Freedom Place

Freedom Place, Inc. was founded in March, 1991 as a grassroots organization of poor and homeless people in the city of Saint Paul. We grew out of the protest group "Up & Out of Poverty Now! which organized poor and homeless people to band together and fight for their rights to housing. We used civil disobedience and created a great stir in the medi... a by occupying abandoned HUD homes in Minneapolis and then Saint Paul in 1990 through 1994. We found public support and worked with other social justice groups to pressure government to do more for the homeless and we succeeded in bringing public attention and new housing into the area. In the mid 1990's we evolved into a service organization by turning our attention to chemical dependency. We saw that a huge percentage of the people we worked with had drug and alcohol problems. That and mental illness along with the shortage of affordable housing were the roots causes of homelessness. So we reached out to people on the street willing to work and stay sober. We created a canvass that employed the poor to raise funds to buy and rehab vacant and run down homes in the inner cities. We did the majority of the rehab work with labor provided by the poor and homeless people we were working with. This worked well enough that were still operating sober homes almost thirty years later with not one dime from the government.Read More