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Center for Social Policy
McCormack Graduate School
University of Massachusetts Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02125-3393
Phone: (617) 287 5550
Fax: (617) 287 5544
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Pine Street power
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Author(s):
Editorial
Source(s):
Boston Globe
Date: February 11, 2004
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FOUR PINE Street Inn residents are an inspiring civics lesson for the state -- and the country --
as they hand out voter registration forms to homeless people and urge them to go to the
polls.
Over the past two months, Jim Cronin, Fred Atkinson, Dwayne Lopes, and Roger Chagnon have
persuaded 73 of their housemates in the 200-bed center Pine Street transitional housing
facility on Boston's Long Island to file voter registration cards. While the numbers may seem
small in this new drive, the zeal of the organizers appears limitless, for they view
registration as being as empowering as that first job or the decision to get help with
substance abuse. "In a single stroke you are no longer a victim," said Cronin, 65, in a
telephone interview, describing the feeling of the newly registered voter. "You become a part
of the United States of America."
He and fellow organizers are planning to take that message to the 1,100 people served by
Pine Street's South End headquarters, to residents of other shelters, and into the streets
in an effort to restore social service budget cuts and to elect people sympathetic to their
cause. "There will be no end to this thing," said Cronin, and his words are the pulse of
democracy, for there is no greater power than the voice of citizens who decide to be
heard.
The Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston says there were
23,000 homeless people in the state in 1999, and the number has increased. The potential
for a voting bloc is there. Homeless people can list a shelter as an address or simply
indicate a street corner. The Pine Street registration drive reminds all citizens of the
importance of placing the X on the ballot -- and the future that might be squandered if one
chooses not to care.
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