Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force – SRRT/ALA

From the LA Times (Bob Pool, 10/16/09, via subscription):

She’s 97 years old and homeless. Bessie Mae Berger has her two boys, and that’s about all.

She and sons Larry Wilkerson, 60, and Charlie Wilkerson, 62, live in a 1973 Chevrolet Suburban they park each night on a busy Venice street.

For the most part, it’s a lonely life—days spent passing the time away in public parks, parking lots and shopping centers around the Westside.

Occasionally, when they need cash, Bessie sits by the side of the road and seeks handouts. She holds a cardboard sign in her lap: “I am 97 years old. Homeless. Broke. Need help please.”

(With thanks to Michael McGrorty for the tip.)

“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.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and This Land Is Their Land, reports on the U.S. recession:

The human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches …

When I called food banks and homeless shelters around the country, most staff members and directors seemed poised to offer press-pleasing tales of formerly middle-class families brought low. But some, like Toni Muhammad at Gateway Homeless Services in St. Louis, admitted that mostly they see “the long-term poor,” who become even poorer when they lose the kind of low-wage jobs that had been so easy for me to find from 1998 to 2000. As Candy Hill, a vice president of Catholic Charities U.S.A., put it, “All the focus is on the middle class—on Wall Street and Main Street—but it’s the people on the back streets who are really suffering.”

Recession porn? Here’s more.

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.”

Russ Baker makes a useful point about how those in power maintain, and profit from, their power:

When this nation’s conversational gatekeepers speak of power elites shaping and dominating a political system, more often than not, they are referring to developing countries. There is a virtual taboo on exploring the true domestic reach of the wealthy, banking interests, the spy services, military and military contractors. Our elected leaders are routinely depicted as singular actors upon the stage of history. And we personalize everything, and get caught up in debate about what are in essence distractions—W’s purported religious conversion, his troubled relationship with his father, the genius of Karl Rove and “evil nature” of Dick Cheney. We prefer to view politics as if it were a sporting competition, and discourage efforts to better understand how elites in our own society maintain their wealth, power and influence.

The University of Illinois’ News Bureau recently interviewed Barry Ackerson, associate dean and director of the master’s program in the School of Social Work.

Ackerson responds to questions colored by the recent survey published in Public Libraries. The survey suggested librarians were overwhelmingly concerned about mentally ill patrons.

What is your reaction to policies such as those at public libraries that seem to exclude homeless or mentally ill patrons?

I have some very strong feelings about them, but I’m not an unbiased person. My late wife, to whom I was married for 30 years, was an academic librarian, so I have some feelings for the issues that librarians contend with …

If someone is simply wearing old, tattered clothes and hasn’t bathed recently, I firmly believe that people in our society need to respect that that person has a right to live in our community. If they’re bothering other people, it’s a different issue. …

But what if they make other people uneasy or scare other patrons away from public spaces?

… We need to have some very vigorous services because some of these people have been in and out of our systems for a long time, and the services we currently have aren’t meeting their needs.

I’m an advocate of community outreach programs and assertive community treatment. I think social workers and mental health professionals shouldn’t do all of our jobs sitting behind our desks.

Read the whole piece.

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?

William Julius Wilson has authored a new book titled More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.

In early March, The New York Times Book Review carried Richard Thompson Ford’s positive review:

[Wilson] argues that the legacy of racism and changes in the economy matter more than the dysfunctional culture of the ghetto. And he rejects the argument that the black poor are responsible for their predicament, insisting that an aggressive public policy response is necessary to break the cycle of poverty …

[T]he law’s arm is not long enough to reach bigotry that occurred in the past, nor can it get a grip on the economic and demographic changes that have hollowed out America’s inner cities. The urban poor need remedies that judges cannot order: public and private investment to create jobs that pay a living wage, training to help them learn new skills and understand the job market, and most of all a chance to move into racially and economically integrated neighborhoods where there are better opportunities and healthier cultural norms.

They likewise need a new generation of librarians to tackle these issues with other community partners.

Sudhir Venkatesh at Salon.com also praised the book:

Critics will complain that Wilson himself has little to offer in terms of policy recommendations. But More Than Just Race contains some clues as to where he may be headed. He emphasizes the advantages of “race neutral” programs. Wilson knows that Americans and their elected leaders are more likely to support initiatives that are not identified with poor blacks. And in this economy, there is no shortage of disadvantaged Americans—white or black—who require employment assistance and supportive services.

He is also partial to addressing joblessness first, despite his insistence that culture matters (and that behaviors don’t change as quickly as policymakers wish). Wilson repeatedly points to the benefits that jobs programs and vocational training have on the cultural front. Stated somewhat crudely, increasing employment will reduce the number of people who might promote or even condone deviant behavior. Change might not occur overnight, and it may not be wholesale, but it will take place.