Lynn Lewis

Lynn Lewis is a popular educator, oral historian, community organizer, and consultant to grass roots organizations. Her work is defined by radical listening, guided by the belief that the expertise, analysis, and leadership of folks most harmed by systems of injustice is essential to liberation. She founded the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project with homeless leaders of the organization in 2017 to document the organizations work and to explore what the being a member of Picture the Homeless meant to the homeless leaders who shaped it. Coining the term, participatory oral history research, she combines elements of community organizing, participatory action research and oral history to reveal meaning for the purpose of documenting Picture the Homeless’s organizing methodology. She has presented this evolving model at Columbia University, The New School for Social Research and Princeton and in partnership with community based organizations including the Howard Zinn Bookfair in San Francisco, the Urban Justice Center in NYC, the Immigrant Defense Project and Mijente. She is the author of Love and Collective Resistance: Lessons from the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project. (Histoire sociale/Social history), and an essay based on the oral history project was included in the multi-media exhibit Imagining De-gentrified Futures Radical Housing Manifesto at Apex Art. Her other oral history endeavors include being an oral historian with the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia and is currently working as an oral historian and narrative consultant on a memoir of the life of Jean Rice, 81 year old social justice leader, and founding board member of Picture the Homeless.

Lynn was the Executive Director (17 years) and civil rights organizer (8 years) at Picture the Homeless (PTH). PTH is a grass roots organization founded by two homeless men in 1999. She began volunteering with them two months after they started the organization and stayed for 17 years helping to build one of the few homeless led organizations in the U.S. Under her leadership PTH moved the issue of homelessness onto the New York City social justice movement’s radar. By supporting the collective analysis and collective action of homeless New Yorkers, PTH advanced visible homeless political leadership and in the process upended stigmatizing stereotypes, winning public policy changes, passing legislation, and participating in the founding of organizations such as Communities united for Police Reform, the New York City Community Land Initiative, and the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary. During this period, PTH’s participatory action research reports, creative direct actions and media work helped to shape a generation of activists in NYC, across the U.S. and internationally.

As an educator, her work spans from training homeless grass roots leaders at PTH through the creation of popular education materials derived from the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project, to co-designing and co-leading workshops to dozens of NYC based organizations in campaign and leadership development, coaching staff and leaders from organizations including Met Council on Housing, the Laundry Worker’s Center, and the East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust, to teaching courses at Columbia University, Queens College, Hostos Community College and the New School where she teaches the Advanced Seminar in Public and Urban Policy.

Born in Baltimore and growing up on the Eastern shore of Maryland, she witnessed segregated water fountains, busing, classism, gender discrimination and homelessness. The disconnect between her own lived experienced and the shaming of the poor first led her to NYC’s Lower East Side in 1980, becoming a tenant in the Cooper Square community and the CHARAS/El Bohio Cultural and Community Center. She was deeply influenced by Frances Goldin, Valerio Orselli, Walter Thabit and Alex Harsley, and countless tenant leaders as well as Chino Garcia and folks at CHARAS. The expansion of her understanding what is politically possible took her to revolutionary Nicaragua where she lived for 3 years, working with a rural community to organize a day care and preschool. She is a mother and a grandmother and holds an MA in oral history from Columbia University and a BA from the State University of New York. She lives in East Harlem and is a member of StoptheSweepsNYC and is a member of the editorial collective for a book in progress, Fight Supremacy! with City Lights book.