POTTER’S FIELD CAMPAIGN WRAP-UP

2004 – Inspired an interfaith coalition of faith leaders to form Interfaith Friends of Potter’s Field to support our work to open Potters Field to interfaith services.

2005 – Won for the first time, the right for homeless people to travel to Potters Field to mourn a friend. Several members of Picture the Homeless, Lewis Haggins family and four faith leaders went to Potter’s Field on Hart Island to celebrate a memorial for Lewis Haggins, our co-founder.

2005 Moved the NYC Department of Correction to allow Interfaith services on Potters Field six times per year, coordinated by Picture the Homeless.

2005 – Co-wrote a liturgy with Union Theological Seminary Student Rev Amy Gopp, “With All Due Respect” to honor the lives of all those buried in Potter’s Field. Union Theological Seminary hosted this memorial on March 3, 2005, and have now adopted as part of their curricula.

2005 – Won the addition of a staffer person at the City Morgue to conduct additional identity verification for deceased Jane and John Does.

2005 – Created a documentary film about the Potter’s Field Campaign, Journey to Dignity.

Charley Heck: Well, for people that have never been forced to live on the street—the uninitiated, they really don’t have a conception of the life of a homeless person. For them to devise all these programs and charities is helpful to a degree, but it doesn’t satisfy the sense of accomplishment. It doesn’t really give a person a sense of accomplishment of doing something, and that’s what I feel is vastly insufficient in helping people on the street.

Willie Baptist: I remember taking that story and that whole campaign around the country and how people responded. I don’t care if they’re homeless or not. They just responded.

I think today it’s something that we need to have people know about because there’s Potter’s Fields all over the country. Every city, they’re a situation where people who can’t afford to die, which is a contradiction the richest country in the world and you can’t afford to die, let alone afford to live, that they have these Potter’s Fields that are set up.

And I think it’s something that needs to be talked about because I think it’s an exposure and an indictment on a society that has so much, and yet people die with nothing.