Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHPR)

EHRP founder Barbara Ehrenreich said that journalists should not attempt to be unbiased but should instead focus on highlighting stories of alleged economic inequality and oppression. ² EHRP executive director Alissa Quart has criticized traditional American values of individualism and hard work and has said that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series promotes these false ideas. ³

Agenda

Poverty

Economic Hardship Reporting Project mostly focuses on highlighting the effects of poverty on people in the United States, hiring low-income people as journalists to report on economic inequality. ⁴ The organization then attempts to place those stories in publications across the country, including NBC, the New York Times, CNN, Politico, and Reuters. ⁵

Alissa Quart has said that “Media tends to be made by rich people, for middle-class people, about poor people. We exist in part to change that equation so more of the people writing about the working poor or struggling middle class are themselves working poor or struggling middle class.” ⁴

Barbara Ehrenreich founded EHRP with this goal, stating that she wanted to counter what she called “mainstream media’s, corporate media’s theory of poverty, which they can’t help but come back to, is that it is a character failure, it is manifested by laziness or promiscuity or addiction or something.” ²

Hard Work in American culture

EHRP has stated that traditional American values of individualism and hard work are mistaken models of how American society functions. Alissa Quart has written, “The bootstrapping story has captured American imaginations for a reason. But it is a tale that erases the roles of our parents, teachers and caretakers, as well as the part that wealth, gender, race, inherited property and a whole cache of related opportunities play in our lives.” ⁶

Quart has also criticized Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, saying that the books “could be seen as underlying both an American pressure to make it on one’s gumption alone and the accordant shame when a person could not do.” Quart also said this alleged myth applied even to people “who are not able-bodied white men willing to take land from indigenous populations” and claimed that people who are in poverty have been unjustly blamed by America society. ³

People

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich was the founder of the Economic Hardship Project. She passed away on September 1, 2022. Ehrenreich began her career as a freelance writer, and she eventually became successful after writing the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. ⁷  Ehrenreich claimed that it was ironic that “in America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty.” ²

According to EHRP’s executive director Alissa Quart, Ehrenreich was a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America in the group’s early years, and she was also apart of labor and women’s movements as well. ⁸ Quart also stated that Ehrenreich disagreed with the idea that journalists should try to objectively report the news without attempting to influence people’s opinions, instead believing that “you needed to have people who are able to speak truth to power contributing to all of the conversations.” ²

Alissa Quart

Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded EHRP with Barbara Ehrenreich, and she has been executive director for nearly a decade. ⁹ Quart has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, and TIME, and she has also authored 5 books, including one called Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, in which Quart claimed that focusing on hard work does not fully capture how upper-class people benefit from social support in American society. ¹⁰

Finances

While financial documents for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project have not been released, the organization’s 2020 Annual Report says that its budget was $912,000 in 2020. ¹¹ On its website, EHRP says that it receives support from numerous left-of-center foundations, including the James Irvine Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the Melville Charitable Trust, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations, the Puffin Foundation, the Solutions Journalism Network, the New York Community Trust, and the Heising-Simons Foundation. ¹²