Blog Action Day!
October 06, 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 email to at least 10 friends in Austin who might want to join us on Blog Action Day (Oct. 15)

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.

P.S. - if you want more info, you can visit the following sites:

* Blog Action Day:
http://blogactionday.org/

* Mobile Loaves & Fishes:
http://www.mlfnow.org/site/PageServer

* Capital Area Food Bank
http://www.austinfoodbank.org/

posted by Sara Hickman at 08:36 am
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