Evicted in Chester County: A Virtual Conversation with Dr. Matthew Desmond, Thu, May 13

This is a FREE event! Join an important discussion about eviction and homelessness prevention in Chester County. Register here.

For nearly 200 years, the Friends Association has worked to protect children and keep families together. When families experience eviction it often leads to familial separation, chronic stress and long-term traumatic repercussions for both parents and children. The COVID-19 pandemic has served to highlight a dire need to understand, discuss, and take action on evictions. This ongoing crisis has left thousands of individuals and families without the means to afford rent and utilities and, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an estimated 230,000 Pennsylvanians are at risk for eviction.

To augment their ongoing homelessness prevention programs, Friends Association launched Chester County’s first Eviction Prevention Court (EPC) Program on September 1st to take action on the eviction crisis in our community. During the creation of this program, they connected with regional and national experts on eviction prevention in order to create an effective, holistic program to address not only the imminent crisis of eviction, but also the root causes.

Dr. Matthew Desmond stands as the leading researcher on poverty and eviction in America. As the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and the Principal investigator of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University; Dr. Desmond shares a common mission with the Friends Association: to prevent and end homelessness.

Friends Association invites you to connect with Dr. Desmond and discuss both the causes as well as the detrimental and long lasting impacts that evictions have on individuals, families and communities. Their hope is that, through these community conversations, we can all become better informed and thus better equipped to create solutions to this crisis. Register here.