TO USE VISUAL MEDIA TO RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES,  DISPEL INACCURATE AND DESTRUCTIVE STEREOTYPES ABOUT POOR PEOPLE AND ENCOURAGE ACTION ON THEIR BEHALF.
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FORTY YEARS AGO President Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty, urging Americans to come to the rescue of those who lived “on the outskirts of hope.” And yet poverty persists – deeply, seemingly intractably – and hidden from the focus of mainstream America.

“The casualties and ghosts of the abandoned war on poverty sit in our classrooms, walk our streets and waste away in our prisons,” says Geoffrey Canada,  president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone. “This is truly the American Nightmare: impoverished, uneducated and unemployable amid a land of plenty. We can continue to ignore them and pay the price or we can call up the national resolve to fight – and through education, win – the country’s abandoned war on poverty.”

In Our Own Backyard is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization of photojournalists committed to the cause of social reform in the United States. Our inaugural project, AmericanPoverty.org is a multimedia examination of the daily struggles of impoverished Americans: a comprehensive and innovative campaign that will affect the way the general public and policymakers think about poverty in America. We believe that increasing awareness about poverty is a critical prelude to building support for initiatives, like the Harlem Children’s Zone, that can create lasting impact in the lives of disadvantaged people. Visual story-telling is unique in its power to achieve that awareness.

We are proud to be sponsored by and partnered with Catholic Charities USA. and their campaign to cut poverty in half by 2020. Together we are producing nine major photographic and multi-media exhibits throughout the United States which will begin in the fall of 2009. Additional partnerships with such organizations as the University of North Carolina Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity, and the Center for American Progress will be critical to carrying the immediacy and emotional impact of visual journalism to the next level, by sponsoring local initiatives, educational curricula, anti-poverty action campaigns and celebrity endorsements inspired by the new imagery.

By pushing the hidden adversity of Americans into greater view, AmericanPoverty.org and its partners will help make fighting poverty a national priority once again.