The 19th Annual Homelessness Marathon

The 19th Annual Homelessness Marathon will be a four-hour broadcast, airing from 6-10 p.m., on the evening of January 19th – the eve of the inauguration! As always, the Marathon will feature the voices of desperately poor and homeless people. This year, we’ll be asking them one question above all: What would you like to tell the incoming president?” According to Homelessness Marathon director, Jeremy Weir Alderson, “This isn’t just about Donald Trump.

We’ve been doing this since Bill Clinton was in office.” In 1998, Alderson founded the broadcast in upstate New York, thinking it would be a one-time event, but the broadcast drew such a positive response that he kept it going, and it grew to have dozens of affiliates across the United States and a daughter broadcast, the Canadian Homelessness Marathon, airing on stations across Canada.

The 19th Annual Homelessness Marathon will be based in the studios of WMPG, community radio in Portland, Maine, where there will be in-studio guests both housed and homeless. But it is the hallmark of the Homelessness Marathon to air voices directly from the streets. This year a network of correspondents, offering microphones to homeless people across the country, will facilitate that mission.

The broadcast will be available free of charge to non-commercial radio stations across the country via the Public Radio Satellite System and the Pacifica Network.


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