Cheri Honkala

Cheri Lynn Honkala (born January 12, 1963) is an American anti-poverty advocate, co-founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) and co-founder and National Coordinator of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, also called the Poor People’s Army.

She has been a noted advocate for human rights in the United States and internationally.

She is the mother of actor Mark Webber.

Cheri Honkala was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1963.

Her father, Maynard Duane Honkala, was of Finnish ancestry, and her mother self-identified as having Cheyenne ancestry.

She grew up watching her mother suffer from domestic violence.

Honkala's mother quietly endured this abuse for fear of losing her children.

Honkala was removed from the household and spent most of her youth incarcerated in a total of nine youth detention facilities.

When Honkala was 17, her 19-year-old brother Mark, who suffered from mental health issues, died by suicide.

Because he was uninsured, he could not afford to get the professional help he needed.

At the time of Mark's suicide, Honkala was already a mother (with a son, Mark, named after her brother), living out of her car and going to high school.

Despite her difficult upbringing, she managed to graduate.

After living in an apartment in Minnesota, Honkala and her young son were forced to move out and live out of their white Camaro.

She and her son became homeless after the Camaro was demolished by a drunk driver.

Honkala could not find a shelter that would allow them to remain together that winter.

To stay together and keep from freezing, Honkala decided to move into an abandoned Housing and Urban Development (HUD) home.

She would later comment, "I chose to live, and I chose to keep my son alive."

She called a press conference, in which she said, "This is me, this is my nine-year-old son, and we're not leaving until somebody can tell us where we can live and not freeze to death."

For the past 25 years, Honkala has been a leading advocate for the poor and homeless in America.

While still living in Minnesota, she formed the Twin Cities anti-poverty groups "Women, Work and Welfare" and "Up and Out of Poverty Now."

In Philadelphia, she co-founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC).

She has organized numerous protests, holding marches, demonstrations and setting up tent cities, in the course of which activities she claims to have been arrested for civil disobedience violations more than 200 times.

She is known internationally for her work advocating for the rights of poor people in the United States, and has received recognition in numerous publications for her role in bringing attention to issues such as homelessness and home foreclosures and has been called "the protester's protester."

Currently based in Philadelphia, she has devoted most of her attention to the rise in home evictions among lower income families.

After moving to Philadelphia with her son in the late 1980s, in 1991 Honkala co-founded KWRU, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, named after the Kensington area in northern Philadelphia, where Honkala lived.

She called KWRU a "Philadelphia based interracial organization of welfare recipients and other poor people."

In the winter of 1993, when homeless shelters were full, the organization took over an abandoned Catholic Church to use as a shelter.

In late 1994, KWRU broke into and took over vacant HUD homes destined for low-income housing and subsidized rent, although all the inhabitants (which included Honkala herself) were eligible for the housing program under the rules.

They chose to ignore the bureaucracy and its delays, particularly the paperwork, paying rent into an escrow account to avoid trespassing charges.

This became known as the Underground Railroad Project.

From that time, the volunteers of the organization regularly (and illegally) took over HUD homes to provide accommodations for homeless families.

To provide a support system to these families, the organization set up what they called an "'Underground Railroad,' a network of other poor people, students, social workers, doctors and lawyers."

Said Honkala: "Stealing slaves out of captivity was against the law ... But it was right. Sometimes the law is wrong. Sometimes you have to appeal to a higher authority."

In the spring of 1994, the Quaker Lace factory (a manufacturer of lace tablecloths) in the Kensington area of Philadelphia burned down, leaving an empty lot.

The following summer, Honkala and KWRU constructed a large tent city on the site.

Because Philadelphia authorities could not produce documentation establishing who owned the property, it was unable to evict the residents.

(Eventually, they were driven out by flooding.) This very public action resulted in a substantial increase in donations to KWRU.

She was featured prominently in the 1997 book Myth of the Welfare Queen by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Zucchino.

In 2011, Honkala was the Green Party candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia, running on the promise of refusing to evict families from their homes.

She was the Green Party's nominee for vice-president in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.