Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force – SRRT/ALA

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.

A letter to the editor submitted on behalf of the HHPTF…

James Kelly’s “Barefoot in Columbus”—published in Public Libraries, May/June 2006—is a useful and well-written contribution to the literature on library risk management. Library directors can now sleep more easily at night. But not so the nine million low-income working families who struggle to get by.

The national discourse on library service to poor people is inordinately dominated by the specter of Richard Kreimer, concern with the “unruly homeless,” and attempts to police odor. Frustration and fear inform the ongoing conversation about homeless patrons, whose presence mortifies us like so many decomposing B-movie monsters.

ALA’s new president, Leslie Burger, maintains that “libraries transform communities.” Yet few librarians quoted in the news mention partnerships with social service providers, advocate for affordable housing and living wages, or express much interest in people who never come to the library—due to a lack of transportation, the burden of multiple jobs, inadequate child care, language barriers, unreasonable fees and fines, or simply because no one has ever invited them.

This is a far cry from the near-decade British information professionals have invested to study social exclusion, the systems and policy decisions that produce disparities, and the benefits thoughtful remedies deliver to all social classes. See The Network, for example: www.seapn.org.uk. While our colleagues across the pond engage poverty’s causes, we remain fixated on punishing those who display its symptoms.

Sociologists Dale Parent and Bonnie Lewis observe,

Social exclusion is not simply a result of “bad luck” or personal inadequacies, but rather a product of flaws in the system that create disadvantages for certain segments of the population. Therefore, the unequal distribution of power in society from which social exclusion is derived should be the primary focus of attention for researchers and policy makers. Everybody does not start the race at the same place.

Libraries may be operating within the law when wielding appearance and hygiene policies. But without a simultaneous effort to engage poverty—to reach out to men, women, and (increasingly) children who suffer it daily—librarians deliberately perpetuate inequality by withholding the knowledge, resources, and power they possess.

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

The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law offers two important new tools for advocates of low-income people.

“Rebuilding America’s Lower Ninth” is a campaign to frame a national dialogue on poverty in late summer:

When Katrina devastated the Gulf States last year, the hurricane alerted the nation to a state without borders, a state whose geography extends beyond the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans—it is the State of Poverty, America’s undeclared disaster area. As part of our State of Poverty initiative, the Shriver Center is coordinating media outreach events between August 21 – September 1, 2006 in a campaign called Rebuilding America’s Lower Ninth …

Our efforts are improving the lives of low-wage workers, helping families advance toward economic security, and preserving communities of opportunity throughout our country. However, we know that we are not alone. As we look to constructive policies that move people from poverty to prosperity, we are asking you to lend your voice and your solutions to this week of outreach and public education.

The newest issue of Clearinghouse Review “focuses on what the federal government must do to end poverty in America.”

The jam-packed May/June 2006 edition features topics ranging from arguments against a “small and passive federal government” to ways to combat adult illiteracy and improve public housing.

For more information about these and other Shriver Center projects, visit www.povertylaw.org.

If you are in New Orleans for ALA, be sure to check out the following program (forwarded by Isabel Espinal):

“Race, Poverty, and Aging Baby Boomers”

Sunday
June 25, 2006
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Morial Convention Center (MCC) Room 393

Sponsored by:
AFL-CIO-ALA Library Service to Labor Groups, RUSA

The tragic aftermath of hurricane Katrina has laid bare the race and class disparities in this country like no other event in recent history. Twenty-eight percent of the residents of New Orleans lived below the poverty line prior to Katrina and 84% of them were African-American. Katrina demonstrated that along with race and class, age matters in America.

While many aging Baby Boomers will be healthier and wealthier than their parents’ generation, the number of older adults in poverty and at risk will increase significantly so that by 2008 there will be 6.7 million persons aged 55 or over below poverty, a 22% increase from 2000. This panel will present findings from recent research, explore implications for librarians, and provide an update on efforts to clean up and rebuild New Orleans.

Speakers:
Andrew Sum, PhD, director, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University; Monique Harden, Esq., co-director, Advocates for Environmental Human Rights

The House of Representatives recently passed a pay raise for itself but just killed a bill to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs today offers some choice criticism of these actions:

Raising the minimum wage … would positively affect the lives of more than 8 million workers, including an estimated 760,000 single mothers and 1.8 million parents with children under 18 … Don’t you think these families just might need that cost-of-living increase a bit more than our elected officials who are paid nearly $170,000 a year?

With no Congressional action on raising the minimum wage since 1997, inflation has eroded wages. The minimum wage in the 21st century is $2 lower in real dollars than it was four decades ago and now stands at its lowest level since 1955, according to the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Also, since the last time Congress increased the minimum wage for our lowest-paid workers, buying power has fallen by 25 percent. Yet over that time our elected representatives have given themselves eight pay raises totaling more than 23 percent.

For more information about living wages, check out the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign: www.letjusticeroll.org.

The minimum wage is where society draws the line: This low and no lower. Our bottom line is this: A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it.

The Campaign conducts an ongoing educational program to inform people of the severity of conditions facing low-wage working people and what must be done to bring about constructive change. It is organizing actively at the federal level and in selected states to raise the minimum wage.

To contact your Representative, visit www.house.gov/writerep.