery store wishes they had profits their customers think they have.”

This points out again that things are generally more complicated than they seem when it comes to poverty. Just because a store charges a lot doesn’t mean they are making a lot of money. Just because someone gets a job doesn’t mean they are on their way out of poverty and just because someone is homeless doesn’t mean they are choosing homelessness or are too lazy to get off the street. There are numerous practical hurdles to cover and they are difficult to understand unless you have experienced them.

I recommend you go read the whole article at The Washington Post site.

The economic downturn has spawned a number of films examining poverty in America. This week the trailers for two upcoming films on the same subject were released.

Life is Hot in Cracktown is a film about the many ways that crack-cocaine has harmed whole neighborhoods. The movie tells the story of a prostitute, a rookie cop and a drug dealer among many narratives. Each is based off a short story from director/writer Buddy Giovinazzo’s 1993 book of the same name.

You can also see an interview with director and writer Buddy Giovinazzo where he introduces the film. The video is grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but if you want to know more about the motivation for the film, you can watch him pace around what looks like a kitchen and talk about his movie.

The other movie, Children of Invention, is the story of a family who loses their home to foreclosure and is forced to squat in an unfinished apartment as the parents search desperately for any kind of job. After their mother doesn’t return home from work one night, the children are forced to fend for themselves.

CHILDREN OF INVENTION HD Trailer #1 from Children of Invention on Vimeo.

Are you excited for either of these movies?