Author: Lisa Gieskes

“D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) said Friday that the $11 million cut in local funding and $9 million cut in federal funding for homeless services was revealed to him Thursday as he prepared for an oversight hearing.

‘Obviously, I was taken by surprise and furious because we have a tenuous relationship with the community as it is,” said Wells, chairman of the Human Services Committee, which oversees the city agency responsible for serving the homeless. “You have to have honesty and transparency in actions, and this undercuts the relationship we’ve developed with the community.’”

For the full article click here.

Barbara Ehrenreich seems to think so. Read her article here.

Dr. Jessie Gaeta, of Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, was interviewed on Talk of the Nation’s “What Works” segment at 3:00 p.m. EST today, August 3, 2009.
Listen to the interview archived at www.npr.org.

Plant A Row
is a public service program of the Garden Writers Association and the GWA Foundation. Their program helps feed hungry Americans.

They write, “According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1 in 8 households in the United States experiences hunger or the risk of hunger. Many frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for an entire day. Approximately 33 million people, including 13 million children, have substandard diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need. The demand for hunger assistance has increased by 70% in recent years, and research shows that hundreds of hungry children and adults are turned away from food banks each year because of lack of resources…

There are over 84 million households with a yard or garden in the U.S. If every gardener plants one extra row of vegetables and donates their surplus to local food agencies and soup kitchens, a significant impact can be made on reducing hunger.”

As long as we keep defining them as homeless they won’t according to two recent feature articles in Public Libraries: “Aiming High, Reaching Out, and Doing Good” and “Problems Associated with Mentally Ill Individuals in Public Libraries.” You can infer a lot about these articles given their titles. The first was written by a reference librarian, Linda Tashbook, the other by three mental health professionals, who advocate that mental health professionals should provide consulting services to public libraries. The librarian tells us that homeless people can be our best patrons considering their informational needs: law, justice, and citizenship, and that they, more than anyone, can appreciate the public library as a bastion of democracy. Tashbook writes, “Reaching out to prospective and present yet disconnected homeless patrons with legal information engages their interest and also helps to reduce their disenfranchisement; they can’t be completely distinct from society if a venerable institution like the library knows about the facts of their existence and acknowledges that they have legal rights applicable to that existence.” The mental health professionals state that there is a pandemic of problematic individuals threatening the future of public libraries, but they base their argument on faulty logic and a flawed survey. Their solution for libraries with homeless patrons is for them to “identify the 10 percent of problematic individuals and ensure they receive treatment for their psychiatric disorders. This can be done in a number of ways, including through the use assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), which requires such individuals to follow a treatment plan (including in some jurisdictions taking medication) as a condition for living in the community.” Since when is the library a place to keep the community out of? Wouldn’t that be taking the public out of public libraries?

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter proposed closing Charles Durham Library (as well as other libraries in poorer Philadelphia communities) but this plan continues to face community opposition. See full article.

See the online petition.

“One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study. Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to the report Monday by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years.”

See the full article.

“In December, when Project ACT, a social service program for homeless students run by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, asked a group of homeless parents what they wanted for Christmas, the parents responded with wish lists worthy of Little Dorrit: toilet paper, bleach, paper towels, food.”

This story, along with others, appears in the article, “Hope for the Homeless: With homeless rates at record highs, America needs a bold new housing policy” (The Nation, Feb. 9, 2009).

224,000 students are homeless in California.
In Boston, homeless families number 3,870.
9,700 homeless families seek shelter in New York City every night.

“The number of Americans who say their lives are a struggle climbed steeply last year from less than half the population to nearly six in 10 people, a vast Gallup poll showed Friday.”

“US unemployment jumped to a 16-year high of 7.2 percent as a deepening recession pushed employers to shed a massive 524,000 jobs in December, capping the worst annual performance since 1945.”

Berkeley Public Library’s controversial RFID checkout system was bought out by 3M in 2008. 3M refused to sign the standard City of Berkeley forms requiring that they will not, for the life of the contract, work for nuclear weapons or do business with oppressive states (as defined by the City of Berkeley). The Peace and Justice Commission denied a waiver for 3M. The final decision rests with the Berkeley City Council.