On Empathy Recording: Poverty and Homelessness in Cambridge – with Philip Mills

On February 9, On Empathy held a discussion at the Bridge Storefront, led by special guest Philip Mills. Our invitation email described the event as follows:

We live in Cambridge, but much of the time I’m not sure how well we see it. We speak casually, even disparagingly, about ‘the locals’ here. Occasionally we might notice that homeless people sleep in the bank vestibules at night to keep warm, or that there’s a major shelter just down from Grand House. But what are the dynamics at work in our town that keep people on the street? What kinds of poverty persist here? And how do we fit into that picture?

This Thursday, at 7:30 at the Bridge Storefront (37 Main St), you’re invited to join us as Philip Mills leads a conversation on poverty and homelessness in Cambridge. Together we’ll begin to uncover the complexity of the societal systems that keep people poor, preventing many from accessing stable housing, and the particular ways those systems are perpetuated in this city. Phil is executive director of the Independent Living Centre of Waterloo Region, and former executive director of Greenway Chaplin Community Centre here in Cambridge. He will draw on his experience with social service provision to give us a local, on-the-ground perspective on these issues. We hope this conversation can begin to deepen the way we think about the location of our school, and the way we approach studio projects locally.