Hear Our Voices Podcast: ‘If We Don’t Stick Together, We Won’t Make It’

On the latest episode, host Kadisha Davis speaks to Charisma White of the Safety Net Activists about her work in homelessness advocacy and her past experiences looking for housing with a Section 8 voucher.

Charisma White grew up around activists and advocates. Her mother was an artist who attended Medgar Evers College and was deeply involved in community advocacy in Brooklyn, work that gave White the opportunity to meet prominent civil rights activists like Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King.

“I was always involved in protesting,” White said this week on the latest episode of the “Hear Our Voices” podcast, which shares stories, resources and information about family homelessness in New York City (the podcast is produced by the Family Homelessness Coalition, whose members include Citizens’ Committee for Children, a City Limits funder).

But it wasn’t until her own experiences with homelessness that she “fully stepped into the role” of activist herself, she said.

“I wanted to find out…where are the resources?” White told podcast host Kadisha Davis. “Where does the money and funding that comes down from the government to go into the resources, how is it getting there? Where is it going? What stops does it make along the way? Does it actually get to the community?”

White has worked as an advocate with Urban Pathways, the New York City Continuum of Consumer Care and the Safety Net Activists, an organizing group that’s part of the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project. “The number one thing is we have to stick together as a people, right? If we don’t stick together, we won’t make it anywhere,” she said of that work.

You can listen to the conversation below—the first in a two-part interview—in which White also describes her experiences as Section 8 tenant, and the frustration of trying to find an apartment with rental voucher in New York City.

“For five years with my voucher in hand, I could not find housing, and I didn’t really think it was the issue of the voucher,” she told Davis. “It was more of the issue of agencies’ non-communication with each other, landlords and realtors discriminating against the voucher.”

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