He didn't read about the crisis.
He lived it.
David J. Foster is not a career politician. He is an artist and investigator who mastered classical method acting in London and Boston — the discipline of dissolving the ego to completely occupy the lived reality of another.
Where many use that craft for the stage, David turned it into a radical investigative methodology. To understand why our social systems fail, he entered voluntary homelessness on the freezing streets of Bangor, Maine.
He stood in the shelter lines. He navigated broken case-management pathways. He lived the catch-22 of needing an address to get a job and a job to get an address — and documented the exact points where bureaucracy fails its people.
My opponents studied spreadsheets. I studied the streets of Bangor. I know how systems fail because I slept in them.
— David J. Foster