✨PLEASE HELP Prevent My Houselessness!✨

Hi blossom! Hey there, fam, friend, creative, comrade, kith, kin, healer, heart. In these troubling times and festive days, with a few friends going through serious life challenges as well, I’m facing my own. I wish I didn’t need to ask but…

I need your help.

I will be evicted from my apartment unless I raise $2500 in emergency resources for rent arrears caused by a complication with a supportive housing voucher – despite my best efforts and through no fault of my own. Please help me keep my home.

need

I must immediately raise approximately $2500 or face eviction due to no fault of my own. On December 3rd I received court papers as well as a Notice to Quit ~ which in Housing Court language means that the landlord is demanding access to lock me out and kick me out of the apartment if I don’t pay my full balance by the end of the month.

December 31st. The last day of the year. Exactly 4 weeks from receipt of court papers.

why

I couldn’t have stopped this train at all. I've been in my home and a faithful tenant for the past twelve years. This $2500 debt accrued over 3 ½ months (balance of rent July to mid-October including court filing fees {$200} and late fees {$50/month}) that I have no choice but to resolve or I’m going to be homeless. The voucher activation delay was solely due to the landlord needing to turn in paperwork and the landlord needing to do repairs in my apartment. I have a court date on January 6th although I could be locked out on December 31st. In all cases, the debt must be met and it is well beyond my means. I desperately need your help.

Legal Services of NJ referred me to their Essex/Newark branch. I completed an intake with them on November 20th. I still need to be assigned an attorney and am calling them every other day since receiving court papers on December 3rd to follow up. Hopefully that assignment will occur soon and aid me in staying the Notice to Quit in the immediate term then advocating for me in court on January 6th. I am actively looking into institutional emergency funding sources (tips welcomed!) and friends have encouraged me to ask for community support.

sum it up

I am deeply grateful to those of you able and inclined to DONATE, SHARE and BOOST this appeal among your circles TODAY. Every scintilla of a penny counts on the path to $2500. Please help me keep my apartment of nearly 12 years!

We all need some communal love, especially nowadays. Many of us are dealing with mighty struggles and challenges and I’m not trying to erase yours. I’m just trying to give you a heads up about mine and pleading for you to help if you can. I’m angry, sad and triggered to be overwhelmed with this precarity. Poverty is awkward and maddening! I have no choice at this point but to ask for your help.

Thank you for holding this in your eyes and, hopefully, your heart. ✨UBUNTU!✨

bio

blkcowrie ❀ and her pen move to the music of water and flowers as she wanders and wonders at the soul’s journey. Her poems appear in Baby Suggs and a Purple Butterfly (Get Fresh Books), Apogee Journal, Lucky Jefferson, Rigorous, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, and Gallery Aferro's inaugural Poem Booth, among others. Local collectives with whom blkcowrie ❀ collaborates include The Writer Is N, Choir of Imagineers, AfroFutureCoven, and Maroon Movement. blkcowrie is a Writing Fellow for The Watering Hole as well as creatrix of the grassroots marketing challenge #UbuntuPoetryPortal. As the eldest daughter of a Black Jamaican immigrant and a southern born Black U.S. Army career soldier, both raised in poverty, blkcowrie ❀ learned through witnessing their lives that the world is wide and multifaceted; to survive it, one must become intrepid.

️ ✨ @blkcowrie ❀ ️✨