For 50 years, Preble Street has advocated for keeping people in Maine fed, sheltered, and housed. We are deeply committed to lifting up the voices of marginalized and underserved populations, bringing people together to focus on solutions, and ensuring that everyone in our state has food, clothing, and shelter. As a social work agency, we carry out this mission by lovingly treating every person with dignity and compassion to make Maine a just place for each person who lives here.
Advocacy is a powerful tool to protect our most vulnerable community members. With critical programs like SNAP and Medicaid under attack, as well as the staffing reductions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which oversees critical funding and programs to end homelessness, the ongoing threat to federal funding for nonprofits, the attacks against the populations that we serve, the need for sustainable funding for emergency shelters, and much, much more all bubbling up right now that puts people experiencing hunger, homelessness, and poverty at even more risk, advocacy might be the most important tool right now in anti-poverty work.
“Preble Street works with people experiencing problems with homelessness, housing, hunger and poverty. Advocating for solutions to these problems is at the heart of everything we do and is embedded in our mission,” says Terence Miller, Advocacy Director, Preble Street. “People with lived or living experience is the foundation for all of our advocacy efforts. Their witness to the barriers they face daily in being unhoused or food insecure focuses our advocacy on solutions to administrative and systemic problems. Based upon the barriers we identify the local, state, or federal level that requires our advocacy to effect social change. We use community organizing, policy advocacy, and systems advocacy, to take action. With the social safety net already under so much strain, it is through consistent and tireless advocacy that we can address the many issues that are harmful to the lives and well-being of tens of thousands of Mainers, in particular the Mainers who need our collective support the most.”
This is what social workers do; we don't stand by.
Preble Street founder Joe Kreisler believed that the community and local government have an obligation to ensure that people have decent housing, access to education, healthcare, and food for their families. Kreisler recognized that many of the institutions that were designed to provide these services created institutional barriers to the people most in need of them.
People with lived experience, like Homeless Voices for Justice (HVJ), which celebrates 30 years of advocacy this year, play a critical role in advocacy efforts. “Advocacy involving our whole community is essential for success, that especially includes listening to people with lived experience,” shares Cheryl Harkins, an Advocate Leader of HVJ and Region 1 Representative to the Statewide Homeless Council; and board member for the Maine Continuum of Care.”We need each other, especially in the face of the Administration’s recent threats that would impact federal funding for Maine.”
News coverage of Preble Street’s advocacy efforts and programs from over the years.
Advocacy is compassion in action and a key component of social work. Social workers advocate for clients every day as they help them access healthcare, housing, and social services. As a social work agency, Preble Street advocacy efforts work toward solutions to the social, economic, and political systems that have historically perpetuated the inequities of our society.
Preble Street is deeply committed to fulfilling our powerful mission and the work that we do on behalf of all vulnerable Mainers. We will fight to keep doing this important work.
How can I help?
You play an incredibly important role in our work. Your care for others in your community. Your advocacy for better policies so that all of us can thrive. Your support, from clothing donations to money, so that people have warm socks and shelter.
Join us in creating change! Be an advocate for your neighbors: call your City Councilor, testify in front of the State Legislature on a bill, attend a rally or march, write an op-ed for a local newspaper, vote in all elections, and lift up the voices of people with lived experience.
To start, visit our Take Action page, sign up for Advocacy alerts to stay connected to Preble Street calls to action. Together, we can end homelessness, hunger, poverty, and injustice in Maine.
Food Is a Human Right: Protecting Access to Nutrition in Maine
In honor of National Nutrition Month, we take a look at the emergency food system in Maine. Food pantries and anti-hunger non-profits like Preble Street play an important role in ensuring people experiencing food insecurity have consistent access to healthy and nutritious food. Since opening in 1975, Preble Street has worked to ensure that everyone
Feeding, housing, and sheltering more people than ever before
For 50 years, Preble Street has been here – expanding far beyond a handful of social work interns in Portland to more than 325 full and part-time staff and programs that touch every county in Maine. Preble Street is just one piece of the puzzle to solve hunger, homelessness, and poverty in Maine. To find
Compassion in action: Preble Street at 50
“If you can’t get what you need, we’re here,” was the message Joe Kreisler wanted people experiencing poverty to hear when he founded High Street Resource Center (the organization that evolved into Preble Street) in 1975. For 50 years, Preble Street has been here – expanding far beyond a handful of social work interns in
