A Marathon Broadcast Sheds Light On The Homeless Issue

Shedding light on growing nationwide problem of the homeless through a marathon broadcast from the Gulf Coast. MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports.

The Homelessness Marathon started in 1998. This year it came to Pass Christian, one of the towns hardest hit by Katrina. Broadcast nationwide on over 120 radio stations for 14 hours straight, the broadcast included testimonies from homeless, conversations with experts nationwide, and call-ins from across the country. The Gulf Coast which is still in recovery mode from the storm seemed the perfect place to hold the broadcast says Homelessness Marathon’s Director Jeremy Weir-Alderson,

“As soon I got here I said this is the place. You know everybody here feels like their story hasn’t been told. There are tremendous struggles here still going on which the nation doesn’t know about. We’re very happy to be able to help the nation understand what’s happening here.”

The issue of homelessness is becoming much more real as the country continues to struggle with the economic recession and a flood of foreclosures says Jeremy Rosen with the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness in Washington,

“You know one thing you hear as you talk to people in homeless shelters, they’re continuously saying that they are seeing a lot of people who come in saying they are middle class families, people who never expected we would need to get food from a food pantry or help from a homeless shelter.”

Jeremy Weir-Alderson says that in these tough economic times the Gulf Coast is the perfect place to broadcast because it’s a place that might be able to teach the rest of the country something about recovery. For MPB News, I’m Phoebe Judge in Gulfport.