Keynote

Date: Thursday, 9/24

Time: 8:30-9:45am

Homelessness is not an intractable mystery. It is the predictable outcome of deliberate policy choices, entrenched stigma, and a social architecture designed, whether by intention or indifference, to exclude rather than welcome. In this keynote, activist-scholar, nonprofit community leader, documentary filmmaker, and researcher Dr. Terence Lester argues that before we can solve homelessness, we must first honestly name the forces that keep it unsolved.

Drawing on scholarly research, personal and family experience, and community practice, as well as scenes from the documentary film Homesick, this talk moves between the intimate and the systemic, from the daily indignities faced by people experiencing homelessness to the sweeping policy shifts that threaten to deepen their marginalization. From the Grants Pass decision and punitive state legislation to executive orders promoting involuntary psychiatric commitment, the keynote maps the legal and cultural machinery that criminalizes poverty and strips our unhoused neighbors of dignity, voice, and belonging.

Central to this talk is an examination of the stigma loop, the self-reinforcing cycle in which negative narratives about unhoused people shape punitive policies, those policies produce worse outcomes, and those outcomes are then used to justify the original stigma. This loop does not sustain itself by accident. It is fed by media framing, political rhetoric, and public disdain that consistently portrays those who are unhoused as dangerous, unworthy, or unwilling, making it nearly impossible for society to respond with care rather than contempt.

The way out of this loop, Dr. Lester contends, is narrative justice. When we center the voices, experiences, and full humanity of unhoused people in the stories we tell, we fracture the logic that makes exclusion feel natural or inevitable. Film, research, testimony, and community witness become tools of liberation, not just documentation. Narrative justice insists that who tells the story, and how it is told, determines what solutions become thinkable.

At the heart of this talk is a guiding question: What would it mean to truly see our unhoused neighbors as full members of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community? And what stands in the way?

The answer is not a lack of resources or knowledge. It is a failure of moral imagination sustained by stigma, political disdain, and systems built to manage rather than include. 

The path forward begins with proximity, presence, purpose, practice, and patience, and with the stubborn insistence that every human life belongs.