Downsized

Our Story

The Trailer Trash Project is seeking funds for a mobile recording studio to gather stories about real people living through hard times.  Our current project will document stories of homeless children living with their families in parked cars and trailers around the Greater Los Angeles area. We are also interested in the stories of children whose families are facing foreclosure on their homes. These stories will be used in  a mulitimedia exhibit housed inside our 1951 Spartan trailer. We'll take the exhibit to community centers, libraries and schools in Los Angeles. Our goal is  to encourage conversation and consider solutions to address the root cause of childhood poverty.

The Impact

The housing crisis that erupted in 2008 has led to more that 8 million foreclosures with more in the pipeline in 2012. Children have been hit  especially hard by the country's financial woes.  Today more than one in four American child living in poverty.   What can we do?  The first step is to listen.  Downsized: Real Stories Of Homeless Children will hold the real life stories of displaced children up to the light.  

What We Need & What You Get

Please help us get our mobile story telling booth - a 1972 Aristocrat trailer (see photo gallery) on the road.  We need to raise $3500 for:

1. A 2001 Ford Windsurfer Van to tow the trailer:  $2500 

2. Van registration and insurance:  $300

3. A Tascam broadcast quality audio recorder + editing software:  $400                                                  4. Gasoline = $300

The Trailer Trash Project is a member of Fractured Atlas.  

As such, donations are tax-deductible.

Other Ways You Can Help                                                                                                                     Strapped for cash? You can still help! Spread the word - add this campaign to your social networking site.  Donate art work, music, tickets, for us to use as perks. Send us suggestions. Sign up for our mailing list:  trailertrashproject@yahoo.com

About Us                                                                                                                                                      The Trailer Trash Project partners with a multicultural, multidisciplinary, intergenerational group of artists – actors, poets, musicians, puppeteers, visual artists and others – who bring art to underserved neighborhoods around Los Angeles. The thing that ties us together is that we are all interested in exploring the meaning of home and community.   We operate out of 1951 Spartan trailer that we are restoring into a green and movable place to live and showcase art. 

 The project was founded by Lydia Breen, a writer, documentary filmmaker and Katrina evacuee and Sam Breen, an actor who recently received his MFA in Theatre from California Institute of the Arts.  Lydia has a long interest in the lives of displaced people. She worked for many years filming in refugee camps around the world for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), the International Red Cross and other international humanitarian organizations. In 2007, she co-wrote the documentary Shake The Devil Off about the post-Katrina lives of a black Catholic parish in New Orleans’ Treme neighborhood.

Writer and teacher, Ebony Williams is assisting with the exhibit.  Ebony is a CalArts grad student who teaches creative writing in workshops for homeless kids in West Hollywood and Skid Row. Her book, How to Build A Ragdoll explores the female body as container for memory, culture, and an ancestral home often impacted by trauma.

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UNICEF’s  State of the World’s Children 2012 :

"...millions of children in cities and towns all over the world are. at risk of being left behind. Excluding these children not only robs them of the chance to reach their full potential; it robs their societies of the economic benefits of having a well-educated, healthy urban population...”    -