Alissa Quart: Journalist, Author & Executive Director of the Nonprofit, Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Angela gets the background on how Alissa Quart’s admiration for and work with Barbara Ehrenreich sparked their work with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.  Listen to learn how Alissa passionately continues the work to give marginalized people a voice.

 Follow Alissa’s work here: http://www.alissaquart.com/ 

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/alissaquart/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisquart 

EHRP: https://economichardship.org/ 

EHRP Twitter: https://twitter.com/econhardship 

EHRP Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EconomicHardshipReporting 

EHRP Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/economichardship/ 

The Village Voice: https://www.villagevoice.com/ 

Barbara Ehrenreich: https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/landing-page/barbara-ehrenreich-about/ 

Gary Rivlin: https://garyrivlin.com/ 

Maisie Crow/The Last Clinic: http://maisiecrow.com/ 

Erie, PA: https://economichardship.org/2022/03/homelessness-in-erie-pa-a-single-mothers-struggles-and-where-she-turned-for-help/ 

Against “Poor” Reporting: https://www.cjr.org/criticism/unskilled-worker-journalism-class-bias.php 

Going for Broke (podcast): https://economichardship.org/2022/11/going-for-broke-can-work-be-love/ 

Remembering Barbara:  https://time.com/6211712/remembering-barbara-ehrenreich/ 

Hispanic Reporters https://nahj.org/ 

Molly Crabapple: https://mollycrabapple.com/ 

Brush with homelessness poem: https://economichardship.org/2021/11/jen-fitzgerald-a-poet-without-a-home/ 

EHRP Funders: https://economichardship.org/funders/ 

Meltwater: https://www.meltwater.com/en 

Utah Rentals: https://economichardship.org/tag/utah/ 

USA News Nursing Home: https://economichardship.org/tag/nursing-homes/ 

Squeezed: https://www.amazon.com/Squeezed-Families-Cant-Afford-America/dp/0062412256 

Bootstrapped: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bootstrapped-alissa-quart?variant=40517189599266 

Thank you for listening!  Please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe to the Media in Minutes podcast here or anywhere you get your podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/media-in-minutes/id1555710662  

Transcript

Angela Tuell: 0:05

Welcome to Media in Minutes. This is your host Angela Tuell. This podcast features in-depth interviews with those reports on the world around us. They share everything from their favorite stories to what happened behind the lens and give us a glimpse into their world. From our studio here at Communications Redefined, this is Media in Minutes. Today we are talking with Alissa Quart. Alissa is the author of four acclaimed nonfiction books, two books of poetry, prize winning podcast creator, has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times and Time among others, and is the executive director of the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. EHRP is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that produces compelling journalism to raise awareness about income inequality, and economic unfairness in America. Hello, Alissa. Thanks for joining us today.

Alissa Quart: 1:01

Oh, hi. Nice to meet you, Angela.

Angela Tuell: 1:03

I'm very excited to talk with you about the economic hardship reporting project. The work you and your team are doing is something everyone should be aware of.

Alissa Quart: 1:11

Why thank you, Angela. Awesome.

Angela Tuell: 1:13

Yes. So did you start out of school as a journalist?

Alissa Quart: 1:17

You know, I did. I was my first job was for a place called The Village Voice, which in the 90s was a alternative weekly that had the storied history in the East in the East Village of New York, which is where I grew up. That was what I thought journalism should be, which was very voici. Very full of intensity, a lot of investigation. Yes. Well, willing to speak truth to power and often in humorous way. So that was my model, starting when I was, you know, 21 years old in the in the mid 90s. In New York.

Angela Tuell: 1:55

Yeah. That's how I think that's how we all started out of journalism school, right? We totally could make such a difference. And obviously, we know how important journalism is. What happened during your career to lead you to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project?

Alissa Quart: 2:10

Well, one thing happened, which is Barbara Ehrenreich. I've met her. I was working on a piece for her and an editor who was working there with her at the time at EHRP named Gary Rivlin. And I just had this experience when I talked to her of sort of meeting the person, it sounds bizarre, but the person I've always wanted to know, it's sort of, it's almost like a form of form of love, really. And we were discussing a film that I was producing with a filmmaker named Maisie Crow called The Last Clinic. And we just had hours of conversation about reproductive rights, about nonfiction about, you know, what is art that is political, but also factual. And we became friends as well as she was my editor at the time. And then when there was a space for an editor, I took it and then raised enough money to really make the organization into a much bigger entity. So that was how it all started. That was, like 10 years ago.

Angela Tuell: 3:16

Okay. So for listeners who are not familiar, tell us what the eEonomic Hardship Reporting Project is.

Alissa Quart: 3:23

So the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, was an idea of Barbara's after the 2008 recession. So you listeners may remember this. Yes, it was, suddenly, it was very hard to find work. The banks were - got that bailout. There was, you know, a lot of downsizing and a lot of industries that were sort of, you know, contracting, and one of them was journalism. So we lost a lot of jobs, we were losing jobs to begin with, because of the internet. And because a lot of other services, including venture capitalists, but at that point, there was a lot of jobs that were being lost, and a lot of people who are not making enough. So Barbara was like, this is really wrong. We've got to support some of these reporters, we've got to get them animated and get them part of the conversation, you know, for the for them so they can survive and continue to work as writers and photographers, but also so people are hearing their voices and hearing the truth of their perspective alongside their reporting. So that was that was how she came up with this idea. And, you know, it became, it became important to different kinds of ways as the decade progressed, we had the Trump era, we had protests in the streets, we had, we're have we're facing another recession now and inflation. And we've always faced the constant shame and blame of working class and poor people in the media, right and in the larger population. So that's just the underlying truth that we're battling with the kind of stories we tell.

Angela Tuell: 5:01

Yeah. So what is the basis of - you kind of just explained it, but you know of what you do with the project?

Alissa Quart: 5:10

Well, third of our little more than third of our writers describe themselves as having come from working class or working poor backgrounds or are currently working poor. Some of them have experienced homelessness, some of them are experiencing homelessness, while they've written for us. So that's a that's like 35%. And the rest are sort of people like writers and photographers and filmmakers who are, you know, are getting by, but they can't really afford to do the kind of serious work around these questions and these topics that they want to. So we're giving them the opportunity to write an article that's not about clickbait, but it's about disability, that's about their own symptoms, their own disability, their own experience of living in a community that's changing, because it's the climate, that kind of thing, that normally, there's only a small number of people who get to write about, say eviction, but we're widening that number. And that also means that we have all these films, right that we've worked on that we've helped underwrite, and podcast series, and very long form articles like this 5000 word piece in The Guardian, we just published about housing, that that was somebody who had lived in a house who was four that didn't know the house she she'd received with had been foreclosed by another person in Detroit, and found the person whose house was basically stolen by the city of Detroit that was her own house had been stolen by him and stolen by the city. So she wrote this amazing story that took eight months for her to get, right. And it was like, one of the most popular pieces The Guardian the other week. So like that piece, I mean, eight months, you know, she, the writer is herself lower income. And, you know, she reckons that even with our help, she probably made $5 an hour, but that was like she was able to do it, you know? Yeah. And that was that's part of what we're, we give people.

Angela Tuell: 7:06

So do you just work with journalists mostly? Or are they they can be writers, and that doesn't need to be their background?

Alissa Quart: 7:14

Yeah, they have to have been professional writers and reporters. And okay, so illustrators, I should add to people who draw, but they have to work in the nonfiction form. So they can't be like, just creative writers. But that said, there are we have essays who are not traditional reporters who have written about their lives, right. So that is something we're looking for. We're not trying to train people from ground up, that's certain, we're not just trying to take their organizations that do undo that wonderfully, like, take, you know, Waitstaff and teach them how to how to write about their lives. But that's if we did that. And they had never had a basic kind of writing, publication history or anything. It would be a whole whole other kind of list, as we say, Yep. So we go instead of of people who, you know, either published or, you know, worked in newspaper at some point, or, yeah, have an MFA or whatever. Yeah. So

Angela Tuell: 8:10

how many writers do you work with?

Alissa Quart: 8:12

Oh, at this point, it's been 1000s. And they're not again, they're in all forms of media. But yeah. And I mean, it's been 10 years now.

Angela Tuell: 8:21

Sure, yeah. So why, in your words, why is this reporting project necessary?

Alissa Quart: 8:27

I think it's necessary. If you look at any of the major newspapers, you see a gap, you see people who are often have privileged reporting to privileged writing about these matters, and sometimes missing missing the point, I think. And so that is part of it. Right? This is about giving space for other kinds of people. And then it's necessary because, you know, a lot of publications in places outside of New York and California in California are closing down, right. So you have to try to recreate some of the kind of immediate ecosystem in some of these places. So that's part of what we've done also, and like Salt Lake City, Utah, and in Iowa and, you know, supported writers in Arizona, etc. So that that was one of the ways that we felt like we could really kind of enhance places in which local newspapers no longer exist, or they're just skeletons that just reprint things that exist. We've also paid for local TV reporters. So that's an effort that is like, we found out that many of the older Americans in these places don't read news sites or read newspapers, they don't they only watch local TV, and they're just getting these kind of feel good stories or, you know, weather or whatever. So we pay for poverty reporters in some of these places. So that's that's the idea to try to get news that's true about these true fights this information around into these news TV stations.

Angela Tuell: 10:01

Yeah. Where do you- so for the TV side there - where do you have some journalists? In what, in what cities?

Alissa Quart: 10:08

Yeah, the most successful one has been in Erie, Pennsylvania. Okay. Yeah. So I think he was either nominated or won a local Emmy. And he was a very young guy. And is a young guys, we still have we still have this going. But um, yeah. And he'd like write on people in the area who are on SNAP, or I mean, these were the it wasn't as a breaking news, but it was breaking news in the sense that none of this stuff had been covered for a long time, and people in the communities didn't know there, didn't have a sense of the suffering of their fellow men, you know. So that was part of the idea.

Angela Tuell: 10:41

I'm in Indianapolis, and we've seen some of our local television stations have started hiring like multicultural reporters to cover some of the communities that are not covered, you know, as they should be. So we're starting to see some of

Alissa Quart: 10:54

You feel like that makes a difference?

Angela Tuell: 10:56

Yeah.

Alissa Quart: 10:57

So people who might otherwise like feel that they didn't have a voice, and also people who might otherwise think that the news should look a certain way and a kind of bigoted way. I mean, do you, do you to hear people who people mentioned it? Or -

Angela Tuell: 11:10

Oh, yeah, we are definitely seeing some great feedback from it. And they are really, you know, so the reporters tell me that it's a little bit that their job has been a little bit harder, because those communities and those people are the businesses don't have the funds to have PR people or, you know, people that help get their stories to the media. So they're really working to dig in to find those, you know, as traditional journalists back in the day, when they had more time to do investigative type work would have done. But now they have seven stories a day and, and just trying to get, you know, the news out there, so it has been more difficult for them, but they're definitely making inroads in the communities and, you know, making connections.

Alissa Quart: 11:53

Well, that's fascinating.

Angela Tuell: 11:55

Yeah, yeah. And I know that, you know, I've seen that the project has talked about, you know, media being base is at least national media in the Northeast and Washington, DC and California and not everywhere else. You know, how do you think that hurts national media organizations?

Alissa Quart: 12:13

It hurts our battle and, you know, kind of the war for the truth or whatever. Like, you have people who are not hearing the truth about this country that are just getting doggerel on websites and Twitter. And, and even if they were gonna ignore their local paper, they'd at least know it existed. And they might know the people who are participating in it, right, they will write other it wouldn't be just as like national newspaper that is filled with people who they have a such a cultural schism with sometimes, you know, so forget about economic and I think that's my hope is that sometimes having some of the stories told in like, my North Carolina reporter about shutting down rural hospitals, who himself is in North Carolina, that was a story we did, and then placing that in a North Carolina publication that then people are like, Okay, this is affecting me by somebody who I recognize. But it's still it still shows how what's actually happening in our state. And then, you know, there's like, limited hospital budgets, or there's corruption in nursing homes, or you know what I mean?

Angela Tuell: 13:23

Yeah.

Alissa Quart: 13:24

And they can turn away from it if they if they have to, but at least it's there, you know. Well, I think, you know, I mean, when you said, Oh, I love this,

Angela Tuell: 13:29

Yeah. You know, as you just mentioned, so more than 2500 newspapers - 2500 across the country have been lost in the last 15 years, according to The New York Times. A third of the TV idea changing channels. Yeah, I mean, we just need more. the nation's newspapers are expected to close by 2025. The We need, I'd love to see either, you know, donations or also Economic Hardship Reporting Project says the loss of local news worsens the political, cultural, and economic divisions greater infrastructure for things like getting TV reporters in the country. There's only 20% of adults living in news deserts that have college degrees compared to 38% in the US in some of these places, or building a kind of a syndicate overall. How can organizations like yours rectify this? And what more can be done? of for local news that might be more reflective of what's really Yeah, I'm sure every day, you see the list of what are in your happening in some of these places than than exists now. And I think some places are, I mean, I know for instance, ProPublica has done this, like local news initiative, and I remember they had particularly one in Alaska that was just excellent. So I think people are getting the memo now. It just needs more to fill in these huge gaps. head of what needs to be done, and work towards it.

Alissa Quart: 15:06

It's so great. I wake up and that's what it's like. It's like it is. And it's sort of like when Yeah, it's like, please share the burden. I welcome other nonprofit media outlets to do more of this sort of thing. And I think they are but anyone listening in Indianapolis? I mean, yeah. And we're also open to partnering in places like Indianapolis. So if you have if somebody has a nonprofit, small nonprofit newsroom there or is thinking is from the television station there. It's like, well, we'd really like to pay for somebody reporting on inequality in our area that this is the kind of thing we can do.

Angela Tuell: 15:44

So yeah, and we have listeners across the country. So I know you work with people across the country.

Alissa Quart: 15:49

Yep.

Angela Tuell: 15:50

Yeah. And you recently wrote an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review about poor word choices when reporting, where you take on the term unskilled worker? Can you share a little bit for our listeners about that?

Alissa Quart: 16:03

Yeah, absolutely. So unskilled workers is sort of it's sort of a gold standard of how certain kinds of labor is described. People retail, you know, behind the cash register, food service, leader, domestic workers. And my whole critique of this was like, why do we accept this just because it is the official phrase used by, like Bureau of Labor Statistics and so forth? It doesn't really describe people's work. I mean, if you or I tried to make a pizza, you know, we would probably not do a very good job. That's evidence that that work is skilled. Or if you're at a department store, and you're trying to figure out where the laundry department is, and where the skis are, you know, like that's, that is actually skilled to keep sense of where - of location, of coding for objects that when you're when you're behind the cash register. And I just think that there's something there's a there's a class bigotry that's embedded in a lot of our, like, natural so called natural language or formal language in this country, that I really wanted to critique and have reporter's question. Like, it's one thing, we just say, Oh, it's the unskilled labor, you know, worker numbers or up or whatever. That would be like a standard refrain. But like, why don't we say the what they call the unskilled workers, which might be but you know, we could we could just protest on some level. I mean, I was thinking of general work would be a better phrase, or I mean, there was a reason why people were called essential workers. And they're often the same people that are called unskilled workers. So we went from romanticizing them during the pandemic, some of these workers, you know, who do gig work or, you know, whatever, to calling them unskilled again, you know.

Angela Tuell: 17:48

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's messages that really need to be out there that journalists should be thinking about, no matter what industry they're in, or, or why not talk about the industry too how bad it is rather than just, you know, a generalization like that. What stories are not being told that you're really focusing on?

Alissa Quart: 18:09

What, we know, we have a podcast radio show coming up with the station to the best of our knowledge, the program called Going for Broke. And it's a three part series on care what care does in labor, what care can or can do if we put care into work, if we put care into mental health and physical health, and if we put care into housing. And each one of these shows is an hour long, and it's going to be on 250 public radio stations, probably one of the ones that your listeners are also familiar with. And one of the things I really liked about this show was, first of all, we have a bunch of each or P writers who have experienced poverty themselves. Talking about their lives with Ray Suarez, who's like a legendary broadcaster, the EHRP broadcaster. And some of those stories are pretty striking. There's one about dating while homeless, one of our writers who experienced homeless misstated while he was homeless to talk about what that was like. Somebody else lived at 70 different homes, 70 different addresses growing up and what that does for your longtime record, which was something I had not thought about before I met her I mean, you know, your people want histories right of residence. I mean, that's just and that's the kind of thing about what you can get when you're working with people who not didn't go to Princeton and didn't, you know, don't come from wealth, but instead had this hardship in their background like these stories occur to them because they're their stories, whereas I hadn't really thought about that. If you don't have an address this this creates this whole long shadow for people. And I think in her case, she didn't have one because of poverty, but also domestic violence, and we need to start thinking about that. Stop requiring proof of address going back, you know when to when people might have had a domestic violence experience, right. So that totally interesting. And then, and then let the experts who have these amazing solutions, they're pretty radical that you don't hear often, you know, around mental health, around addiction. And we have an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich, who passed away two months ago, which I've been really wrestling with on a personal level, but it's an interview with her where she's talking about how activism in journalism can go together. And again, kind of a radical, innovative way to think about what reporting should be. So yeah, I'm kind of pretty excited that's launching in two days.

Angela Tuell: 20:45

Wow, awesome. We will definitely link to it for our listeners to to be able to listen. How do you identify these potential stories? You know, there's so many out there, and I'm sure it's endless what you could do. But how do you identify them? And the author's to tell those stories?

Alissa Quart: 21:03

I mean, we do kind of recruiting, I'd say. And because we've gotten relatively well known at this point we're getting, you know, like the two writers I mentioned, I think, one we recruited and one, Alex Miller came to us through our editor, Debbie Lee. And so maybe she recruited him or he just wrote to us, I can't remember. But through like call outs on Twitter, I mean, it wasn't very advanced, right? It had heard of us, and they came to us, you know, we also have go to conferences, you know, the Hispanic reporters conference, we went to the NAHJ. We also, you know, go talk at classes. And, you know, people know us, you know, we're who we, me and my colleagues, you know, we have networks. And so that's part of it, they'll be like, Oh, I've heard about this thing, because I've heard of Alissa, or I've heard of, you know, David, who's one of my colleagues, or Debbie is doing this, and I have experienced like this, or my friend has experienced like this. And it becomes kind of a hub. And another thing is just by publishing so widely. Like our partners range from like, The Times, to Showtime to Cosmopolitan needed to these unusual suspects. And so all these different populations see our work and see our tagline. And then there'll be like, oh, I want to write about the time I was homeless. So yeah. And that, or when my sister experienced addiction, and I had to find her and various shelters or whatever, you know, and then that goes from there. And that that's how we find those kinds of stories. And the other kind of stories again, like there's so much, honestly, your poverty in independent reporters lives that most of you know, any newsroom that knows of us is will tell their freelancers, you know, go ask them if they're doing something that would fit with our kind of mandate. Yeah, you know, get a grant from them. And that's sort of how it's worked.

Angela Tuell: 23:03

That's great. And you've talked a little bit about this, but how is what you're doing different from other news outlets who are covering the economy and the impact it has on communities?

Alissa Quart: 23:13

Well, I think part of it is more grassroots, like I'm saying, like we're getting some of the representatives of these communities to talk about their own lives, right about their own lives, report their own lives. I mean, we now have had at least two pieces by people who are in the process of being evicted. Who are professional journalists, and then they reporting being evicted. So that's kind of like pretty novel, like, I don't think many other organizations do that.

Angela Tuell: 23:40

No, no.

Alissa Quart: 23:41

But also, I think it's very, I think our approach is kind of more slightly more artistic, you know, like, we'll have visual nonfiction people like Molly Crabapple, very beautiful work. Poets, documentary poets, people who are telling their stories. One person wrote a story about her brush with homelessness as a poem, which I can share with the listeners I love.

Angela Tuell: 24:06

Yes, please. That'd be great.

Alissa Quart: 24:07

Yeah, and you know, poems about abortion, abortion, poems, about being Asian American, and the immigrant experience and Chinatown. So I'm really proud of some of the more imaginative stuff because I feel like that is there are these works are also nonfiction. They're all true. But they're told in these exceptional ways, right? So.

Angela Tuell: 24:33

Yeah. And then how do you bring those voices to the wide audiences that you mentioned? And how are you supporting the authors?

Alissa Quart: 24:40

Well, we give people $1 word plus expensive so that's what I always say that was a middle class reporting salary in the 1990. So that's still not enough. But yeah, I mean, just contrast it with what people normally get from websites, which is like $400 for 2000 words story, right? Yeah. Hate paid at all. So, um, that has become one of our challenges to make sure people have enough and then getting expenses, which can mean, you know, for flights or hotels, which again, is something that a lot of places don't do anymore. Yeah. That's one thing that we do. And then the other thing is we have these partnerships with all these publications with large audiences like the Guardian, like. Like Vogue, we've had things in Vogue, or Teen Vogue. I mean, they, you know, on Twitter alone, I think they were than a million followers, right. And then, you know, a New York Times. So that has been a large audience as well.

Angela Tuell: 25:46

Yeah, it gives them a lot of visibility to their, to their work and probably helps in their careers.

Alissa Quart: 25:52

Yeah, and I think it also to do the co-publishing model, which is something that not all the nonprofits do, maybe that's another way, we're kind of exceptional. To me, that was my dis thought in the beginning, like, I saw that a lot of nonprofits saw themselves as destinations. And that's, you know, like, we're going to create this great website, we're going to hope that all these people come to the site to read the work on the site. And I just was like, Well, the point really is changing these people's lives and changing what majority people read. And for that co-publishing, it's fine. So are better than fine. It's an advantage because there are all these places that have huge audiences, but they don't give people money. So what the attention economy is there for in a lot of publications, but not the economy economy, to support them, and also to support them editorially. And then to be able to get that stuff into the mainstream media, to me is the point.

Angela Tuell: 26:45

Yes, yeah. And you're reaching the people that, you know, like the story that you gave about the different addresses, you know, you're reaching people, other people that didn't know that, and you're actually teaching Americans the different or different perspectives, you know, that they may or may not have grown up in. How is EHRP financed?

Alissa Quart: 27:07

We get grants from all these major foundations. Some of them prefer to remain anonymous. Like we have an anonymous donor that just came in with a lovely donation. But you know, among the ones that I can tell you about our JPB, which is one of the places Omidyar Network, forward Foundation, and so on, and so on. So I think something like 12, Irvine, a bunch of others, and yeah, and some of them are interested in our editorial and they want to host events, and some of them are just like, here's, you know, here's a check. But yeah,

Angela Tuell: 27:41

So how do you track how the difference that the organization is making over the last 10 years?

Alissa Quart: 27:48

Well, you will use this industry product called Meltwater that measures I think we get I forget how many hundreds of millions or like, impressions we'd get from that. I mean, right. The thing is, since we're co-publishing we there's it's in arguable that we're reaching millions of people, right? Because it's like, these are stories that sometimes the most popular story on a site like the Guardian, right, or Showtime or airing on 300 radio stations, right, so there's just a large audience built into that. But then impact can also be measured by policy. We've seen some policy shifts in like Salt Lake City in Utah around kind of corrupt regimental processes and the company doing that and nursing home. We had, we supported a coverage in USA News about a corrupt nursing home. So we could and that was cited by the Biden administration. Sometimes it's language, sometimes it's like, I don't know how to phrase"human infrastructure" that was in my last book, Squeezed, and then I'm not gonna say I created it, but then I suddenly heard the phrase "human infrastructure" a lot. Yeah, like two years later. So sometimes it's just stuff like language, you know?

Angela Tuell: 28:58

Yes, yes. Stuff that's very important that you know, that. Yeah, making a difference that way. And I love I love those things that happen when you actually see policy change too, or, or things change. That's where you can, when you see the concrete examples there that always that always helps. That's always helpful. Yeah, very impactful. Yes, yes.

Alissa Quart: 29:18

And also just winning winning prizes. So I think within the media, we've won, you know, Moreau, we've won this year alone SPJ, which is a big award. The top labour award for so just that to me means that our colleagues are seeing that we're really doing a nice job with this this subject matter so... And to me that means that's that's good in a different kind of impact, because it means that they're going to probably use our work more you know what I mean?

Angela Tuell: 29:51

Exactly.

Alissa Quart: 29:51

Trust our trust our instincts, so that's, that's-

Angela Tuell: 29:53

That's very incredible. And yeah, we mentioned in the beginning that you are also a nonfiction author yourself. as well as the author of poetry. But you have a forthcoming book out in March of next year called Bootstrapped. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Alissa Quart: 30:08

Yeah, it's the history of the idea of bootstrapping, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps that anyone who wants to succeed can succeed in this country, which I'm saying is a lie. And that there's a lot of, again, shame and blame placed on people when they're not able to do that. Self hatred that people are asked to are actually required sometimes in this country to experience even if they even if they tried to refuse it and say, Look, I did the best I could. And that's enough. You're told, you know, you should be excelling. You should be, you know, in the stock market, you should all this stuff, right? And it's a look at how that idea came came to be, you know, what writers and philosophers made that, you know, such a crucial and con that people followed, including people like that people that one might like, like Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also people that one really doesn't like like Ann Rand. And then onwards, looking at people whose lives were shaped by this idea for the ill, you know, who have had suffered because of this idea that they're supposed to do it on their own, you have to raise money for go through GoFundMe account, you know, GoFundMe campaigns for basic medical care. So they I've interviewed a lot of people around some of these things, and then ending with, you know, movements, collective movements like mutual aid and worker co-ops that show way forward, where we're leaning on each other. And we're not just telling ourselves, we have to do this all alone. So that's, that's the book.

Angela Tuell: 31:42

That sounds fascinating, cannot wait till it comes out to read it.

Alissa Quart: 31:46

Happy to send you a copy.

Angela Tuell: 31:47

Great. So how can our listeners follow and support EHRP online and you personally?

Alissa Quart: 31:54

Well, they can go to the economic hardship.org to our site and read our stuff, they can share it, I think it's our Twitter's econ hardship, at econ, hardship, and Instagram, and we have Facebook and just sharing the work, reading the work sharing it enthusiastically. If you want to make a donation, you can go to the site. Also, there's a space base that tells you how to do that. If you're in the media, and you're interested in, you know, writing about us, that's always helpful. Or if you'd like to, if you read a journalism school or school and you're interested, and I didn't even get into this new thing I'm working on called Working sources, which is an archive of experts that are working class or close to it, and that I'm happy to come talk or have people from my organization, come talk about it, it journalism schools. So that is the kind of thing that we're ways you can support us. And also obviously, if people have stories they want to tell or their reporters that needs support, they should come to us.

Angela Tuell: 32:58

Wonderful. I am so excited we get to share your story and the organization's story. Thank you for joining us today.

Alissa Quart: 33:04

Oh, thank you and I personally can be found at LisQuart that's my Twitter. So l-i-s q-u-a-r-t. Thank you.

Angela Tuell: 33:12

Perfect. Thank you. That's all for this episode of Media in Minutes, a podcast by Communications Redefined. Please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe to our show. We'd love to hear what you think. You can find more at CommunicationsRedefined.com/podcast. I'm your host, Angela Tuell. Talk to you next time.