Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Let's talk now about the book and its message today in the lead-up to Labor Day with Alissa Quart.

She co-founded the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project along with Ehrenreich, and she has a piece about Nickel and Dimed in The Nation.

Alissa, welcome back to the program.

It's great to be here.

... that affordability and concerns around that become a major issue politically, and people vote along those lines and along their own self-interest.

Mm-hmm.

We have been talking to Alyssa Court, co-founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, EHRP, about Barbara Ehrenreich and the book she wrote twenty-five years ago now, Nickel and Dimed.

And Alyssa's piece in The Nation is Saluting a Matriarch twenty-five years after Nickel and Dimed.

Hey folks, welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.

Today, I'm speaking with Alissa Quart and Anne Larson of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Alyssa built the organization with the legendary Barbara Ehrenreich, whose landmark book, Nickel and Dimed, is now 25 years old.

What you don't necessarily realize when you're selling your time by the hour is that what you're actually selling is your life.

Maybe it's the experience, the class, the identity.

How does the meaning sort of fall away in the current conception?

I think some of the meaning falls away even if you take journalism, right? So this organization I created with Barbara, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a lot of the older reporters that have been laid off or have had their word counts winnowed and those people are now having a very different future to look forward to both economically and personally than they thought they would.

And that's happened in multiple fields.

I put together a forum with her.

Arlie Hochschild, who's also a legend, said, Bill Fletcher, who is a unionist and an activist who worked with Barbara, and Anne Larson, who is a writer of Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the organization I created with Barbara.

And

she herself had been a low-wage worker, so she was writing from that perspective.

I think there's more of an emphasis on people telling their own stories, nothing about us without us.

And that's part of what this organization she created was seeking to do.

Talk about her, her as a person, and how you came to know her and work together and start the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

She was amazing.

It builds off her New York Times Sunday Review cover story, The End of Babies, and was published in September 26 by Day Street Books.

She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, McDowell, the Hambridge Center, the Greater Good Science Center, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the DeGroote Foundation, and others.

She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, the 2024 cohort of Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows, and an Omidyar Network reporter in residence in the fall of 2024.

She has reported from two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America.

So how did Illinois take that step and what's been the surprising result? To talk about that, we have journalist Bryce Covert, who wrote about Illinois' experience.

With support from the Pulitzer Center and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, her article appeared recently in The Nation magazine.

And joining us from Illinois are two people directly involved in the passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act.

Sharon R. Mitchell Jr., Cook County Chief Public Defender, was the lead policy expert for the Coalition to End Money Bond.

People will always try to try to get a little bit better or a little bit worse.

But my thought is that we are in a place where we've been able to prove that this is something that is working for communities far better than the previous system.

Well, as Sharon said, the telling of the story is so important, and I want to thank you, Bryce, for telling it, and also point out that you needed help to do that, that you, in your byline, mentioned support from the Pulitzer Center, from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Why? Why did you need that help to tell this story? I guess I'm talking about the economics of reporting in these times.