Thinking about poverty

At today’s Social Media Club, Bob Carlton and Mike Chapman filled me in on Bob’s plan for Blog Action Day. Bob wants to mobilize local bloggers to fill the 24-hour action day with posts that “capture 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.

I signed up to blog (7am-8am on October 15), and I’m giving it a lot of thought. In a past life, I worked with poverty programs for quite a few years, and I learned firsthand and from many perspectives about what it means to be poor. I haven’t thought about it in quite a while. I’m not sure I know what it’s like to be poor in the 21st century, though… and how much worse it will be with the harsher economic climate we seem to be facing.

Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.