Author: John Gehner

Every two years, the Economic Policy Institute releases a Labor Day study that “sums up the problems and challenges facing American working families” and “examine[s] the impact of the economy on the living standards of the American people.” The State of Working America 2006/2007 is now available. A fact sheet sample:

The United States bills itself as the land of opportunity, where someone from the humblest roots can, with grit and determination, climb the economic ladder. Some even say that concern about growing inequality between the top and bottom of the income pyramid is misplaced because of our high income mobility. In a chapter new to this edition [EPI] finds that rags-to-riches stories, despite their wide appeal, are the exception, not the rule, and that for most people in America today, where you end up is increasingly a function of where you started out.

Our colleague AV forwarded Robert Reich’s biting commentary, “How to Reduce Urban Poverty Without Really Trying” (Aug. 30, 2006):

It’s an old story, really. Areas of any town or city where the infrastructure is most ignored—like [New Orleans’] Industrial Canal levee that burst on the morning of August 29 a year ago—have the lowest property values. So that’s where the poor live. When there’s a flood or a leak of toxic wastes or any other calamity, these places are the first to become uninhabitable. Which means, the poor often have to leave. Then the political and moral question is whether anyone cares enough to help them return and rebuild.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of “welfare reform,” enacted by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Robert Scheer, however, believes that “Clinton Ended Welfare, Not Poverty” (Aug. 30, 2006):

The ex-president gloats over the large decrease in the number of welfare recipients as if he is unaware of the five-year limit and other new restrictions which made it inevitable. Nor does he seem bothered that nobody … assess[es] how the families on Aid to Families with Dependent Children fared after they left welfare. The truth is we know very little about [their fate], 70% of whom are children, because there is no systematic monitoring program … The best estimates … indicate that at least a million welfare recipients have neither jobs nor benefits … For those who found jobs, a great many became mired in minimum-wage jobs—sometimes more than one—that barely cover the child-care and other costs they incurred by working outside the home.

YouTube hosts a variety of videos featuring homeless people.

Some clips are sophomoric, exploitative, and cruel. Others represent earnest attempts to document life on the street and to capture first-person stories. (Note to well-meaning auteurs: please dispense with the saccharine background music.)

The site includes two clever, 30-second scenarios: “Box” and “Scaffold.” Original high-def versions are available on the New York Coalition for the Homeless homepage.

CFTH offers substantial information for anti-poverty advocates and publishes an annual Resource Guide for low-income New Yorkers, including a searchable electronic version. Check it out!

“Katrina: One Year Later” offers an archive of articles assembled by The Times- Picayune in New Orleans. The site features reporting from last year’s catastrophe, current analysis of rebuilding efforts, photos, and stories of the storm’s victims. A related site, Katrina’s Lives Lost, contains tributes and obituaries:

Joan died Aug. 31, the day after the floodwater rose. “It was probably about 105 degrees in the attic,” her sister Gerry said. “The man at St. Gabriel (morgue) said it appears that she died of hyperthermia. It got too hot; she was exhausted by it.” [Her husband] Don stayed in the house another three or four days, until he saw a neighbor’s son going by in a paddleboat, Gerry said. “Don came to the front door and said, ‘Get me some help. My wife is in here and she’s dead. Please get the Coast Guard to come get her.’” Workers lifted Joan’s body out of the attic on Sept. 17.

Adolph Reed Jr., whose many family members reside in New Orleans, writes a scathing critique of the disaster, “When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina” via AlterNet:

The fetish of “efficient” government—code for public policy that is designed to serve the narrow interests of business and the affluent—is the ultimate cause of the city’s devastation. Remember that the city survived the hurricane. It flooded because the levees failed. The levees on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals failed because, in the words of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, “safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.” This was the result of federal underfunding, the Corps of Engineers’ skimping, state and local officials’ temporizing, and a lack of adequate government oversight—or, in neoliberal parlance, cutting government red tape.

Jill Leovy, of the LA Times, profiles the security staff at Los Angeles Central Library in “By the Book, With Footnotes” (Aug. 13, 2006). Like most mainstream reporting on homeless people in libraries, the article does not mention if the library is working in any capacity with local social-service agencies or advocating for day-shelter funding. One photo caption is particularly ironic: “Keeping up appearances is part of the unwritten code that lets different people mix comfortably in the library.”

“Some patrons will say, ‘Isn’t there any way to keep these homeless out of the building? They are so dirty,’ etc., etc.,” [Security Officer William] Morris said. In response to such queries, “I try not to be sarcastic,” he said. But he thinks, “I’d rather have them than you.” Many library staff have similar, complicated views. They complain about regulars—“a vortex of madness,” one called the situation—then defend them in the next breath. They are protective of the library atmosphere but even more protective of the principle of access. In fact, whatever the rules are on paper, it’s clear that library security officers essentially enforce what one librarian called “almost a compromise” between staff and the homeless.

Earlier this year, Springfield, Ill., city alderman Joe Bartolomucci proposed banning homeless people from the Lincoln Library plaza. Mayor Tim Davlin refused to support the proposal. The State Journal-Register interviewed some of the homeless individuals who use the library and sleep outside:

“People wonder how you end up in this situation and what can be done to help it,” [Tim Hawker] said last week … his back against the brick wall near the south doors of the main library, Seventh Street and Capitol Avenue. “People say ‘get a job’—but getting employment is more than just getting a job. To get employment, you have to have transportation, a phone number, somewhere to put your things … How do you get here? You’re single. You work minimum wage. You live at a poverty level, and you can’t save any money. So there’s no net to fall in when something happens. And down you fall again.” … Most of those who stay at the library actually are avid readers, Hawker said.

Despite repeated e-mails to ALA staff members, a Web page titled “America’s Libraries and the Homeless” remains buried in the ALA site. We’d like to see this page included in the links list under “PIO Fact Sheets.” The document offers examples of how

[m]any librarians play a leadership role in addressing the problem of homelessness in their communities by working in cooperation with other agencies and by providing direct services such as special reading collections in shelters for the homeless, literacy programs and information and referral services.

The following list was first published on August 29, 2005. A second version, with an introduction, appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Counterpoise (Vol. 9, No. 4). Today’s update includes new resources.

Homeless people who reside in urban areas are frequent targets of ordinances that restrict their use of public space. Such regulations—often approved by local governments in deference to commercial interests—contribute to what some describe as a “brutal public sphere.”

Without affordable housing and an adequate social safety net, low-income citizens who possess no private space must consequently live their lives in public. And they are criminalized for having to do so.

The control of public space, however and on whomever it is rendered, impacts constitutional rights. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and with the authority provided by the USA PATRIOT Act, law enforcement agencies at all levels have routinely exhibited aggressive and repressive actions in response to free expression in public places.

Among other absurdities, various city leaders have devised “designated free speech zones” that effectively “quarantine dissent.” As geographer Don Mitchell has noted,

Dissident speakers have to remain outside the mall that has become the new public space of the city; they must remain at a distance from the politicians and the delegates they seek to influence; they must picket only where they will have no chance of creating a meaningful picket line.

Below are selected resources that address the fight(s) for public space. They touch on different issues, forces, and people. They also speak to what you can do to support (and express) constitutional and human rights.

Transfer: The Anti-Sit Archives
www.usemenow.com/web-log/archives/the_antisit/
This photo archive features examples of anti-homeless measures rendered on New York City’s urban landscape. Property owners and city managers construct elaborate cages around sidewalk steam grates and affix spiked rails to window ledges, planter boxes, and fire hydrants with the express purpose of preventing citizens—homeless or not—from lingering.

“A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities”
National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH)
www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/index.html
“An unfortunate trend in cities around the country over the past 25 years has been to turn to the criminal justice system to respond to people living in public spaces. This trend includes measures that target homeless persons by making it illegal to perform life-sustaining activities in public. These measures prohibit activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and begging in public spaces, usually including criminal penalties for violation of these laws.” The study surveys laws and practices in 224 cities and features a Top 20 list of “meanest cities.”

“People Need Their Civil Rights Protected”
Bringing America Home: The Campaign
www.bringingamericahome.org/civilrights.html
This document maintains that people “should not be criminalized or face injustice as a result of their housing status” and “should have the right to vote regardless of housing status.” It forms part of a “national, broad-based initiative … dedicated to the goal of ending homelessness. The Campaign is founded on the principles … that people need affordable housing, livable incomes, health care, education, and protection of their civil rights.”

“Exposure to the Homeless Increases Sympathetic Public Attitudes”
American Sociological Association (ASA)
http://tinyurl.com/bgnw8
A February 2004 study “looked at exposure through four dimensions: third-party information, observation in public places, interaction with homeless people, and having been or knowing someone who is or has been homeless … all four forms of exposure promote sympathetic attitudes toward homelessness … Also, people who have more exposure to homelessness tend to attribute homelessness to structural causes as opposed to individual causes.”

The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space
Don Mitchell (The Guilford Press, 2003)
http://tinyurl.com/qg4mv
“This provocative work asserts that the right to public space is crucial to advancing the cause of justice. Complex yet comprehensible, the book balances the ideas of legal scholars, cultural theorists, and social scientists with Mitchell’s singular voice based on his extensive thinking and research in the area. Mitchell thoughtfully argues that the struggle for rights actually produces public space and thus insists that rights be taken seriously, especially by leftist scholars, as they are central to counteracting exclusionary practices and the pervasive power of the state.”

Street People and the Contested Realms of Public Space
Randall Amster (LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/lnd46
“This work explores the social and spatial implications of homelessness in America. Increasingly, commentators have lamented the erosion of public space, charting its decline along with the rise of commercialization and privatization … [T]he author explores patterns and interconnections among: the impetus of urban development and gentrification; the enactment of anti-homeless ordinances and regulations; the material and ideological erosion of public space; and emerging forces of resistance to these trends.”

“Keeping the ‘Public’ in Public Space”
Project for Public Spaces (PPS)
www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/issuepapers/commercialize
“Public spaces have always gone hand in hand with commerce. Markets, vendors, and retailers are essential components of many a great place. But when does vibrant economic activity cross the line and become crass commercialization? Everywhere we look people who manage parks and squares are struggling with this question … ”

“Selling Out: Our Public Space, Universal Services Under Assault”
Ralph Nader
www.commondreams.org/views03/0810-07.htm
“The loss of free-standing library structures and their landscaping means families and individuals entering and leaving libraries must navigate between people with shopping bags and carts negotiating adjacent stores, parking, and all the noise. Commercial minds do not appreciate the sanctuaries of such public institutions. They do understand dependency, however, as well as the proverbial foot in the door toward privatization …”

Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy
John Buschman (Libraries Unlimited, 2003)
http://lu.com/showbook.cfm?isbn=9780313321993
“This work presents a thorough examination of librarianship and the social and economic contexts in which the profession and its institutions operate … Buschman asserts that a significant shift has occurred from the library as a contributor to the public good to a model where economic rationality directs policy. He challenges much of the current thinking and assumptions guiding libraries, exploring the circumstances in which librarians and libraries operate and linking the profession back to democratic and public purposes as the core essence of the field.”

“On Libraries and the Public Sphere”
John Buschman
www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/buschman.htm
“Thinkers as varied as the management guru Henry Mintzberg and the media critic Neil Postman have arrived at similar conclusions: we are a society out of balance. One system of thinking about society and its problems and one method of solving them—economics—has come to dominate as a public philosophy … The educational philosopher Maxine Greene writes reminding us that ‘nowhere is it written’ that we are required to organize ourselves ‘in response to the demands of the Pentagon or to those obsessed with exploiting markets overseas.’ To accede to that purpose robs the society we serve of an important, if ineffable, resource …”

“The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent: A National Lawyers Guild Report on Government Violations of First Amendment Rights in the United States (2004)” (PDF)
Heidi Boghosian
www.nlg.org/resources/DissentBookWeb.pdf
With a foreword by Lewis Lapham, this report cites ‘a long list of incidents in which various law enforcement agencies … have deployed one or another of increasingly sophisticated methods of intimidation (checkpoints, rush tactics, pop-up lines, containment pens, mass and false arrests, etc.) meant to negate the freedoms of speech and silence the voices of dissent” in the public sphere. The NLG finds that “rights of free assembly and free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution are simply no longer available to the citizens of this country.”

“The Liberalization of Free Speech: or, How Protest in Public Space Is Silenced”
Don Mitchell
http://agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/mitchell.shtml
”[C]ontemporary speech laws and policing effectively silence dissident speech in the name of its promotion and regulation. As the [Supreme] Court has moved away from a regime that penalizes what is said—in essence liberalizing free speech—it has simultaneously created a means to severely regulate where things may be said, and it has done so … in a way that more effectively silences speech than did the older regime of censorship and repression.”

“People in the Streets: The Promise of Democracy in Everyday Public Space”
Greg Smithsimon
www.columbia.edu/~gs228/writing/importanceps.htm
“A key prerequisite for a democratic society, [public] settings are where we take organized political action, and meet and learn about the society of which we are a part. One challenge, for planners and improvers from the 1890s to today, has been to translate that article of faith into a compelling argument that public space is the rich soil from which a democracy society grows. Explaining public space’s crucial role–both for organized political activity and through its everyday uses–is crucial to building popular support for the development and protection of vital space that many Americans aren’t even sure they want …”

“Sidewalk Democracy: Municipalities and the Regulation of Public Space”
A. Loukaitou-Sideris, Evelyn Blumenberg, and Renia Ehrenfeucht
http://communityartsadvocates.org/sidewalkdemocracy.html
“Today sidewalk democracy remains contested as design and regulatory strategies have serious constitutional implications for First Amendment speech and assembly rights …”

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space
Margaret Kohn (Routledge, 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/zan3d
According to reviewer Zachary Callen, “Kohn embarks on a historical/descriptive analysis of the changing form of public space in contemporary American society. Through this discussion, she interrogates the rise of ‘private spaces’ that are replacing ‘public’ venues. Kohn’s second preoccupation is more theoretical. In this voice, she focuses on the normative importance of public spaces for a thriving democracy. In both of these efforts, Kohn’s contribution is valuable, reinforcing the importance of public space for the production of healthy democratic citizens.”

The Politics of Public Space
Setha Low and Neil Smith, eds. (Routledge, 2005)
http://tinyurl.com/n73cm
“Public spaces are no longer democratic places where all people are embraced and tolerated, but instead centers of commerce and consumption. Increasing privatization through collaborative public/private partnerships between municipalities and local businesses has transformed such places as Bryant Park and Union Square in the center of New York City into environments maintained by video surveillance and police control … The linkage between public space and the globalizing political economy deserves closer scrutiny because societal mobilization about public space influences … democratic participation.”

The Kansas City Star highlights local pediatricians who give children books during their regular checkups. The effort is part of the national Reach Out and Read program:

Reach Out and Read, which provides more than 4 million books a year to 2.5 million children nationwide, got started in Kansas City in 1997 … “We reach over 20,000 kids each year with a special emphasis on children growing up in poverty,” said Jean Harty, a development pediatrician and executive director of Reach Out and Read Kansas City. Children in the program receive a book at every well-child checkup until they reach kindergarten [12 books total].

Via the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram.com, a local doctor shares her opinion of the Worcester Public Library’s borrowing restrictions for homeless people:

For 30 years, I have referred hundreds of patients to [WPL] to use these valuable public resources. I did not question whether they lived in shelters, they were readers and that is what counted. I imagine the humiliation of a child, teenager or adult, who brings a robust pile of books to the circulation desk only to find that because of the residential address, he or she would be limited to only two books. As with medical care, I believe that homeless individuals and families, i.e., the people who populate our shelters, share the same rights as other citizens.

According to The Record, 50% of schoolkids in San Joaquin County, Calif., qualify for free and reduced-price lunch programs. Hunger is just one of the challenges these kids face.

[Sara] Garfield directs Stockton’s Transitional Learning Center, a school for homeless children. Students from poor families often come to school with unmet needs their more affluent peers don’t share, Garfield said. They might not have a library card or books at home … They might never have visited a museum. “Then, if you put poor attendance on top of that, or health issues, or not having adequate clothing or feeling embarrassed, it greatly compounds the problem[s].”

WebJunction has named the Carvers Bay Library in South Carolina its “Library of the Month.” Betha Gutsche profiles the library’s use of gaming in literacy initiatives:

If asked which US library is pushing the envelope on introducing interactive computer gaming in public libraries, how many would look to the most rural, poor, and isolated corner of a county in South Carolina? And if informed that this corner of the library world has a 30% illiteracy rate, a 15% unemployment rate, a poverty level exceeding 30% with up to 90% of school kids eligible for free or reduced-rate lunches … what odds would you give that it can even keep its doors open?

The East Grand Forks Campbell Library in Minnesota is currently hosting a photography exhibition titled “Portraits of Home: Families in Search of Shelter in Greater Minnesota.” The exhibit is sponsored by the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund and is available for display elsewhere.

“There’s a preconceived notion that homelessness is an urban problem,” [exhibition coordinator Julie] Delliquanti said. “Rural folks struggle with the same issues on housing. They’re isolated, and they don’t have that same sense of community and resources” … Because of the visibility of homelessness, more people are aware of it, she said. People who live in poverty are harder to identify … “How many people don’t know their neighbors are struggling or their children’s teacher is struggling? … Our service workers, teachers, fire departments, police officers, all the people we depend on … They’re working, raising children and still falling through the cracks. Somewhere, we’re failing them.”

Beginning August 29, PBS is broadcasting the documentary Waging a Living by filmmaker Roger Weisberg.

Shot over a three-year period in the Northeast and California, this observational documentary captures the dreams, frustrations, and accomplishments of a diverse group of people who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck. By presenting an unvarnished look at the barriers that these workers must overcome to lift their families out of poverty, Waging a Living offers a sobering view of the elusive American Dream.

The National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) has published a study titled “When Work Doesn’t Pay: What Every Policymaker Should Know,” which includes a Family Resource Simulator.

Here is the dilemma: although our nation highly values work, parents working full-time cannot always provide adequately for their families. Nearly 30 million Americans—a quarter of the U.S. labor force—work in jobs that pay poverty-level wages and provide few prospects for advancement and wage growth. Some 24 million children live in low-income families despite having at least one parent who works … In other words, this is no small problem.

America’s Second Harvest has published the Hunger Almanac 2006, featuring analysis and statistics keyed to each of the 50 states.

More than 25 million Americans rely on charitable food assistance to make ends meet. An estimated 9 million children live in families where getting food from food pantries, soup kitchen lines or homeless shelters is as commonplace as getting food from grocery stores. Nearly 3 million seniors are spending their golden years relying on the generosity of others for a meal. The Almanac contains these and more difficult truths …

The American Psychological Association (APA) adopted a detailed “Resolution on Poverty and Socioeconomic Status” in 2000. The document is supported by a bibliography and chock-full of interesting data:

WHEREAS, perceptions of the poor and of welfare—by those not in those circumstances—tend to reflect attitudes and stereotypes that attribute poverty to personal failings rather than socioeconomic structures and systems and that ignore strengths and competencies in these groups (Ehrenreich, 1987; Katz, 1989; Quadagno, 1994), and public policy and anti-poverty programs continue to reflect these stereotypes (Bullock, 1995; Furnham, 1993; Furnham & Gunter, 1984; Rubin & Peplau, 1975);

A report from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), “Katrina’s Vanishing Victims,” takes the media to task for ignoring the “rediscovered poor” in New Orleans and elsewhere:

What Slate’s Jack Shafer had written during the height of the storm (8/31/05) remained true months later: “I don’t recall any reporter exploring the class issue directly by getting a paycheck-to-paycheck victim to explain that he couldn’t risk leaving because if he lost his furniture and appliances, his pots and pans, his bedding and clothes, to Katrina or looters, he’d have no way to replace them …”

The Boise Weekly conducts an insightful interview with Henry Krewer, who sits on the board of Corpus Christi House, a homeless day shelter:

When you’re homeless, a lot of the development stops—emotional development, educational. And a lot of it’s because you’re in survival mode. It’s static. Nothing happens while you’re homeless. They’re all good people, but they’re kind of on hold. A lot of homeless people work. Most of them work. If they have housing and work, then they’re on their way. If they just have work, then they’re living day to day.

The News Leader in Staunton, Virginia, profiles the struggles of Darlene Keiper, who has lived in her car for more than a year:

After four years spent living in a Waynesboro boarding house, the Pennsylvania transplant fell on hard times last year when she tried striking out on her own in a new apartment. “I was struggling for six months to meet the rent, and I got evicted,” she said … Keiper spent a month at the Econo Lodge on Richmond Road, where she was employed but was sent packing in August when new ownership took over. She’s been living in her car ever since …

Whatever your opinion of Oprah may be, have a look at material from her show “Inside the Lives of People Living on Minimum Wage”:

Thirty million Americans who work full time are living in poverty … Why should you care? These are the very people we rely on every day. They are the teachers’ aides in your child’s classroom. They are caring for your aging parents in the nursing home. They make sure your hotel rooms, your offices and your schools are clean. They are security guards keeping buildings safe. They are paramedics who are there in your most desperate hour.

In 2002, the Common Dreams NewsCenter published a sixth-grader’s views on poverty and “What the American Flag Stands For”:

You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.

The Onion offers a funny take on advocacy work in “Nonprofit Fights Poverty with Poverty”:

“Our crack team of anti-poverty activists is totally devoted to marshalling every resource at our disposal,” Lindstrom said as she stood under a flickering light bulb in the office’s bathroom and added some water to an old toner cartridge to squeeze every last drop of usable ink from it … According to Lindstrom, the organization recently acquired a stool with two fully intact legs and a 1987-model photocopier …

Submitted to WPL and others on behalf of the HHPTF …

The American Library Association provides guidelines for developing library policies, including access privileges. Founded on the Library Bill of Rights, the guidelines state that public libraries “should avoid arbitrary distinctions between individuals or classes of users,” policies “should not target specific users or groups of users,” and policies “must be communicated clearly and made available in an effective manner.”

An ALA document on economic barriers to information access notes, “Resources that are provided directly or indirectly by the library … should be readily, equally and equitably accessible to all library users.” ALA Policy 61 (Library Services for the Poor) calls for direct representation of poor people and their advocates in policymaking and for cooperation between libraries and social-service agencies.

Within these ALA parameters, and as reported by various media sources, Worcester Public Library is choosing to ignore its obligations to disadvantaged citizens. WPL’s two-book borrowing limit fails to provide equal access for low-income people. And bearing an air of classism, its incomplete “agency blacklist” brands them as thieves.

According to the U.S. Census, the percentage of people living below the poverty line in Worcester is higher than the national average. Is WPL attentive to this fact and responsive to those who struggle with poverty and social exclusion?

I am hopeful that WPL will rescind its prejudicial borrowing policy, and I am confident that there are more thoughtful ways to exercise “fiduciary responsibility.” In support of these necessary changes, I invite WPL staff, board members, and others to consult the resources available at www.hhptf.org.

Respectfully,

John Gehner, Coordinator
Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force (HHPTF)
Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT)
of the American Library Association (ALA)

During her recent guest-blogging stint with FreeGovInfo.info, Jessamyn West posted some great information about policies and programs for making use of unwanted or unused food.

The most common methods of food recovery are field gleaning, perishable food rescue or salvage (from wholesale and retail food sellers), food rescue (for prepared foods) and nonperishable food collection (food with long shelf lives). Some of these tactics are familiar to Food Not Bombs workers, food shelf volunteers or dumpster divers.

She points to the USDA’s A Citizen’s Guide to Food Recovery and the Food Recovery State Resource List, among other resources.

The complete post, with links, is available at http://freegovinfo.info/node/517.

On a similar note, FoodFirst has posted “12 Myths About Hunger,” to help people “unlearn” fictions and false impressions. For example:

Myth 1: Not Enough Food to Go Around

Reality: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn’t even count many other commonly eaten foods – ­vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide … enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most “hungry countries” have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.

For the complete list of hunger mythbusters, visit www.foodfirst.org/node/1480.

The Legal Assistance Corporation of Central Massachusetts, in conjunction with the ACLU of Massachusetts, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of homeless citizens against the Worcester Public Library.

The library restricts borrowing privileges for homeless residents, limiting them to two books—versus 40 books for everyone else.

The Boston Globe reports (7/9/06),

[T]hree homeless patrons of the library filed a class action lawsuit in US District Court, alleging that the policy violates their constitutional right to equal access to public services. The plaintiffs include a homeless couple whose 8-year-old daughter seeks out the latest Lemony Snicket adventures, and a woman who fled a home where she was the victim of domestic violence …

The seeds of Worcester’s battle were sewn two years ago, when a city librarian noticed that many of the library’s missing books had been loaned to people staying in the city’s shelters. Unable to find the offenders, the librarian proposed the two-book limit to the board of trustees, which approved the policy. [Head librarian Penelope] Johnson said she did not have data on how many books had been lost over the years to homeless patrons, but said the policy had helped curb the problem.

According to Kate Fitzpatrick, an attorney with LACCM, “We tried to work with the library for over a year to modify or rescind the policy, but felt we had no choice to file the lawsuit when we realized the extent of the city’s inflexibility and its lack of good faith to truly understand the policy’s effects.”

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette found that “the public library system lacks any firm criteria it can use to determine who is subject to a two-item borrowing limit at Worcester’s three library branches.”

Rather than restricting the borrowing privileges of individuals, the library reportedly maintains a list of social service agencies and limits anyone that is a client of these agencies. The Telegram & Gazette says that the list is incomplete and that not all agencies are “aware of their status at the library.”

[L]ibrary officials were resistant to disclosing information about the policy. They still have not publicly disclosed exact losses from items checked out and not returned by what the library calls transient residents.

Worcester PL’s policy clearly contradicts the values outlined in ALA Policy 61, Library Services for the Poor and the Library Bill of Rights.

If you would like to write a letter in support of the Worcester area’s homeless citizens and their right to equal services, contact:

Michael V. O’Brien
City Manager
City of Worcester
455 Main Street, Room 309
Worcester, MA 01608

Jay Scully
President, Board of Directors
Worcester Public Library
3 Salem Square
Worcester, MA 01608

Penelope Johnson
Head Librarian
Worcester Public Library
3 Salem Square
Worcester, MA 01608

Letters to the Editor
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Worcester, MA 01615-0012
letters@telegram.com (in subject line write “Letter”; the email must include a mailing address)
Fax: 508-793-9313

Additional information is available via ALA and via Kathleen de la Peña McCook’s journal at LISNews.org.