Coalition to debut documentary on NC poverty this weekend

The Truth and Hope Poverty Tour, led by the state chapter of the NAACP, will screen the 26-minute film Saturday during a daylong poverty summit at Opportunities Industrialization Center, 402 E. Virginia St. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m.

The coalition also plans to unveil its agenda, goals and the costs involved in reaching them.

Since January, the coalition – which also includes the North Carolina Justice Center, Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University, AARP of North Carolina and the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity – traveled 2,000 miles and met thousands of people in 27 communities across the state.

They say the purpose of the Truth & Hope Poverty Tour Report Mass Meeting and Summit is to allow the greater public to see the faces and hear the accounts of some of the people they met who are out of work, homeless, without health care.

More families, the coalition says, are falling into poverty. The North Carolina Justice Center says the statewide poverty rate last year was 17.5 percent, the highest in 30 years.

"We cannot just write off 1.6 million people in our state and millions in our country and think that somehow that does not render suspect all of our claims of being a moral society, a just society, a noble society," State NAACP President Rev. William Barber said at a news conference in Raleigh Wednesday. "We're upping the ante."