A Man, a Mom, and a Movement
Mary Bricker-Jenkins, PhD
The old church in North Philadelphia, the size of a small cathedral really, was already bitterly cold in the fall of 1995. It was full of small tents and “family rooms” formed by pews, blankets, and sleeping bags. Taped around the entrance were notices: Sign up here for child care. Smoke outside & pick up your butts. Study Circle, 6 pm, under the tarp. Twelve Step Meetings, 8am & 8pm.
The area under the tarp was the nerve center of this community of homeless people who had moved their tent city from an abandoned lot to an abandoned church for the winter. Cheri Honkala, the leader of the group, was meeting there with her circle of advisors, community members who had agreed to take on responsibilities and duties for the group. Beside her was a youth leader, a very articulate 15 year old boy named Mark. That’s how I first met him. I didn’t know for some time that he was Cheri’s son; I knew him only as one of the “go to” people in the community.
As a professional social worker with a doctorate in child welfare, I suppose I focused instinctively and immediately on the children and youth. Quickly satisfied that they were safe from every threat but poverty and homelessness, I was able to broaden my focus to this community and its leaders. I started “coming around” to attend the community meetings and educational sessions. Both Mark and his mom led many of them. Soon I realized that I was learning more from this welfare mom and her pubescent son about the systemic causes of poverty and homelessness than I had learned in decades of formal study. And I was watching a social movement forming in that old, cold church in the midst of Pennsylvania’s poorest community.
The organization running the tent-city-in-a-church, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, was a little over 5 years old by that time. It had been formed by five “welfare moms,” including Cheri, who had spent some time living in cars and abandoned buildings with Mark. In 1998 KWRU sparked the formation of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, a national organization dedicated and determined to building a movement to end poverty. Cheri became its National Organizer and Spokesperson.
By that time it was clear that Mark, ever self-defining and independent, now well into adolescence, would successfully pursue his passion for acting. Frankly, some of us assumed he’d be too busy for the marches, demonstrations, and interminable meetings demanded by the campaign. That he’d want to distance himself from the hardships of homelessness, police abuse, public ridicule. That at best he’d drop in to be a celebrity activist from time to time. Or, the worst possible outcome, that he’d be scooped up by the media as a protagonist in the kind of “rags to riches” story that obscures the real causes of poverty and cloaks the people that benefit from it. None of those has happened. Mark still marches at his mom’s side, organizes and educates his friends as well, holds fast to the vision and the strategy of the movement and its organizations, resides well within the circle of its leaders, and now uses his films to tell the truth about poverty and homeless in the USA.
