Blog Action Day (Oct. 15) - Will You Raise Your Voice to Poverty in Austin ?

Following is a post from Social Media Club member Bob Carlton’s blog The Corner. After meeting with Bob and the folks at Mobile Loaves and Fishes, I’ve decided to jump in all the way and to be a part of the 24 hour immersion with them.

Hopefully the social media community of Austin can help them in their effort to humanize the homeless population in Austin. For me personally, I’m not going to think too much about the results and just accept their invitation to take some action.

Bob Carlton, Oct. 1, 2008 - Today, 20% of the folks in our wonderful hometown live in what is considered poverty conditions - approximately 200,000 of Travis County residents are classified as “working poor” by the Texas Department of Human Services. The estimates are that 41,000 children under the age of 18 in Travis County are confronted with food insecurity every day.

Far too often, these are flat fact, numbers that wiz by.

On Blog Action Day (Oct. 15), Austin bloggers, podcasters and videocasters will devote 24 hours to capturing the face of poverty in Austin today, focusing on the personal story behind the facts of living in poverty. A core team will focus on a street retreat immersion effort, delivering updates via Twitter, small video updates & audio segments, as well as scheduled webinars. By engaging with stories from a wide variety of voices & mediums, online readers in Austin will be immersed in an experience of what it means to live in poverty in Austin today.

Working side-by-side with Mobile Loaves & Fishes and Capital Area Food Bank, there are 3 objectives for this project:

• Raise community awareness of the personal aspects of living in poverty in our hometown
• Communicate a unified call-to-action across a variety of organization working with poverty in Austin, spotlighting specific ways to face poverty in Austin
• Engage the broader Austin community in how to respond to these stories, harnessing our city’s unique imagination & creativity

We need your help to make this happen:

• Sign up to blog for at least one hour during Blog Action Day (Oct. 15) - just go here and sign up:

http://www.doodle.ch/participation.html?pollId=kyawmrma58rxup99

• Consider joining us for some or all of the street retreat immersion effort - if you want more info or want to be involved, just email me

• Expand the network for this effort - forward this post to at least 10 friends in Austin who might want to join us

Our neighbors who live in poverty conditions are people just like us, with stories to share. You can be a conduit for sharing those stories - just say YES to being part of Blog Action Day (Oct. 15), raising your voice to poverty in Austin.