Cheri and her 9 year old son Mark became homeless in winter but rather than freezing to death they decided to move into an abandoned HUD home where the heat is kept on to protect the pipes. For trying to protect her son Cheri was arrested.

Cheri Honkala believes in education; not just job training but the deep critical thinking required to challenge the mechanisms behind our economic woes. She is dedicated to learning and teaching the politics of poverty, homelessness, and hunger.

Not everyone in America
shares in the same American Dream.
some basic human values have become lost.

Many of the Civil and human rights we’ve inherited
grew out of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Cheri Honkala has lived in the tradition of Thoreau,
Gandhi, MLK Jr., and nameless others who came before.

The everyday struggles by poor and working class people
are ignored or exploited by politicians and media while
Cheri Honkala has been fighting right along side
everyday people for over 25 years.

Cheri Honkala has been a leader in America’s largest multiracial movement of poor people since the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign that was begun by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.