HuffPost is asking everyone to bear witness to the tragic human cost of the corruption and greed that have brought us this financial crisis.
Share your story -- or become a reporter and tell the story of someone you know whose home has been foreclosed, whose job has disappeared, whose kids can't afford college, whose credit card interest rate has ballooned to 30 percent, or who has been taken advantage of during these trying times. We also want to hear the positive stories: the heroes -- judges, lawyers, volunteers -- who are helping people stay in their homes, the neighbors who are coming together to help alleviate the pain and make their community a better place.
Sharing your story is easy; just email it to bearingwitness@huffingtonpost.com. We're not putting a word limit or minimum on these submissions, so be as detailed (or brief) as you'd like. Also, we encourage you to include primary documents to help depict what happened, whether it's a credit card statement or a mortgage agreement. Receiving such primary documents has already helped expose a mortgage refinancing scam and demonstrate that banks are using bogus excuses to ignore mortgage refinancing requests.
If you decide to send an email now without reading any further, first sign up to receive updates about the project by clicking "Join Now" at the bottom of the page.
You can also share your story by uploading a photo below. Simply press "Participate," provide a title to your photo, include a description of what it represents, upload the picture, and pinpoint your location on the map. These pictures will be featured in slideshows with your description underneath your picture, so make sure it tells a complete story. We have created three categories for submission:
Bearing Witness 2.0: The Human Cost of the Crisis -- To submit a photo that chronicles the suffering caused by the economic crisis -- or an injustice perpetrated by the financial system -- click "Participate" below. Make sure to give a short description of the story behind your photo before pressing submit.
Bearing Witness 2.0: Heroes -- To showcase an unsung hero of this economic crisis or to share the story of individuals working to change the status quo, upload your photo here.
We will also continue our weekly Capture the Recession feature of local images that uniquely illustrate these trying times. These are photos that tell a story by themselves, without any description or back story required, though we encourage you to include the photo's location in the description. You can submit photos by pressing the "Participate" button here.
Finally, we hope that people will use all forms of media to tell their stories, including video. Narrate your experience with a video blog or interview somebody else on camera, then upload the footage to YouTube and email the link to bearingwitness+video@huffingtonpost.com.
Regardless of how you choose to bear witness, we ask that you sign up below to receive updates about the project and so we can link your HuffPost Social News profile to the stories that you share.