This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home
Location: Zoom
Speaker(s): Lauren Sandler, Julie Boatright Wilson, Raysa Rodriguez, Chris Herbert
Even before the COVID pandemic, nearly 60,000 New Yorkers – 40 percent of them children – slept in city-run shelters and more than half of the city’s residents were rent-burdened, paying more than a third of their income for housing. In This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, published last year, author Lauren Sandler makes these issues personal by following Camila, a young, homeless single mother for a year as she tried to find stability and shelter in New York City. The book, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, “is a testament to the bigness of the small story, to the power of intimate narratives to speak to something much larger” (The New York Times).
At this event, Sandler will discuss meeting Camila and writing the book, and how the pandemic has made a challenging problem even worse, both by increasing the number of people who cannot afford housing and making it more difficult to safely meet their needs. Sandler will be joined in conversation by Julie Boatright Wilson, the Harry S. Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Raysa Rodriguez, Associate Executive Director for Policy & Advocacy at the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, and Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Watch the Video:
Co-Sponsor(s): Harvard Urban Planning Organization, Harvard GSD Department of Urban Planning and Design, Homelessness Caucus at HKS
