Underheard in New York

Underheard in New York was created to help the NYC Rescue Mission’s ignored homeless residents. We identified four homeless men and gave them prepaid mobile phones to tweet via SMS thoughts and anecdotes from their daily lives. The project built a community of over 18,000 Twitter followers who sent more than 9,000 messages to the men within a single month. Followers volunteered gifts both financial and priceless, from metrocards and part-time jobs, to reconnecting a manwith his daughter after eleven years apart. Twitter even voted one of the men’s tweetsthe third most important tweet of 2011.