Tag Archives: Mark Horvath

Lost & Found in Como Park

Como ParkHere’s proof that I’m crazy.

Earlier this week I announced Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of Homelessness, my project to support Mark Horvath and InvisiblePeople.tv. It launches November 9. Last night I launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish this year’s National Novel Writing Month effort, Lost & Found in Como Park.

As if my life wasn’t crazy enough.

So here’s the deal: I love Como Park. It’s this great park we have in St. Paul. It’s got a free zoo and the conservatory and trails and statues. It’s more than 100 years old, so there’s history everywhere you look. It’s great place to take your family.

I’ve decided to set this year’s NaNoWriMo story in Como Park. I want to use the locale and the history—and more than that, I want to bridge fiction and reality. I want to place a memorial brick in Como Park for a fictional character from the book. It’s a celebration of Como Park and a way to make the story real.

So if we can hit the $1,000-goal then we’ll publish the book and put a brick in Como Park and make this thing happen. Kickstarter works on pledges, so if we don’t hit the goal, you don’t have to pay. I’ll write the book either way, but publishing the book and placing the brick are dependent on getting enough pledges. If we go past the goal we can make the book better.

There are all kinds of rewards for making a pledge and backing the project. I tried to make them low cost and high fun—so you’re getting a deal, not being charged a premium. For $10 you can get a copy of the book (I won’t be able to sell it that cheap, so you’re getting a deal). We’re also giving away a bunch of Como Park souvenirs that I’m going to work into the story. You can also be written into the story. Or you can get a personal tour of Como Park. Lots of fun stuff.

I’m hoping this will serve as some extra incentive while I’m writing the novel and a fun way to share the story and Como Park with all of you.

Or, I’m just crazy.

The novel writing starts on Monday. You’ve got until the end of November to pledge. Want to join me?

InvisiblePeople.tv Book Launches November 9

Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of HomelessnessMy third book project of 2010, Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of Homelessness, will officially launch on Nov. 9. The book will support homeless advocate Mark Horvath and his work with the nonprofit InvisiblePeople.tv.

The book gives voice to homeless people, retelling their stories from videos on InvisiblePeople.tv. It also features the contributions from some 25 tech, nonprofit and social media experts reflecting on homelessness and the power of technology that Mark has harnessed. The book also tackles misconceptions about homelessness and gives suggestions for how you can help.

It officially launches on Nov. 9 and will be available for $9.99 on Amazon (details on digital formats are forthcoming). All profits will go to InvisiblePeople.tv. That works out to $3.84 per copy from Amazon, 100% of the royalty. I’m not making any money on this project.

Since Mark first supported one of my initial efforts to help the homeless (while he was facing homelessness himself), I’ve been a huge fan of him and his work. I’ve always thought Mark should have more support than he does and I’ve been appalled when I hear how he’s barely making it. Someone with his heart doing the work he’s doing shouldn’t have to worry about health insurance or what he’s going to eat. That’s why I so strongly supported his efforts to win the $50,000 Pepsi Challenge grant at SXSW (which he did win, and he reinvested into WeAreVisible.com, among other efforts).

And so I’ve always wanted to do something big to support Mark. Sure I could send him a check, but that’s not going to go very far (especially a check from my bank account). I always thought someone needed to rally behind Mark and create something to raise money for him.

I had the idea of creating a book with all the proceeds going to Mark. He has such a good story and has inspired so many and there’s such a need for a more in-depth resource like that. It was a brilliant idea (if I do say so myself), but no one was doing it.

So I decided it was time to do it.

Last January the process started and I actually thought we could have the book out in March. Silly me. Ten months later we’re finally getting the book out with the support of so many people (check out all those names at the bottom of the page—those are the ones who made this happen).

And we’re going to need more help. This is a self-published project and that means it won’t go anywhere unless we get it there. And to be honest, I’ve put so much time into this project that I really can’t afford to give it the time it now needs. My only hope is that the many contributors, the many friends and supporters of Mark, and folks like you will pick up the torch and carry this project home.

So please check it out. Buy a copy. Tell your friends.

It’s time we opened our eyes and saw the invisible homeless people in our midst. They’re not just the stereotypical man on the corner with a cardboard sign. They’re families—just like mine. People—just like you—who were just one tragedy away from the street. Let’s open our eyes, open our hearts and help.

Can Twitter Change the World?

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the Twitter revolution by Malcolm Gladwell. Basically Gladwell says Twitter is not the glorious social revolution we think it is. He points to the incredible organizing ability of the civil rights movement that happened without social media and says that Twitter could never duplicate that effort.

He’s basically saying Twitter can’t change the world.

He argues that the civil rights movement was powered by strong connections and organized hierarchy, whereas Twitter relies on loose connections and no central authority. The resulting mob mentality results in chaos, not organized action of the type that overcame institutionalized racism.

I think Gladwell has a point.

But we miss the point if we think Twitter can’t make a difference. Twitter and other social media tools are not going to replace the hard work of revolutions. But they do enable different kinds of change.

For a simple example, look at Mark Horvath and the work he’s done with InvisiblePeople.tv. Or Shaun King’s work with TwitChange and aHomeInHaiti.org. Or my own  Bald Birthday Benefit or the recent well we funded in Ethiopia.  These were all projects powered in part by social media tools. While they’re not revolutionary, they are changing the world, one person at a time.

Twitter alone isn’t going to topple great social evils. But it can make a difference. And that’s something.

Sidebar: Reading Gladwell’s detailed stories of the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement makes me want to dive into that history. What a fascinating time.

Pregnant & Homeless in St. Paul

Mark Horvath Talking to Ka'e k'eA couple weeks ago homeless advocate Mark Horvath (aka @hardlynormal) came to town on his national InvisiblePeople.tv road trip. Last year when he came to town I accompanied him to downtown St. Paul as he handed out socks and talked to homeless people, capturing their stories in poignant, uncut videos.

This year we made a shorter trip and talked to fewer people, but it was even more impacting. Because we talked to Ka’e k’e, a 20-year-old homeless pregnant woman. As Mark would say (and did say), I’m wrecked.

Her story is hard to watch because she’s so painfully honest. She’s pregnant because for a while she was couch surfing, and at times that meant survival sex was the only thing keeping a roof over her head. That’s right, men would tell her to take her clothes off or get out, and in the middle of a Minnesota winter walking out the door doesn’t seem like a good choice. As a result, she doesn’t know who the father of her child is.

She says she doesn’t believe in abortion, so here she is, pregnant and homeless at the Dorothy Day Center in downtown St. Paul. That says something about what pro-life advocates need to be doing.

She also admits to doing drugs, even though she knows it isn’t good for the baby. When Mark confronts her, she says it’s hard not to turn to something when you’re under such stress. I don’t condone what she’s doing, but I understand it. A hard day with the kids and I turn to food and drink as comfort. Others turn to alcohol and in worse conditions I can imagine turning to drugs seeming like a good idea. It’s obviously a horrible idea, but you try living on the street and not wanting a little escapism.

Ka’e k’e also has a 5-year-old son out there. I don’t know the story there, but I can imagine. She also has a family out there somewhere—some kind of family.

This is the reality of homelessness in America.

When I told Yeshumnesh about meeting Ka’e k’e, she said her heart was worried. I had to explain Mark’s concept of being wrecked. Because that’s what this story is.

Homelessness is real. Ka’e k’e is someone’s daughter. She’s someone’s mother. And her and millions of others like her need help.

Watch her story, open your eyes and do something.

We Are Visible: Connecting Homeless People

Mark Horvath is at it again. The founder of InvisiblePeople.tv has put that Pepsi money to good use and launched WeAreVisible.com, a site that connects homeless people to social media.

I can see folks scoffing already—why do homeless people need Facebook?!—but those are the folks who don’t get the power of social media. Those are the folks who don’t realize that Mark Horvath has been doing this since 2008 and funded two cross-country trips with the power of social media. These are the folks who don’t realize the power of having a voice.

Homeless people are often powerless, voiceless and invisible. But they’re not helpless. WeAreVisible.com educates them about tools that can make them visible again.

And it works. The site includes stories of homeless people who have been empowered by social media.

I love seeing Mark in action. I just wish my InvisiblePeople.tv book was out and raising support for efforts like this. Soon. The book is so close.

What is Social Media Good For? Ask Johnny

If you’re one of those people who doesn’t get the blogging or the Twitface and always scratches your head wondering what this stuff is good for, well, just ask Johnny. I talked about him the other day: Johnny is a disabled veteran who has been living in his mobile home until it got impounded. His very home was impounded and he had to live on the streets in his wheelchair for 19 days.

Thanks to Mark Horvath of InvisiblePeople.tv spreading the word through social media, he was able to raise an additional $345 to go with the $280 Johnny had raised on his own and get his home out of the impound.

Here’s the story:

Helping the homeless doesn’t have to be so hard.

If you’re in the Twin Cities, there’s a local ‘sleep in your car’ event organized by a guy who sleeps in his car. It’s an opportunity to experience what the homeless experience every day and get motivated to do something about it.

Spending the Night at Church with Homeless Families

One month a year my church hosts the county’s overflow shelter for homeless families. It’s called Project Home and it’s something I’ve supported for a while now. It’s the organization we were raising money for when we spent a night homeless.

This week I finally volunteered for the organization, sleeping over at my church on Monday night as an overnight volunteer and spending Tuesday evening there as well. There were four families spending the night at our church, five adults and 11 kids. They spend the day at family shelters, finding services they need, working or whatever they need to do, and come to our church for around 12 hours, from after supper until the morning. We offer snacks and breakfast, and then provide whatever they may need. Usually that means keeping the kids entertained while the adults relax.

It’s an eye-opening experience. These are families being chewed up by poverty and the economy. You can see how out of sorts the kids are, in a strange place with new volunteers every night and parents who are pushed to the edge. And I said we’re the overflow shelter—we’re actually the overflow for the overflow shelter. Some months there’s even a third overflow shelter. The need is tremendous.

I’ve been wanting to volunteer with Project Home for a long time, and this year it got to the point where I don’t think I could face my good friend Mark Horvath if I hadn’t volunteered with Project Home. Mark is good at kicking my butt that way.

While I’m glad I finally volunteered, and I’m up for doing it again, I felt completely inadequate. I’m not the outgoing, talkative person who strikes up conversations with ease. I did my job, but I never felt like I did it very well. I guess I felt like these families deserved something more. And they do.

Go Geeks: Mark Horvath Wins $50K

So homeless advocate Mark Horvath won the SXSW Pepsi Challenge. I stayed up until midnight on Monday night sending out tweets, bugging people to tweet and watching the parade of #RefreshGary hashtags come in. We went to sleep pretty sure we’d done it, and Tuesday at noon Pepsi confirmed it and announced InvisiblePeople.tv the winner of the $50,000.

I’m so happy for Mark. I’m shocked at what the guy has been able to accomplish with such minimal support. Most of us need a paycheck to do good work, either being employed by a nonprofit or having a real job so we can do volunteer work on the side. But Mark doesn’t have either (OK, he has the case manager job, but it barely covers his rent). He’s got nothing in his fridge and yet he still champions the cause of the homeless. He’s an incredible inspiration.

That’s why I didn’t mind spamming my friends. Heck, I can hardly call it spamming them when I’m telling them why Mark is so deserving of this grant. I don’t like these spammy tell all your friends contests. I don’t like that they pit good ideas against each other. I don’t like that somebody wins and somebody loses. I hope folks learn from that and do something different next time. But it was Mark Horvath and he needed the help. He didn’t ask for it, but this was offered to him I’ll be damned if I was going to standby and watch him miss an easy opportunity for funding.

$50,000 is huge, but it’s also not. It’s not an unreasonable salary for a person of Mark’s position in a nonprofit (that position being everything from CEO to camera guy to janitor). He could give himself an actual salary and restock the fridge and he’d be just fine in my book. But knowing Mark, he’s not going to be sitting back with this money. That’s part of why my little InvisiblePeople.tv book project is so important to me. As huge as this grant is, Mark needs the on-going support.

Anyway, we won. Geeks doing good. Awesome. Thank you Pepsi. Thank you Gary Vaynerchuk. Thank you everybody who tweeted. And thank you, Mark. This was the least we could do.

The video announcement and Mark’s “acceptance speech”:

Other cool folks blogging about the victory:

The InvisiblePeople.tv Book

Mark Horvath Ready for ActionI’ve been tweeting and blogging about the SXSW Pepsi Challenge all weekend (and will be until midnight tonight) trying to win a $50,000-grant for homeless advocate Mark Horvath and his InvisiblePeople.tv project. A few tweets could earn Mark the support he desperately needs. The guy has been on the verge of homelessness since 2008 when he started this project to help the homeless. That’s dedication.

I’ve been tweeting like mad because I believe in what Mark is doing. Unfortunately he’s losing to an idea supported by the tech site Mashable, a site with more than a million views a day. (An idea, by the way, that no one has yet invested in or proven—Mark has been doing his thing since 2008; OK, sorry. Shouldn’t rag on the competition, I’m just a little bitter about that.) I’m so passionate about this because a few tweets could give Mark some major support. It kills me that he doesn’t have the support he needs.

So I tweet like mad. But if all our frantic tweeting doesn’t get Mark the $50,000 he deserves, it’s not a total loss. At least we’ll have helped spread the word about what he’s doing.

But the reality is that I’ve been doing a lot more than tweeting.

I’ve got a secret: I’ve been working on a book about homelessness to support Mark’s work. In my wildest dreams I thought I could have had the book ready by this past weekend—conveniently in time for Mark’s appearance at SXSW.

Continue reading The InvisiblePeople.tv Book

Geeks Doing Good: Help Mark Horvath Win $50,000

The SXSW Interactive Festival is going on this weekend in Austin, Texas. It’s a bigtime collection of web geeks (and yes, I so wish I could be there). The cool thing about web geeks is that they care about causes. There are a lot of online competitions happening this weekend to raise money for various causes, all in geeky fun.

There are probably others I’ve missed, but I’m most excited about Mark Horvath and the Pepsi Challenge. Here’s how it works: He’s competing against two others to see who can get the most votes by midnight on Monday. Winner gets a $50,000 grant from Pepsi. You vote by tweeting “#RefreshGary” and you can vote every two hours. All the details are on Pepsi’s Facebook page (vote on Twitter, details on Facebook?).

I’ve talked about Mark before. He’s a tireless advocate for the homeless. When he lost his job in the fall of 2008 he was only seven weeks away from being homeless. Again. He spent a year in the 1990s living on the streets of Hollywood. But instead of worrying about being homeless himself, he went out and started InvisiblePeople.tv to tell the story of other homeless people. He’s been doing that since, and the entire time he’s been on the verge of homelessness.

He lives in a cockroach apartment in Los Angeles. I interviewed him for an article a few months back and the contents of his fridge was a bottle of water, milk and a discount veggie tray. He was eating dinner at the homeless shelter, not because he wanted to, but because he had to.

If anybody could use $50,000 from Pepsi, it’s Mark.

Mark started InvisiblePeople.tv with next to nothing. Yet he’s shared the uncensored stories of over 100 homeless people, from Los Angeles to New York, Florida to Seattle, New Orleans to St. Paul. He’s done incredible things with no resources. Imagine what he could do with $50,000.

I get kind of tired of these social network voting things where we spam our friends and the most popular person wins. But I can hardly consider telling my friends about Mark Horvath to be spam. If you get tired of it, you can ignore me. If it makes you mad, stop following me. If I lose a bunch of followers because I tried to help my friend, so be it. If you don’t like it then you can give Mark $50,000 and I’ll be quiet. I just want to help my friend.

So I’m asking you to help Mark out. We only have until midnight tomorrow. So hop on your Twitter account and slap a “#RefreshGary” tag on your tweets every two hours. If you don’t have a Twitter account, set one up just for today. Why not?

Geeks doing good. What’s not to love?

Update: Here’s a story Mark shared from my own backyard. Pearl calls a shelter in St. Paul her home. She wants to know if you’re kind or cold-hearted? This why Mark deserves this grant from Pepsi, so he can continue to share these stories and make us realize the reality of homelessness in our own cities.

Pearl from InvisiblePeople.tv on Vimeo.