Homeless-Rights Activist and Journalist Tim Harris to Speak at WWU May 24

Contact: Kelsey Taylor, student president of the Current Events Forum, taylor98@students.wwu.edu, or Susanne Seales, Western Washington University Honors Program instructor, at Susanne.Seales@wwu.edu

BELLINGHAM – Tim Harris, founding director of the Real Change News and the Homeless Empowerment Project, will discuss his work as an activist and organizer for the rights of the homeless at Western Washington University on Friday, May 24 at 3:30 p.m. in Communications Facility room 115.

The event is free and open to the public and is hosted by the Current Events Forum, an Associated Students club at Western. There will be a question-and-answer session after the presentation.

Harris has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, he founded the Spare Change homeless newspaper in Boston in 1992 while working as executive director of Boston Jobs with Peace.

Harris founded his first alternative newspaper, “critical times”, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he graduated in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in Social Thought and Political Economy.

He has led numerous organizing drives on issues of homelessness and poverty, including a recent campaign to defeat proposed aggressive panhandling legislation that garnered Real Change the Seattle Human Rights Award for 2010. He is a co-founder of the North American Street Newspaper Association and a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists prestigious Susan Hutchinson Bosch Award for outstanding courage and integrity in journalism.

Co-sponsors of the event include Western’s Center for Service-Learning, the Honors Program, and the Honors Student Board.

For more information please contact Kelsey Taylor at taylor98@students.wwu.edu or Susanne Seales at Susanne.Seales@wwu.edu.