Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force – SRRT/ALA

Despite the best efforts of the Chicago Housing Authority to prevent the public from learning about a Section 8 housing lottery this spring, librarians at Skokie Public Library made sure that thousands of people were informed.

In early April we heard about large groups of individuals queueing up outside the Chicago Public Library main library and branches before they opened. They had heard a rumor that the lottery for Section 8 (affordable) housing was starting soon and that they could find information at their local library. When the librarians tried to find out the source of the information, they ran into a brick wall. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was not giving out any information …

One enterprising librarian from the Evanston Public Library got hold of the information and sent it out to all in her network. It arrived at our library without any mention of confidentiality … we decided to make the information public on our community website, SkokieNet.org. It went live on April 11th . And we started to get a steady flow of calls, emails, and visits to the website.

Here is the full story. Way to go, SPL!

Canada’s national Working Together Project published the absolutely stellar “Community-Led Libraries Toolkit” in March.

The resource treats a variety of subjects including social inclusion, fees and fines, collaborative planning, and the role of “community development librarians.”

When the Working Together Project asked librarians to talk about developing inclusive library practices and services, discussions stalled. Many librarians were hesitant to discuss social inclusion issues with us because they believed that the library already was inclusive. Some librarians cited long open hours, appropriate physical access, and creative programming as evidence of inclusiveness.

Others defined inclusiveness by describing their own comfort level serving anyone who walked through the library’s doors and by their personal commitment to developing original programming. The dilemma for the Project was to have discussions about inclusion that went past personal definitions and further than asset-focused examples.

To begin discussions about social inclusion and libraries, the Project started discussing social exclusion and communities. Social exclusion should be understood in broad terms. It can affect any stratum of our society, including people who are poor or live in poverty, people who are unemployed or underemployed, and people who are members of ethnic or cultural minorities.

Being excluded can mean being alienated from the political, social, economic, and cultural life of the community because of race, gender, sexual orientation, or class. Excluded communities can include new immigrants, refugees, the working poor, and groups that have been historically isolated such as African Nova Scotians and First Nations people. For some people, being excluded can stem from, or bring about, drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. The conditions that define social exclusion can often be multiple …

Understanding that there is social exclusion in our communities and recognizing that it does keep people from engaging with mainstream institutions such as public libraries is necessary before we can create truly inclusive libraries.

Kudos to Sandra Singh, Annette DeFaveri, and their many colleagues! This publication demands wide distribution and discussion.

From ChicagoTribune.com:

Spiraling gas and fuel prices along with rising food costs are behind the dwindling food donations, which are at a four-year low, officials said. Feeling the impact of these costs, the federal government and food industry—retailers, manufacturers and distributors—cannot afford to donate as much food to pantries as they once did …

The Federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, in which the federal government buys surplus food from farmers and donates it to food pantries, has been a crucial source for the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

But in the last five years, the program’s budget has remained flat, and with food prices skyrocketing, the amount of aid for the depository has dropped from 13 million pounds of food in 2004 to 6 million pounds this year …

State officials reported last week that a record number of households in Illinois are receiving stamps. Nearly 1.3 million people get daily staples such as bread, eggs and milk through the program.

According to CNN.com, many middle-class families in California are being forced to live in their cars:

There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers.

The lots open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. and are run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, a homeless outreach organization.

It is illegal for people in California to sleep in their cars on streets. New Beginnings worked with the city to allow the parking lots as a safe place for the homeless to sleep in their vehicles without being harassed by people on the streets or ticketed by police …

Linn Labou, 54, lives in her car with four cats. She used to be in the National Guard and is on a waiting list for government housing, but the wait is a year long.

“I went looking for family, but I couldn’t get them to help me,” she said.

One view of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program and its changing fortunes:

There has been far more outrage online over the news that the OLPC may switch to Windows from its version of the free Linux operating system than over the discovery that hardly any of the laptops, originally to be deployed in no quantities smaller than 1m a country, will ever reach the poorest children.

The collapse of the scheme illuminates the utter falsity of the hope that technology alone can lift people out of poverty. Knowledge may, but the technology that spreads knowledge best is literacy, not laptops.

Library user advocates successfully challenged San Francisco’s Public Library Link+ automated interlibrary loan system’s large fee for lost books.

SFPL patrons can now negotiate lost book replacement fees.

As more and more people fall victim to the sub-prime mortgage mess more and more people are finding themselves without a home, living in tent cities.

Springtime is one of the neediest months for families of the working poor in Minnesota (and elsewhere).

What do these families need? More food at food pantries (80% of the contributions to Minnesota’s food shelves come from individuals). Food pantries keep food that often needs to be cooked, which what working poor families can use. Those people who are homeless are often directed to homeless shelters, not food pantries.

To find a food shelf or make a contribution to one in Minnesota call 651-721-8687 ext. 331 or go to Minnesota Food Share’s website.

The Shriver Center has just released the 2007 Poverty Scorecard: Rating Members of Congress. The collected stats are interesting.

Members of Congress from states with high rates of poverty are less likely to support anti-poverty measures than other members of Congress …

[The scorecard] assigns letter grades to each member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives according to their voting records on the most important poverty-related issues that came to a vote in 2007, including legislation on affordable housing, health care, education, labor, tax policy and immigrants’ rights …

In general, states whose Congressional delegations generally opposed anti-poverty measures are clustered in the south and western parts of the country. States whose delegations had the worst voting records and highest poverty rates were South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona.

The University of South Carolina School of Medicine will receive a $1.2 million grant from the City of Columbia in order to implement Housing First, a program that will place 25 homeless people into apartments and homes in the city of Columbia beginning in April.

Columbia is the first Housing First program to have a medical school coordinate services for the clients.

To find out more about the project, contact David Parker, director of Supportive Housing Services at the university’s medical school rdavidp@gw.mp.sc.edu.