Transcript: 

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

Carol Jenkins

Hello, and thanks so much for joining The Invisible Americans Podcast with Jeff Madrick and Carol Jenkins. We address the travesty of child poverty here.

Jeff Madrick

There are nearly 13 million children living in serious material deprivation in America, and we don't see them. They are our invisible Americans, and we plan to change that.

Carol Jenkins

A couple of words about us. The podcast is based on Jeff's book, Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty. He's an economics writer, author of seven and co-author of another four books on the American economy.

Jeff Madrick

Carol is an Emmy-winning journalist, activist, and author. Most recently, president of the ERA Coalition working to amend the constitution to include women.

Carol Jenkins

We are longtime colleagues and friends.

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

Jeff Madrick  

On today's episode, we talked with two writers about homelessness, each with their own experiences with the chaos that poverty – and homelessness that often goes with it – can create.

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Carol Jenkins  

Jennifer Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist – the Goon Squad, Candy House – who has for many years done deep reporting on the unhoused in New York City. She approaches it from experiences with her own brother, who's struggled with mental health issues for many years.

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Jeff Madrick  

Ethan Goodey is a 22-year-old first time book author. He has struggled with hunger and finding shelter for much of his life. And now he has written a children's book about homelessness, titled Finley Finds Home, a small clownfish as he calls his hero, looking for a proper place to live.

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Carol Jenkins  

We began with Jennifer Egan. For nearly a year she covered the residents being selected for and then moving into a supported housing building in Brooklyn. In her powerful New Yorker article entitled A Journey from Homelessness to a Room of One's Own, Egan introduces us to several chronically unhoused New Yorkers who have finally been brought inside, given 24 hour mental health and substance abuse supports, and she reports this kind of housing first approach to solving poverty seems to be working.

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Jeff Madrick  

Housing First seemed to me to be such a good idea and you seem to be a strong advocate in your New Yorker piece of Housing First, that is to say, let's get these people housing before we have any other requirements for them. In other words, they don't have to get sober first. Do you still believe that there's been a big right wing counter argument? What's your attitude towards this sort of backlash against Housing First?

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Jennifer Egan  

Though, I will admit that when I began researching this piece for The New Yorker, I did not even know what Housing First was. Because when I had last really been involved in this issue, really right after the turn of the 21st century, 2001. Housing First was not a phrase that one heard very often. I think that was the point at which that was first becoming something that people were even aware of. So it's counterintuitive, in a way. 

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I began this research a year ago thinking really, you mean you can just give people housing even though they have these major problems, and they stay in the house. I was well positioned to really pass this a little bit because I did not go in as a true believer. It struck me as kind of wavy. But what I found was that, in fact, it's totally intuitive because once you understand how complicated and hard it is to tackle, problems like, persistent mental illness, and addiction, and frankly, just homelessness itself. The difficulties of applying for housing, the bureaucracy, the need for all kinds of documentation, or to apply for disabilities in an unstable housing situation. In a way it becomes so clear that all of that is very difficult to do when on house. 

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So once I was amidst this population, I saw that there were very good reasons to proceed with the Housing First attitude. And in fact, that by saying you have to meet all of these benchmarks before you can be considered for housing just means that very many fewer people will end up in housing. If our goal societally is for people not to be living on the street, and frankly, this is a goal, I think, practically everyone shares, then why not give them the best chance of success? That's my feeling now. So I was a convert.

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Jeff Madrick  

But there is a backlash from the right wing right now. Housing First, even probably beginning five or 10 years ago. How do you counter that? What's getting them so angry?

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Jennifer Egan  

The argument seems to be why on earth should we give housing to people who are breaking the law, using illegal drugs and not getting their lives together? My immediate answer to that would be we as a society are giving them housing, whether they are living in our public spaces, or living, frankly, at much less expense to taxpayers in humane conditions. So the choice is ours. No one likes street homelessness. The people experiencing it don't like it, and the rest of the culture dislikes it. So I guess my question is, for those who oppose Housing First, what is the counter argument? Are they saying that this is desirable, having people living outside in the street? We, as a culture, are providing housing no matter where these very troubled people live.

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Carol Jenkins  

Jennifer, you mentioned the word troubled people. Very clearly, in this article, you talk about the different kinds of homelessness there is, chronic versus sudden versus, kids being kicked out of their homes, all kinds of reasons that people wind up and sometimes suddenly. Your writing ability is just extraordinary. The way you describe some of the residents of 90 Sands Street and what they had been through before they got there is just incredible. 

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Jennifer Egan  

Well, one thing I should say is there really is a regional aspect to this. I'm writing about New York, and it's important to acknowledge that because in New York, we have a right to shelter for single individuals or families. So what that means is that for someone to end up living on the street in New York usually means that they really do have some pretty pronounced disability that is making the shelter system very difficult for them to contend with. 

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In a place like California, for example, you have thousands of people without disabilities who are living outdoors in the streets. So those are not the chronically homeless. They don't fit into that category and yet they are unsheltered and there are other reasons for that. I don't want to bash California, which is where I'm from. And also, I haven't done sufficient research to comment meaningfully on all aspects of that problem. But at least in New York, most people, in fact, I would say, everyone who is living outdoors here is doing so because they do have some kind of disability. And that is usually a mental health diagnosis, a serious addiction, which, frankly, is also a mental health diagnosis, but is viewed differently as a different category, or most often both. Because many people who have addiction, also have a mental health issue that they are trying to medicate with whatever drug it is. 

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And I say I'm talking about these people as if they're distant from me, but my own brother was schizophrenic, and an alcoholic. And if he had not had the drinking problem, his schizophrenia might have been easier to deal with. But there was really no separating the two. So I feel very, very close to this issue and I have a lot of sympathy for the individuals themselves, and also the people around them who struggled to help them because these are really hard issues to untangle. And once again, much easier to do so for someone who’s housed than not.

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Carol Jenkins  

You’ve said that had your brother not had the support system that he had, that he might have been one of the homeless as well?

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Jennifer Egan  

Absolutely. It was difficult for him to live any sort of mainstream life, even with all the support that he had. So in some ways, I think he would have benefited from being in a place like 90 sands because he did behave sometimes in his housing in ways that were not acceptable to those around him and because he was just living in normal housing, without support coming to him or without any kind of awareness and those around him of what his challenges were, that, in a way was a worry for all of us that his housing might become unstable. So there's something about the comprehension in contextual comprehension, that these are people who are struggling. It can be very helpful to the people themselves. 

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Jeff Madrick  

Only 6% of those who could be homeless or are homeless are out on the street in New York City. What am I getting wrong here?

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Jennifer Egan  

No, fewer than 6% of homeless people in New York are unsheltered, that is a fact. But in the western part of America, places like Phoenix, Seattle, LA, San Francisco, a way greater proportion of the homeless are unsheltered. And that includes many people who are not in the chronically homeless category. You even have a small percentage of families with children living outdoors. I think that's often in vehicles. Because what is called unsheltered is defined as living in a place not meant for human habitation. So that does not necessarily mean that person is lying on the street, it could mean that person is living in a car or a van, or an abandoned building, you might not actually see them, but that is considered unsheltered because they are living in a place not meant for human habitation. 

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Carol Jenkins  

Explain to us about 90 Sands Street. It’s not completely dedicated to the unhoused. It's a mixed building. So create for us what 90 Sands is.

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Jennifer Egan  

90 Sands is a mix of supportive housing and affordable units. And it's a 60% 40% split. So 60% supportive, 40% affordable. The supportive units are for people who have had chronic homelessness, and either a serious mental illness or a substance use disorder, or as I mentioned, often both, so they have to have those features to their biography in order to qualify. And the affordable units are assigned through a lottery, which is how affordable units I think are often filled in New York City. And those will go to low income New Yorkers but with a range of income. So the very least that an affordable tenant will pay is something like $500 for rent, which is really low. I mean, especially for this very beautiful building in DUMBO. And then those at the higher end will pay like 2000, which is obviously a lot more but still below market rate for the very nice studio or one-bedrooms that they will be renting.

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Carol Jenkins  

Is it true that there were something like 60,000 applicants?

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Jennifer Egan  

Yes, 60,000 for under 200 apartments, and there's just a brutal housing shortage in the city. So that is the mix. The supportive units filled first, and just to clarify, this is a building that was renovated and opened for occupation just last September. So what made it such an interesting building to write about, I mean, there are a lot of buildings like this in New York. This is not new, although I have to confess, I did not fully understand how much supportive housing there already was in the city. But to go from empty, to occupied by 305 supportive tenants in the span of eight months was a fascinating process to watch. And not an easy one, I should really emphasize that. There were many deaths in the building, a number of them from overdoses. And there was often tumult. 

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I think that for supportive housing to work, and statistically it very much does work around 90%. In the most recent study, which was just a couple of years ago, around 90% of people who enter supportive housing from chronic homelessness are still housed two years later. And certainly all my subjects are still housed. But it requires real expertise on the part of the management to prevent a building like this from starting to descend into a kind of mayhem. And I really saw the need for that control because no one wants to live in a situation like that. And the whole point is to try to remove these chronically homeless people from a situation in which they feel at risk and endangered and all of that. So it takes an organization that really knows what they're doing and has a lot of experience to do this well.

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Carol Jenkins  

Talk to us, Jennifer, a little bit about the support that is given. What are we talking about, 24/7 Mental Health availability. What is available to them?

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Jennifer Egan  

Well, it's interesting, technically supportive housing can mean as little as a rent subsidized apartment which a case manager visits on a regular basis to confer with the tenant about their needs and wishes and goals. 90 Sands provides a lot more than that. There is 24 hour security, which is actually really important in a volatile situation. There is on-site medical and psych service, not round the clock, although it's possible to reach someone around the clock. In other words, if there's a psychiatric emergency, the security desk, which is sort of the conduit for connecting those people who need things with what they need, can contact a psychiatrist. But basically, it just means that the case managers are on site, they all are in a big office area, which is at the basement level. Anyone can go down whenever they want, and request to meet with someone. 

There's a nurse practitioner, a doctor, the doctor makes house calls. I've been with tenants when he came to dress wounds, and do other things. There's a presence in the building of people willing and able to help; some tenants don't want that and don't need it, frankly. But others really do. It’s the knowledge that those people are there. And that if there's an emergency, if there is violence,, and I write about all of this, which does happen if there's a death, there are people to respond immediately to that it's not on the tenants to contend with that.

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Jeff Madrick  

What's your measure, a successful program? What percentage of people stay for how long and get better?

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Jennifer Egan  

Well, that's a great question. Because again, going in, being a sort of type A New Yorker focused on success and productivity, my thought was like, Oh, are people succeeding? How are they doing? Are they getting better? Are they getting jobs? What I realized over time was that success means remaining housed. This is a program that is providing supportive housing. And part of that is services to help people work on whatever problems they're dealing with. But the baseline measure of success is our people still housed. And that's where that statistic of almost 90% of chronically homeless people moving into Supportive Housing remaining housed is a really meaningful statistic. Because, again, we're talking about whether people are living out on the street, or in a habitable space with the help that they need to try to tackle their problems. 

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I think what I had to let go of, was the idea that progress should be getting made, every week, people should be moving toward sobriety, or whatever else it is. And what I came to realize is, that's really not for me to say. No more than it is for me to say that people on my block in Brooklyn who might have issues they're working on. That’s not for me to judge them, or to have placed my expectations on them. In other words, these are tenants. They are paying rent, they are in housing, and they're receiving help to work on what they deem useful to work on. And what I have seen is that that has happened on a large scale in this building.

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Carol Jenkins  

Jennifer, if you could talk with us about some of your earlier writing about homelessness and about children. And we understand that your last reporting on that was some time ago, but as such powerful moving stories of what children went through to hide the fact that they were homeless, afraid of what their classmates and friends would say about them.

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Jennifer Egan  

That was where I started in 2001. And I think what has driven me to this issue again and again, is that I remember a time before modern homelessness. I grew up in the ‘70s in San Francisco, and I had never seen a person sleeping on the street, and I was a wild teen who ran around the city at all hours. If anyone was going to see homelessness, it would have been me. It wasn't there. So to go from that to tens of thousands of homeless families and children in New York City, it was just so shocking to me. 

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So what I was looking at there was–and this was really an earlier phase in our understanding of modern homelessness. I think we know a lot more than we did then. And in some ways the problem has actually improved since then. That was really a low point, the first few years of the 21st century. And after that point, we have put some of the data and the discoveries that have been made to use, but it was horrifying to see these kids who are just trying to be kids, they're playing outside of what was then called the EAU, which was the sort of the central clearing house for homeless families to get shelter. 

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They were trying to normalize this, and they were just being kids. They were often upbeat, they were happy, we would go to McDonald's. But I again spent many months on that story, too. And what I saw, looking at kids of various ages, was that that joyfulness really disappeared at a certain point at around the preteen teenage years – because many of these families had an unstable home housing for a long time – yhey became really unhappy and troubled. They were aware that they were homeless, and many of their peers were not. 

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It was incredibly hard to have any sort of educational continuity. Because, yes, New York City guarantees your right to shelter, but at least then that could mean being in a different neighborhood every week. So you've had a roof over your head, yes. But how can these kids learn or develop any sort of stable base? Statistics show again, and again, that children who grew up experiencing homelessness are far more likely statistically to experience homelessness as adults, perhaps as parents, then their own children start to go through this and this dismal cycle continues. 

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I mean, I feel so strongly that we have got to solve this problem of modern homelessness, it's still new enough. I just feel like we can put this genie back in the bottle. It doesn't have to be this way. The thing that's hard is you can point to the outrageous quantities of money that are spent on homelessness. And I think make an argument that it wouldn't cost much more than that, to actually just revise housing policy so that more people could stay in their housing and supportive housing could be provided more widely. But the problem is, that becomes a budget line item that requires an enormous amount of federal collaboration, and congressional collaboration to enact. And it's very hard to see that happening. So even though all of the pieces are there, we have the knowledge, the money's already being spent. People are suffering, no one is happy with this. And yet, it's oversimplification to say, well, come on, let's just do it. That's not easy and I get that.

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Jeff Madrick  

One way to make life better for the prospective homeless, the people who will become homeless, is to make them much less poor in their childhood. And as you know, we have a very high poverty rate compared to most rich nations. We have a higher poverty rate than virtually all rich nations, and we're trying to do something about it as with a policy, like the Child Tax Credit. Give them cash has suddenly been okay after going through a right wing backlash in the ‘80s, that giving cash was actually the problem that made people dependent. So I wondered if you had further thoughts on how reducing child poverty might begin to reduce the future homeless problem in America?

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Jennifer Egan  

I think it will, certainly from the mental health standpoint. I mean, the population I was working with are adults who have had extremely traumatic childhoods, that have resulted in very serious mental health issues, some of which I think probably originated with PTSD, and the extreme insults they received as children that absolutely can be traced to poverty, racism, all of that. So I think that mental health bills would most certainly be mitigated by less child poverty, no question about it. 

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I do think, though, that housing itself and housing policy is also a big part of this. That doesn't necessarily have to do with children per se, but the idea that if the way that housing has become an investment, huge corporations are investing in buildings. They do’nt care if people are living in them or not. There's much less money spent on subsidizing housing, making housing affordable. All of that I think is really important too. And it's not specifically—I guess you could call it anti poverty, but I guess I want to hold on to the idea that housing policy, per se, separate from all of this other stuff, is really an important piece of all this.

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Carol Jenkins  

Jennifer a personal question, because we know that you are a world famous novelist award winning for your output of many novels and yet you do this, what people would call on the street reporting, how does that fit in? How do you put those two pieces of your life together, your work together?

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Jennifer Egan  

Well, sometimes it feels like they don't fit together that well, because, for example, I haven't been writing much fiction for the last six months, and I feel a little guilty about it. But in the larger sense, I think they fit together really really well for me, and I feel so lucky and grateful to have been able to have what I kind of see as a moonlighting journalism career. I don't feel like I'm a kind of a real journalist, exactly. But first of all, I don't write about myself. I'm not interested in writing about people like me. I know my life, and it's terrific, but there's no discovery for me and revisiting it in fiction. So I'm the opposite of an auto fictional writer. 

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For me, it's crucial, especially as I get older, I just turned 61. There’s such a danger of solipsism, of one's world shrinking. And I know that in my case, you would really feel that in the fiction. I need in a visceral way to be thrust into worlds where I don't belong, where there's no overlap. It's my own experience. And that is so nourishing to me, I can't overstate it, it feels like I'm breathing in some kind of pure oxygen that I need. And I forget my own situation. I kind of lose track of even who I am sometimes, that sounds sort of weird. But having these conversations with people whose lives have been so extreme, it's so tumultuous. But until I have the privilege of listening to them tell these stories, it feels like I don't know how I got lucky enough to have this be my job. 

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It's just fascinating, and a vivid reminder of what an enormous range of human experience exists even in such a closed set of circumstances as New York, a relatively small city. So I don't know how any of this will help my fiction exactly. But my fiction is full of knowledge that I would never have had, if not for my journalistic experience. And just to give you one very concrete example, my last novel, The Candy House, has a lot in it about opioid dependency, while of course, my knowledge of all that was furthered in writing the article about homelessness, but I already knew quite a bit because I had written for the Times Magazine about women with opioid dependency who become pregnant, and what happens to them and to their children. I followed them for like eight or nine months through pregnancy, childbirth, and I was deeply involved in a world that centered on methadone clinics, treatment facilities. 

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And so all of that knowledge about addiction became almost second hand of second nature, I should say. And it came through strongly in The Candy House and I'm so glad because this is a problem that is saturating our culture right now. It's a deep and true emergency. Because the drugs are so tainted, so deadly, so many people are unable to give them up. And how can I hope to reflect and synthesize the world around me in a relevant way if I'm not deeply aware of these problems, and what it's like to have them. So this is my way of finding that out.

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Carol Jenkins  

We thank you so much for sharing them. The residents of 90 Sands are riveting. Their stories are thanks to you. And thank you for sharing them.

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Jennifer Egan  

I remain very involved with many of my subjects and grateful to them for their openness. And I feel very protective of them. So I'm going to be seeing what happens next, even though I'm not supposedly reporting on it. But thank you for having this conversation. I think these are incredibly important things to be talking about. And I noticed sometimes that there's almost a feeling of kind of giving up about poverty like well, it's always been with us, we can't solve it. I feel like no, it hasn't always been like this. And we can solve this and defeatism is just no help. So I really am grateful for your podcast.

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Jeff Madrick  

Thank you for participating with us.

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Jennifer Egan  

Thank you.

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The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

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Jeff Madrick  

Ethan Goodey of Lincoln Illinois knows what a child feels like when there's not enough food and no place to stay. He's written a book to share with small children called Finley Finds a Home. He’s dedicating half of the proceeds to Project Oz. A program that gives shelter to teenagers without homes.

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Carol Jenkins  

Ethan, we love your book. The description of it is, Finley and his mom or a happy family until the lion fish came and took their home away. I love the description of it. The illustrations are lovely, the search for home. And what's so interesting is that you say that you chose a clownfish, Finley, because clownfish usually have homes unlike sardines you said..

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Ethan Goodey  

Thank you for having me. I appreciate this opportunity. Yeah, I was talking with my artist about it because I originally just wanted to do something on childhood homelessness, and I wasn't sure how to exactly go about it. So I started talking with Ethan Perea and he was the one who came up with the idea of making a clownfish because usually clownfish have reefs, and they have the anemone home, so it would work really well.

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Carol Jenkins  

And Jeff and I are having so much fun with this, Ethan. So tell us how you came to write the book, you had experience with homelessness yourself.

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Ethan Goodey  

I've always had this passion to start writing something, and always felt like something I couldn't get out on paper. So I finally had something to where it hit close home to me. And I knew we could actually do some good benefit for the world. So it just gave me enough motivation to actually get that out there.

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Jeff Madrick  

When you were homeless, did you have a lost direction? Was it an anxiety issue? How do you describe it?

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Ethan Goodey  

It was a lot of issues. It was like a cumulative amount of events that led me to that. So for most of my life, I lived with my grandmother and I didn't live with my parents. I currently talk to my mother now, but currently my father, he's in prison right now. He went in and out, in and out. And I lived with my grandma for a while and we became very poor, she became on disability. And we were living on about $1,000 a month. And that was about the only income we could have. 

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Before I became homeless, we started getting most of our diet out of the dumpster over at Kroger. And then that's what we would mostly eat, just random deli stuff. They throw out random dry goods that were expired and everything. That happened and my grandmother's disease was starting to overtake her. She became very, very stressed. And my father is living at the house at that time as well. He was a drug addict. And it caused a lot of stress. And it ended with me being kicked out of the home. And for about a solid year, year and a half, I was living from couch to couch, trying to figure out a friend's house to stay at. There were some times where I couldn't find anywhere to sleep. So I would just walk around the city for hours and hours at a time just to help the sun comes up.

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Carol Jenkins  

Ethan, how old were you?

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Ethan Goodey  

We started with the dumpsters around 16. And then between 16 and 17 is when I'd start leaving the home because it wasn't a good home life. And I'd stay with random friends. And then eventually it just went to full homelessness around the end of 16th started when I was turning 17. And then I stayed around there until around. I just turned almost 18. I was there for about solid 10 months a year. And I reconnected with my birth mother that I never really had a conversation with. I messaged her, and I ended up sitting on her couch for a couple of weeks. And then it just kept progressing from there, to where I am now.

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Carol Jenkins  

Wow, and where are you now? How have things progressed?

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Ethan Goodey  

I live with my girlfriend. We've been together for a few years now. And I keep on a full time job and I work on a bunch of other projects along with this book.

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Carol Jenkins  

So things have turned in a positive direction for you. How did that happen? How did you go from using the dumpster as your source of food to be full time employed with a home of your own and a book?

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Ethan Goodey  

[INAUDIBLE] Because I was very depressed at the time too. I was suicidal. And it was something that was always part of my life, was just this depression. And it just led me down this road of just misery pretty much and I didn't really have any motivation to actually get out of it. So eventually, I kept getting broken down and broken down and I just had this point where I'm still alive. I'm alive for a reason. And I'm having to go through this for a reason. I convinced myself of this. And so no matter what keeps getting thrown at me, I'm gonna make it no matter what. I don't care what it takes, I'm just going to do it. So I keep going. And I kept going and then eventually got a new job, started saving up money, just kept doing side hustles and just trying to do random stuff, just trying to get money, met my girlfriend, and then ended up going from house to house. I had to live with a very paranoid schizophrenic at one point to try to avoid homelessness. I lived in a house of about seven different people just so I can actually have somewhere to stay. I just kept working and saving money and working and working and working just out of spite no matter what I'm going to make it and it was just nothing but hard work 24/7.

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Jeff Madrick  

You must have written this book with the idea that other people needed. I hate to call it your advice. But it's partly that, how to go with it, how to get out of homelessness.

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Ethan Goodey  

It's the hope, more than I think the advice because a lot of people when you get my situation, because I know personally, you feel like you're never gonna get out of there. Doesn’t matter what you do, it feels like you will never get there and you're stuck there. And you're not. It's super hard, especially if you don't have anyone around you but it is possible. And having that hope, like how I gave myself that hope is really the only way you can do it.

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Jeff Madrick  

Excellent. What does society need? Or is that too abstract a question to be meaningful?

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Ethan Goodey  

So I think about this a lot. And I really think the issue with this is it's a cultural problem. We don't have a sense of community anymore. People don't look at their neighbor and think I love you. And it's a really lack of care and compassion in our communities. We're at a time to where personally, I feel that we're super divided between people and their opinions and their politics and everything. And it just gets us to this point to where we're not actually helping anyone that actually needs it. Because we're so wound up in trying to hate each other instead of loving each other.

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Carol Jenkins  

You are dedicating half of the profits for the book to Project Oz. Talk with us a little bit about that. How did you learn about them and get involved with that organization?

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Ethan Goodey  

I originally was trying to get with them because I was running at Comic Con at that time. It was one of the projects I started working on and we ran one in Bloomington and I always had this want to help charities, especially when I'm actually doing something good. So I reached out to them, we started talking and couldn't make anything happen. 

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So when the book came around, I was like, hey, so I want to do this. I'm [INAUDIBLE] might as well give it to someone that needs it more than I do at this point. So I reached out to Lisa Thompson over the Project Oz. I sent her an email, and she was more than happy for it. I reached out to her after I wrote the book. I was like, I have this. Let me donate this to you. And then that's it pretty much and they were ecstatic about it. So there's a local one out of Bloomington, Illinois. They’re about 25 minutes away from me from where I currently reside. So it was an easy choice.

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Carol Jenkins  

Yeah, what we've been reading about them is very, very good. So many kids who are put out of their homes. There are some who lose their homes. There are some families who put their kids out because they disagree with their lifestyle, or can no longer support them all of that and Project Oz is one of the shelters.

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Ethan Goodey  

Yeah. And they've helped thousands of kids at this point.

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Jeff Madrick  

What's your future gonna be like, Ethan?

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Ethan Goodey  

I really just hope and I'm striving for putting work towards just making it a future to where I help people. Personally, right now I have a house. I have a happy girlfriend, and I have a dog. And that's really all I need in this life to be happy. Really. I'm just kind of pushing people to get help that they need and to help just build up my community. So to answer your question shortly. I hope my future just looks like me building up the communities around me.

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Jeff Madrick  

Fascinating story. Thank you for joining us Ethan, and good luck with the book, and all your other projects. I suspect they'll be pretty successful.

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Ethan Goodey  

I appreciate that.

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Carol Jenkins  

Thank you, Ethan. 

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Ethan Goodey 

Thank you.

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

Jeff Madrick

History will judge the nation's decency in various ways, one of them will surely be the well-being of all its children. American neglect of its poor children is both inexplicable and deplorable. By basic measures, it has the highest child poverty rate among rich nations in the world. A generation of careful academic research has shown how damaging this has been to children's cognition, health, nutrition, and future wages. We are dedicated to restoring a bright and optimistic future for all children in this land long celebrated for equal opportunity.

Carol Jenkins  

Thanks so much for joining us on the Invisible Americans podcast available wherever you get your podcasts, but we urge you to visit our website for transcripts, show notes, research and additional information about our guests and their work. That's www.theinvisibleamericans.com. Please follow us on social media and our new YouTube channel. And our blog posts are up on Medium as well as our website. That's www.theinvisibleamericans.com Jeff and I will see you the next time.

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

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