Recession Lessons Road Trip 2009

What is it?
The Recession Lessons Road Trip 2009 is a cross-country rally to New York. Along the way, I’ll be stopping in cities, towns, villages and the occasional hamlet to document the spread of the Unemploymentality across the United States. But to get it started, we’re asking you for a little help.

Why help us?
We know you. You’re the jobless, the broke, the sometimes desperate, but often resilient muchachos and muchachas of the American recession. You’ve been laid off for days, weeks, or maybe months, and have grown accustomed to a lifestyle defined by your unemployment. You’ve had to change your ways and adapt to this new lifestyle in a hurry. And in this process, it’s changed your mentality. You have an unemploymentality, just like us. The only difference is that we’ve spent the past six months sharing our unemploymentality with you. Now we want you to show us yours.

That’s right. We want to hear how the recession has changed you. How are you making ends meet since the economic downturn? How has your life changed? What’s your outlook on the future and what lessons have you learned along the way? Or even better, how are you sticking it to the recession by doing even better than you were before?

What we want:
Send us your Recession Lessons to be included on the site and for a chance to win “amazing” prizes. Submissions can be personal stories, poems, pictures, videos, audio recordings or any other medium that you can think of.  Just get them to us and we’ll find a way to add them to the site.

Prizes (because we know you won’t do it for nothin’):

• 

  Nando's autograph = priceless.

  3rd Prize: Your resume ‘sexed up’ with a custom header and framed. Well also send you a t-shirt – straight from Goodwill!

• 2nd Prize: An autographed picture of the official mascot of the 2009 recession, Nando the Unemployed Pooch. You’ll also get a t-shirt from Goodwill!
• 1st Prize: 3-5 first prize winners will be visited by the Unemploymentality’s Minister of Recession Affairs, John Henion, on his summer 2009 cross-country road trip where he’ll bake lasagna (meat or vegetarian) for your entire family! He’ll also make a little video of your recession story. But be warned – he’s broke too. So he might just ask to sleep in your garage.

Rules & Considerations:

• We’re beginning to think that there are already too many stories about how sad and sorry we’ve all become due to desperate economic times. Although our hearts go out to these people, it’s time to highlight some resilience. We’re looking for the stories about the phoenix – stories about Americans that make the best out of a bad situation. So if you’ve got a story that will bring sorrow to our soul, make us shake an angry fist at ‘the man’ or tug on our heart strings, you best save it for Oprah. ‘Cause we ain’t giving out no free Cadillacs here. Now we’ve got that out of the way.
• All stories about change and making things work in this down economy are fair game.
• Winners will be selected on June 23rd, 2009.

Send your submissions to john@unemploymentality.com TODAY and help us document your unemploymentality!