Series with Aaron Munro #4. Media’s Role in Defining the Un-housed Person’s Identity.

After 17 years working in Vancouver Canada’s Downtown Eastside, Aaron Munro’s highly unique and courageously inventive practice ideas have been studied by mental health systems all over the world and are now being discussed as more humane practices to consider inserting into refugee camps. In our third episode, Aaron guides us through a multitude of relational practices he learned from the homeless people he works with that led him to purposefully challenge and ingeniously disrupt former taken for granted ideas about ‘professional’ relationships with homeless people and managing homeless shelters.

The Media’s Role in Defining the Un-housed Narrative, Aaron writes:

In my experience Media has the largest role is disrupting or creating the narrative about both un-housed people and the friction between housed and un-housed people. Journalists have the ability to write a detailed story that creates a larger contextual frame of a problem offering the general public more information to ponder social issues. Media also have the ability to only ‘listen to the loudest voices’ of decent and amplifying an often dominant narrative about the un-housed causing no social change and – increasing fear in our community. Journalists don’t just write a story, they create it. I have met with a lot of great Media people throughout my work, people dedicated to the truth. I have also met a lot of people dedicated to their own political leanings who slant the story for their cause or to increase their own notoriety.