The quiet Storms of Reform

Current project from Ben Tecumseh DeSoto

Our nation’s war on poverty, like our nation’s war on drugs, is remarkable because both problems remain if not the same in breath and scope if not larger now than the at the start.

The current methods are, obliviously, not working.

In 1999, Nan Roman with the coalition to End Homelessness identified these three institutions- foster care, medical care and court system- as contributors to a perpetual underclass that make up our chronic homeless population, a part of our social landscape since the 1980’s.  Part the result of political and business policy changes in the early 1980’s and regressive, putative sentencing laws (Rockefeller laws), our homeless and prison populations are made up of high school drop outs, orphans, the children of orphans and disproportionately suffering from undiagnosed and treated mental and physical illness.   New research has shown a dynamic relationship between chronic homelessness and posttraumatic stress disorders, making homelessness a symptom and not the problem itself. 

This history of institutional failures, personal trauma coupled with the recent economic crisis often called Great Recession, has created an opportunity for a reform movement attempting to save the good of each institution and employ the “more perfect” policies to serve future generations.  The solutions are coming from within and a return to an old way of thinking about providing care.

Details will soon be released about a crowd funding campaign to support a timely photojournalism and documentary video project as an independent observer of the reformers, Texas state report to the Legislature and university study.