Highlights from the Washtenaw Shelter Association's 2008-2009 Annual Report:
"According to HUD's 2009 Point-in-Time Count, there are approximately 4,212 individuals experiencing homelessness in Washtenaw County; 1,592 are children and youth."
"1,478 men and women experiencing homelessness sought shelter and services at the Robert J. Delonis Center." According to the same report, the Delonis Center expenses for the 2008-2009 fiscal year ending June 30, 2009 totaled $2.2 million.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
This is change
We'd like to think our activity this year has helped in a small way to prompt funding, political action, and policy change in our county. Certainly many organizations and concerned citizens have advocated on behalf of the homeless.
This is change:
http://www.annarbor.com/news/government/washtenaw-county-community-leaders-working-to-expanding-homeless-support-system-this-winter/
This is change:
http://www.annarbor.com/news/government/washtenaw-county-community-leaders-working-to-expanding-homeless-support-system-this-winter/
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Ann Arbor is adding more beds!
We are very excited with the news that the Delonis Shelter in Ann Arbor is adding more beds and chairs to their warming center this winter.
The article is here: http://www.annarbor.com/news/government/washtenaw-county-community-leaders-working-to-expanding-homeless-support-system-this-winter/
The article is here: http://www.annarbor.com/news/government/washtenaw-county-community-leaders-working-to-expanding-homeless-support-system-this-winter/
Friday, September 4, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Ann Arbor Chronical Story: Homeless Camp Moves
This article was published by the Ann Arbor Chronicle on September 2nd about MISSION´s itinerant tent city. We´re now officially itinerant.
We also need your support. Please share this story.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Johnny's Story
I want you to think about the warm bed that you slept in last night, then I want you to think about how being rained on will affect your dreams. I want you to think about your job, whatever it is that you do for hours on end when you’d rather not be. Then I want you to think about how it would feel to never do that again. I want you to think about how you would feel if you knew, for a fact, that everything you will ever need has been provided for you and is there for the taking. I want you to imagine how sweet a rose or young girl’s perfume might smell when you are covered in self-excrement and dumpster gunk every day. Think of all your friends, all your dreams and commitments, think of all the things that make you, you. Then think of the beautiful simplicity of sleeping under the stars and walking everywhere you go. Think of your bills, and all the reasons you do the things you do; then imagine you knew that none of it mattered. What would you do? Would you perpetuate the lie, or would you steal your life away from those who would claim it as theirs?
Only if you can imagine all of this, if you can live it all in your mind can you imagine what this life is like. But, even then, you won’t really know. I didn’t really know what Juba was talking about until many years later, after I had been where he was.
I was face-deep in an inch of water when all I had to do was get up and walk away. I was drowning in things I wanted to buy, people I wanted to know, drugs I wanted to do. Then a simple man with simple needs taught me the wisdom of simplicity.
The words he spoke to me shattered and changed the world. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he was an avatar of the god of coincidence, come to create and destroy. Sometimes I think maybe he was an agent of the same forces that made so many people betray me. Whatever he was, his words stayed with me, and continue to stay with me, the only friend I need.
“Don’t let them get you down, Johnny.” Juba consoled.
“Oh, I’m alright, I just have a headache.” I lied, not about the headache, but about being okay, I was anything but.
I had been evicted from my apartment a few months prior and moved back with my mom. She died two weeks ago and just that day some guys came and said I couldn’t live in the house anymore because she owed a lot of money. They threw everything I owned into the rain.
Watching those men throw my TV, stereo, bed and assorted other material shackles into a pile reminded me of Nazis throwing Jewish bodies into a mass grave to be covered with lime and forgotten about with as much malice as possible.
Juba looked into my eyes and got a look on his face as if he were reading something. “I know.” He said. “Just don’t let them get you down, that’s how they win.”
I looked down at the concrete at my feet just outside the back door of Bennigan’s, still wet from this morning’s rain; then I looked back up at him with a face that read, ‘either say something that will help or shut up.’ He sat down on the curb next to me and lit up a cigarette. Drawing in the smoke with a long smooth breath, Juba paused for a minute. He was staring, almost as if he was looking through something. He turned to me and said, while exhaling the mentholated cigarette smoke, “there are many kinds of success, there are many ways to look at this world and there are many ways to live. It would be foolish to think that any of them is right.” I looked back at him with puzzlement. It would be many years before I would understand what he meant, but at that time I was too confused to understand anything.
Just as I was about to pass him off for another raving old kook, he said, “Let me tell you a story.” With apprehension I stopped myself from speaking and opened my mind.
“I’m a painter, I don’t know if you know.” I nodded ‘no’ just to appease him, I knew. “A few years back this hippie-chick comes into the homeless shelter looking for talented people to be in this art show downtown. I thought this was my big break; I thought about all the money I would make, all thing things I was going to buy, and all the girls that would want to fuck me.” Again, he gets that look on his face like he’s looking through something. “I got sucked in, I began to desire. I wasn’t selling out, I was buying in, or at least that’s what I told myself.” He took another deep drag of his cigarette, I looked in the direction he keeps looking, and trying to find what is so interesting. All I see is the concrete wall of the dumpster corral.
“Well this chick came up to me and said she would get my paintings into this showing. She said that there would be all kinds of people there who loved to throw their money away. She said I would make a lot and get recognized.”
“So I went clean,” he said as he pulled a half-pint out from under his plastic apron. “I quit drinking and started working. I started painting like a demon trying to possess his own soul.”
“Okay so what’s the point of all of this?” I questioned.
“Would you shut the fuck up and listen for a second. Close your earth-blinded eyes and see something for once. Absorb something real, some real wisdom.” Something deep inside me told me that I should listen to him; maybe he would be good for a laugh, if nothing else.
“So I was clean for months. I told G not to bring the green around anymore; I told the party boys that I would not be coming by the house anymore. I didn’t even go near a liquor store, I was clean.”
After a long and smooth gulp from the bottle, he twisted the cap back on and put it back in his pocket without a single facial expression.
You should’ve seen some of the stuff I painted. But the bitch, she screwed me. On the day of the show she sent me a gift basket, complete with a fifth. I had half of it finished by the time I stumbled up the door. The guards at the door would not let me in, something about disturbing people. It was my show and they would not let me in. I ended up lying down on a park bench and finishing the other half of the fifth. I woke up a few hours later to the hippie chick shaking me, hoping that I was dead so that my paintings would be worth more. She told me that the paintings sold for thousands of dollars apiece, that I would be rich, that she would send me the money. She lied; I never saw that bitch again.”
He seemed to get a slight swelling in his eyes, like a tear might fight its way through, but his clenched jaw said only anger. He then pulled his half-pint out again and prayed to the god of coincidence.
“The only things that they can take away from you are the things you have. If you don’t have anything, you can’t lose.”
I looked back at him, breaking my concentration on the concrete.
“Don’t let them get you down, let them have what they want, they won’t be any happier with it than you are.”
Just then, Sully stuck his head out of the back door and said, “Boonsty, get back in here, we got a rush; and Juba, we need that silverware down so the servers can roll it.” With that he shrunk his head back inside the beast.
“Allah the Dolla, that’s who they worship. You shouldn’t worry about him, worry about coincidence.”
He turned and went back into the building and so did I. Many years passed before I know what he was talking about. It was only after I lost everything that I learned I needed nothing.
Three years later I was bankrupt from my mother’s funeral and squatting in my mother’s abandoned house. I was still working at Bennigan’s, a manager even. None of them knew that the person that told them what to do everyday shivered on cold nights and took showers at a truck stop. I was still holding on to what I was told was life.
Sometimes I would come by my sister’s house and catch a warm shower and see my little nieces. I already hated my sister; a smug, prissy whore of a woman, she always acted like she was better than me. One time I left one of my paychecks at my sister’s house on accident and that bitch signed my name and cashed it. When I asked her why she did it, she said, “I bought things for my kids, I knew you wouldn’t care.” And right then, I realized that she was right, I didn’t care. I had lost so much that anything more didn’t make a difference. I thought I had already hit rock bottom, but I was wrong, as most people are when they think they’re there. After informing my sister of my opinion of her, I left her house and went straight to the closest liquor store.
No I was no angel at this point, I went to college; I did every drug put in front of me. With only a few ragged bills in my pocket I spied a beautifully cheap bottle on the bottom shelf. “Gilbey’s gin,” I said to myself, “it can’t be that bad.”
“Don’t be so sure,” the clerk said; a tall hairy white boy with a giant blonde afro stood there. “That stuff will put chest hair on our chest hair.” Ignoring his warnings and sliding two bills across the counter, I took the bottle and walked out of the store and into the cold, unforgiving night.
I left this world that night. I left all its pain, all its worries and all its business. I traded all those things that were me, for another world. Like a ship in a bottle, I felt cramped and contrary to my purpose. I was caught in an endless cycle of emotionally blunted reactions to increasingly less fulfilling stimuli. No matter the surroundings, my reaction remains the same, a dull wanting for something known. But it is the unknown I was seeking. I was seeking the un-knowing of all that I was. I was seeking that which unmade me, destruction, as it were, of myself. I had been, therefore I have been a being, to myself and what I perceived to be to others, for many years. Now was a time to destroy all of that. Not the annihilating, ending-of-all-things-to-come a kind of destroying, but the kind of destroying that was exploratory. I was seeking to know who I truly was as a being and therefore what it is to be a being, and by extension of that, what it means to be. I had to first strip away all those things that had built around me, confusing who I was with what I was. Possessions are distractions from true purpose.
That night I slept under the stars and awoke with a terrible thirst, but felt it being quenched just as it arrived by the down pouring rain. Falling into my senses is never pleasant, but it kept happening to me more and more and I thought that it was a sign. Not a sign of something being wrong necessarily, just a sign that something needed to change.
After orienting myself and taking refuge under a tree for a few minutes, I decided to make my way to the paper mill. It stopped raining on the walk over there, but I was already soaked. The paper mill, as it was, and is, and always will be; is a spiritual place abandoned by society and its ideals. Coming here somehow gave me a sense of peace. It is somewhere lonely souls can go and feel comfort in the whole. Its blood red brick is scarred and weathered from the hunger of time. Hard to find myself here, whom I didn’t know, but anywhere else leads to nothingness.
Forsaking the sky by looking down all day, I stared at this rock lying in the river, inspired. Like a million calamitous pixies fighting a way over territory, the sun reflected off of the waves of the river. The waves were passing to and through the rock and my consciousness as one. I came here today, of all days, to find peace. I steal little bits of serenity from the waves. For some reason this rock captivated me. It is not really a rock, per se, it is more of a hunk of concrete dumped into the river and forgotten about. It seemed so artificial. But it also seemed like it could not have been anywhere else but right in front of me at this moment. The rock struck me strange because it had a large hole in the middle of it through which the river flows through and around it at the same time. How envious I was of the rock, something so strong that still let’s give and let go where it needs to go. The water caressed the rock from the inside out, leaving it perpetually blissful. I wanted to be like the rock, strong and unchanged, but not fighting against anything. There were many rocks lying in the river, making its flow distinct, but this one seemed so out of place. It seemed out of place but at the same time it seemed like every river should have a hunk of concrete in it for people to contemplate upon.
I thought about the last time I had come to this part of the river. It was winter time and very cold, the kind of cold that froze the snot inside your nose. I had come there on that day to find myself, to be with myself and caressed by the river at the same time. The rock had not been here back then. Back then it was the ice that comforted me.
Over the waterfall that came after the small dam in the river, there had been a log, stuck halfway over the waterfall. It was just dangling there, as if it were suicidal and indecisive. It dangled there for so long that ice started to form around it. It stayed cold long enough for a succession of ice coverings formed on it. The ice draped around the log like some regal robe. Just under the log there was a little part where the water kind of spit forth, apart from the rest of the waterfall. The ice and the single stream of water made it look much like some lord of the fish, a person peeking his head out of the waterfall, spitting forth his disdain for us “surface dwellers.”
I became ever more envious of the rock, having known such wonders apart from my world.
When I walked back to my mother’s house I saw two cop cars sitting outside. Knowing that I could be arrested or at least questioned just or being young and black, I decided to just go take a shower at the truck stop and go to work. After successfully dodging some prostitutes that smelled like they were unaware of the showers just inside, I cleaned myself and made myself into that other person. I became Boonsty, the successful me. That was my nickname, I don’t really remember where it came from, but that’s what most civilized people called me. I became that other me that is successful and rich and cool. I was still Johnny, the one who thought and felt things that Boonsty could never understand, the one that slept under the stars last night and loved the morning dew. But to the world, when I was in it, I was b.
I successfully piloted the Boonsty raft to Bennigan’s. Walking in the front door, I was greeted by two police officers talking to my manager. I could overhear a few words, “squatting, and “Mother” and illegal” were among them and I started to get a sinking feeling.
As I walked in they turned to me and said, “Jonathan Boyd, you are under arrest for assault.”
“What, against whom?” I protested.
“Your sister, Gloria.” One of them responded.
“What, I did no such thing.”
“She said that it occurred in December of ’86.”
“But that’s twelve years ago.”
“Well, unfortunately there is not statute of limitations on assault in this state.”
I thought to myself for a second, I knew what this was about. Back in high school I slapped my sister once for being a total bitch to me and the entire family. It happened at school after I had given her a ride and another student saw it and told the principal. I almost got expelled. And now that bitch was pissed at me and she was trying to screw me by bringing this up.
So I conceded to the men and let them shackle me. They took me to the county jail and threw me in a poorly lit room smelling of feces and loss. I was printed, processed, and re-processed like so much cheese. I spent the next thirty days in there because the inept lawyer that the state gave me didn’t seem to even care because I had no money and it wasn’t a high profile case. And the Femi-Nazi judge that they gave me didn’t care that my sister was a bitch, she didn’t care that it had happened twelve years ago, she didn’t care about anything but her revenge on that first boy that she had a crush on that told her she was too fat or ugly or poor or whatever.
So I spent the next thirty days wallowing in resentment. All I had was hate. I did a lot of thinking in there; there was nothing else to do but talk to crack heads. I thought about all the time and hard work I had expended to get my things. I thought about how my life had revolved around those things. I began to hate those things. I began to hate all things. I hated people-things, I hated animal-things, I hated insect-things, but most of al I hated thing-things; those things that confine us through their own definition. I kept thinking about that day when those men threw all of my thing-things into a mass grave. At the time I had hated those men because I loved my things, but now I know that they were just angels of coincidence, come to liberate me. I did a lot of thinking about Juba. I had worked with him for a long time but I only really talked him once, yet I could not stop thinking about it. I became envious of the way he was so happy to know where happiness didn’t come from. He didn’t think he knew the answer, he just knew where not to look. I built myself a cocoon and stayed there, changing, for thirty days.
When I got out I didn’t bother going back to Bennigan’s, I knew that they knew that I was Johnny, and Boonsty. They would never look at me the same; I didn’t want them to anyway, because I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same as I was; I wasn’t the same as them. I was reborn, remolded into an amorphous being free of care. I didn’t have anything, no money, no family, no friends, nothing to tie me down.
The first few days were rough, sleeping wherever I could find shelter, eating out of the garbage, finding limitations to my limitless transcendence. That is, until a kind man came to me one morning as I sat, half conscious, under the awning of a restaurant that hadn’t opened yet. The man came to me and said, “Here buddy, you’ll be happier with this than I will be.” As he set black plastic garbage bag full of bottles next to me and walked away before I could even thank him. I was saved.
I took the bottles to the Kroger’s and exchanged them for a new life. A life free from care, free of worry, free of need. At that moment I new that everything was going to work out because everything that I will ever need will be thrown out by someone who thinks that they are better than me.
Allah the Dolla is dead in my mind, now I worship the god of coincidence.
Only if you can imagine all of this, if you can live it all in your mind can you imagine what this life is like. But, even then, you won’t really know. I didn’t really know what Juba was talking about until many years later, after I had been where he was.
I was face-deep in an inch of water when all I had to do was get up and walk away. I was drowning in things I wanted to buy, people I wanted to know, drugs I wanted to do. Then a simple man with simple needs taught me the wisdom of simplicity.
The words he spoke to me shattered and changed the world. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he was an avatar of the god of coincidence, come to create and destroy. Sometimes I think maybe he was an agent of the same forces that made so many people betray me. Whatever he was, his words stayed with me, and continue to stay with me, the only friend I need.
“Don’t let them get you down, Johnny.” Juba consoled.
“Oh, I’m alright, I just have a headache.” I lied, not about the headache, but about being okay, I was anything but.
I had been evicted from my apartment a few months prior and moved back with my mom. She died two weeks ago and just that day some guys came and said I couldn’t live in the house anymore because she owed a lot of money. They threw everything I owned into the rain.
Watching those men throw my TV, stereo, bed and assorted other material shackles into a pile reminded me of Nazis throwing Jewish bodies into a mass grave to be covered with lime and forgotten about with as much malice as possible.
Juba looked into my eyes and got a look on his face as if he were reading something. “I know.” He said. “Just don’t let them get you down, that’s how they win.”
I looked down at the concrete at my feet just outside the back door of Bennigan’s, still wet from this morning’s rain; then I looked back up at him with a face that read, ‘either say something that will help or shut up.’ He sat down on the curb next to me and lit up a cigarette. Drawing in the smoke with a long smooth breath, Juba paused for a minute. He was staring, almost as if he was looking through something. He turned to me and said, while exhaling the mentholated cigarette smoke, “there are many kinds of success, there are many ways to look at this world and there are many ways to live. It would be foolish to think that any of them is right.” I looked back at him with puzzlement. It would be many years before I would understand what he meant, but at that time I was too confused to understand anything.
Just as I was about to pass him off for another raving old kook, he said, “Let me tell you a story.” With apprehension I stopped myself from speaking and opened my mind.
“I’m a painter, I don’t know if you know.” I nodded ‘no’ just to appease him, I knew. “A few years back this hippie-chick comes into the homeless shelter looking for talented people to be in this art show downtown. I thought this was my big break; I thought about all the money I would make, all thing things I was going to buy, and all the girls that would want to fuck me.” Again, he gets that look on his face like he’s looking through something. “I got sucked in, I began to desire. I wasn’t selling out, I was buying in, or at least that’s what I told myself.” He took another deep drag of his cigarette, I looked in the direction he keeps looking, and trying to find what is so interesting. All I see is the concrete wall of the dumpster corral.
“Well this chick came up to me and said she would get my paintings into this showing. She said that there would be all kinds of people there who loved to throw their money away. She said I would make a lot and get recognized.”
“So I went clean,” he said as he pulled a half-pint out from under his plastic apron. “I quit drinking and started working. I started painting like a demon trying to possess his own soul.”
“Okay so what’s the point of all of this?” I questioned.
“Would you shut the fuck up and listen for a second. Close your earth-blinded eyes and see something for once. Absorb something real, some real wisdom.” Something deep inside me told me that I should listen to him; maybe he would be good for a laugh, if nothing else.
“So I was clean for months. I told G not to bring the green around anymore; I told the party boys that I would not be coming by the house anymore. I didn’t even go near a liquor store, I was clean.”
After a long and smooth gulp from the bottle, he twisted the cap back on and put it back in his pocket without a single facial expression.
You should’ve seen some of the stuff I painted. But the bitch, she screwed me. On the day of the show she sent me a gift basket, complete with a fifth. I had half of it finished by the time I stumbled up the door. The guards at the door would not let me in, something about disturbing people. It was my show and they would not let me in. I ended up lying down on a park bench and finishing the other half of the fifth. I woke up a few hours later to the hippie chick shaking me, hoping that I was dead so that my paintings would be worth more. She told me that the paintings sold for thousands of dollars apiece, that I would be rich, that she would send me the money. She lied; I never saw that bitch again.”
He seemed to get a slight swelling in his eyes, like a tear might fight its way through, but his clenched jaw said only anger. He then pulled his half-pint out again and prayed to the god of coincidence.
“The only things that they can take away from you are the things you have. If you don’t have anything, you can’t lose.”
I looked back at him, breaking my concentration on the concrete.
“Don’t let them get you down, let them have what they want, they won’t be any happier with it than you are.”
Just then, Sully stuck his head out of the back door and said, “Boonsty, get back in here, we got a rush; and Juba, we need that silverware down so the servers can roll it.” With that he shrunk his head back inside the beast.
“Allah the Dolla, that’s who they worship. You shouldn’t worry about him, worry about coincidence.”
He turned and went back into the building and so did I. Many years passed before I know what he was talking about. It was only after I lost everything that I learned I needed nothing.
Three years later I was bankrupt from my mother’s funeral and squatting in my mother’s abandoned house. I was still working at Bennigan’s, a manager even. None of them knew that the person that told them what to do everyday shivered on cold nights and took showers at a truck stop. I was still holding on to what I was told was life.
Sometimes I would come by my sister’s house and catch a warm shower and see my little nieces. I already hated my sister; a smug, prissy whore of a woman, she always acted like she was better than me. One time I left one of my paychecks at my sister’s house on accident and that bitch signed my name and cashed it. When I asked her why she did it, she said, “I bought things for my kids, I knew you wouldn’t care.” And right then, I realized that she was right, I didn’t care. I had lost so much that anything more didn’t make a difference. I thought I had already hit rock bottom, but I was wrong, as most people are when they think they’re there. After informing my sister of my opinion of her, I left her house and went straight to the closest liquor store.
No I was no angel at this point, I went to college; I did every drug put in front of me. With only a few ragged bills in my pocket I spied a beautifully cheap bottle on the bottom shelf. “Gilbey’s gin,” I said to myself, “it can’t be that bad.”
“Don’t be so sure,” the clerk said; a tall hairy white boy with a giant blonde afro stood there. “That stuff will put chest hair on our chest hair.” Ignoring his warnings and sliding two bills across the counter, I took the bottle and walked out of the store and into the cold, unforgiving night.
I left this world that night. I left all its pain, all its worries and all its business. I traded all those things that were me, for another world. Like a ship in a bottle, I felt cramped and contrary to my purpose. I was caught in an endless cycle of emotionally blunted reactions to increasingly less fulfilling stimuli. No matter the surroundings, my reaction remains the same, a dull wanting for something known. But it is the unknown I was seeking. I was seeking the un-knowing of all that I was. I was seeking that which unmade me, destruction, as it were, of myself. I had been, therefore I have been a being, to myself and what I perceived to be to others, for many years. Now was a time to destroy all of that. Not the annihilating, ending-of-all-things-to-come a kind of destroying, but the kind of destroying that was exploratory. I was seeking to know who I truly was as a being and therefore what it is to be a being, and by extension of that, what it means to be. I had to first strip away all those things that had built around me, confusing who I was with what I was. Possessions are distractions from true purpose.
That night I slept under the stars and awoke with a terrible thirst, but felt it being quenched just as it arrived by the down pouring rain. Falling into my senses is never pleasant, but it kept happening to me more and more and I thought that it was a sign. Not a sign of something being wrong necessarily, just a sign that something needed to change.
After orienting myself and taking refuge under a tree for a few minutes, I decided to make my way to the paper mill. It stopped raining on the walk over there, but I was already soaked. The paper mill, as it was, and is, and always will be; is a spiritual place abandoned by society and its ideals. Coming here somehow gave me a sense of peace. It is somewhere lonely souls can go and feel comfort in the whole. Its blood red brick is scarred and weathered from the hunger of time. Hard to find myself here, whom I didn’t know, but anywhere else leads to nothingness.
Forsaking the sky by looking down all day, I stared at this rock lying in the river, inspired. Like a million calamitous pixies fighting a way over territory, the sun reflected off of the waves of the river. The waves were passing to and through the rock and my consciousness as one. I came here today, of all days, to find peace. I steal little bits of serenity from the waves. For some reason this rock captivated me. It is not really a rock, per se, it is more of a hunk of concrete dumped into the river and forgotten about. It seemed so artificial. But it also seemed like it could not have been anywhere else but right in front of me at this moment. The rock struck me strange because it had a large hole in the middle of it through which the river flows through and around it at the same time. How envious I was of the rock, something so strong that still let’s give and let go where it needs to go. The water caressed the rock from the inside out, leaving it perpetually blissful. I wanted to be like the rock, strong and unchanged, but not fighting against anything. There were many rocks lying in the river, making its flow distinct, but this one seemed so out of place. It seemed out of place but at the same time it seemed like every river should have a hunk of concrete in it for people to contemplate upon.
I thought about the last time I had come to this part of the river. It was winter time and very cold, the kind of cold that froze the snot inside your nose. I had come there on that day to find myself, to be with myself and caressed by the river at the same time. The rock had not been here back then. Back then it was the ice that comforted me.
Over the waterfall that came after the small dam in the river, there had been a log, stuck halfway over the waterfall. It was just dangling there, as if it were suicidal and indecisive. It dangled there for so long that ice started to form around it. It stayed cold long enough for a succession of ice coverings formed on it. The ice draped around the log like some regal robe. Just under the log there was a little part where the water kind of spit forth, apart from the rest of the waterfall. The ice and the single stream of water made it look much like some lord of the fish, a person peeking his head out of the waterfall, spitting forth his disdain for us “surface dwellers.”
I became ever more envious of the rock, having known such wonders apart from my world.
When I walked back to my mother’s house I saw two cop cars sitting outside. Knowing that I could be arrested or at least questioned just or being young and black, I decided to just go take a shower at the truck stop and go to work. After successfully dodging some prostitutes that smelled like they were unaware of the showers just inside, I cleaned myself and made myself into that other person. I became Boonsty, the successful me. That was my nickname, I don’t really remember where it came from, but that’s what most civilized people called me. I became that other me that is successful and rich and cool. I was still Johnny, the one who thought and felt things that Boonsty could never understand, the one that slept under the stars last night and loved the morning dew. But to the world, when I was in it, I was b.
I successfully piloted the Boonsty raft to Bennigan’s. Walking in the front door, I was greeted by two police officers talking to my manager. I could overhear a few words, “squatting, and “Mother” and illegal” were among them and I started to get a sinking feeling.
As I walked in they turned to me and said, “Jonathan Boyd, you are under arrest for assault.”
“What, against whom?” I protested.
“Your sister, Gloria.” One of them responded.
“What, I did no such thing.”
“She said that it occurred in December of ’86.”
“But that’s twelve years ago.”
“Well, unfortunately there is not statute of limitations on assault in this state.”
I thought to myself for a second, I knew what this was about. Back in high school I slapped my sister once for being a total bitch to me and the entire family. It happened at school after I had given her a ride and another student saw it and told the principal. I almost got expelled. And now that bitch was pissed at me and she was trying to screw me by bringing this up.
So I conceded to the men and let them shackle me. They took me to the county jail and threw me in a poorly lit room smelling of feces and loss. I was printed, processed, and re-processed like so much cheese. I spent the next thirty days in there because the inept lawyer that the state gave me didn’t seem to even care because I had no money and it wasn’t a high profile case. And the Femi-Nazi judge that they gave me didn’t care that my sister was a bitch, she didn’t care that it had happened twelve years ago, she didn’t care about anything but her revenge on that first boy that she had a crush on that told her she was too fat or ugly or poor or whatever.
So I spent the next thirty days wallowing in resentment. All I had was hate. I did a lot of thinking in there; there was nothing else to do but talk to crack heads. I thought about all the time and hard work I had expended to get my things. I thought about how my life had revolved around those things. I began to hate those things. I began to hate all things. I hated people-things, I hated animal-things, I hated insect-things, but most of al I hated thing-things; those things that confine us through their own definition. I kept thinking about that day when those men threw all of my thing-things into a mass grave. At the time I had hated those men because I loved my things, but now I know that they were just angels of coincidence, come to liberate me. I did a lot of thinking about Juba. I had worked with him for a long time but I only really talked him once, yet I could not stop thinking about it. I became envious of the way he was so happy to know where happiness didn’t come from. He didn’t think he knew the answer, he just knew where not to look. I built myself a cocoon and stayed there, changing, for thirty days.
When I got out I didn’t bother going back to Bennigan’s, I knew that they knew that I was Johnny, and Boonsty. They would never look at me the same; I didn’t want them to anyway, because I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same as I was; I wasn’t the same as them. I was reborn, remolded into an amorphous being free of care. I didn’t have anything, no money, no family, no friends, nothing to tie me down.
The first few days were rough, sleeping wherever I could find shelter, eating out of the garbage, finding limitations to my limitless transcendence. That is, until a kind man came to me one morning as I sat, half conscious, under the awning of a restaurant that hadn’t opened yet. The man came to me and said, “Here buddy, you’ll be happier with this than I will be.” As he set black plastic garbage bag full of bottles next to me and walked away before I could even thank him. I was saved.
I took the bottles to the Kroger’s and exchanged them for a new life. A life free from care, free of worry, free of need. At that moment I new that everything was going to work out because everything that I will ever need will be thrown out by someone who thinks that they are better than me.
Allah the Dolla is dead in my mind, now I worship the god of coincidence.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Digital Itinerant Services Network
The following article relates Google's efforts to assist the homeless in San Francisco.
http://www.switched.com/2008/02/29/google-gives-free-phone-numbers-and-voicemail-to-homeless/
To make inroads with Google will open up an exchange of ideas and perhaps a layer of Google services directed at this population. Imagine an Itinerant Services Network, to which all camps are connected and is easily accessible through mobile devices, that provides up-to-the-minute information on nearby available services, including tent community vacancies.
Moreover, this service can provide information to the non-homeless about what needs must be met, and how one can help in a simple way. Let us fill the buckets with a million drops, by unleashing a flow of information through digital-age pipes.
http://www.switched.com/2008/02/29/google-gives-free-phone-numbers-and-voicemail-to-homeless/
To make inroads with Google will open up an exchange of ideas and perhaps a layer of Google services directed at this population. Imagine an Itinerant Services Network, to which all camps are connected and is easily accessible through mobile devices, that provides up-to-the-minute information on nearby available services, including tent community vacancies.
Moreover, this service can provide information to the non-homeless about what needs must be met, and how one can help in a simple way. Let us fill the buckets with a million drops, by unleashing a flow of information through digital-age pipes.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Wall Street Journal- 08/11/09
By JENNIFER LEVITZ
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Last summer, police responding to complaints about campfires under a highway overpass found dozens of homeless people living on public land along the Cumberland River.
Eviction notices went up -- and then were suspended by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat, who said housing for the homeless should be found first.
A year later, little has been found -- and Nashville, with help from local nonprofits, is now servicing a tent city, arranging for portable toilets, trash pickup, a mobile medical van and visits from social workers. Volunteers bring in firewood for the camp's 60 or so dwellers.
View SlideshowJosh Anderson for The Wall Street Journal
Jack Adkins sat in what he calls his "office" at his home in Tent City in Nashville.
Nashville is one of several U.S. cities that these days are accommodating the homeless and their encampments, instead of dispersing them. With local shelters at capacity, "there is no place to put them," said Clifton Harris, director of Nashville's Metropolitan Homeless Commission, says of tent-city dwellers.
In Florida, Hillsborough County plans to consider a proposal Tuesday by Catholic Charities to run an emergency tent city in Tampa for more than 200 people. Dave Rogoff, the county health and services director, said he preferred to see a "hard roof over people's heads." But that takes real money, he said: "We're trying to cut $110 million out of next year's budget."
Ontario, a city of 175,000 residents about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, provides guards and basic city services for a tent city on public land.
A church in Lacey, Wash., near the state capital of Olympia, recently started a homeless camp in its parking lot after the city changed local ordinances to permit it. The City Council in Ventura, Calif., last month revised its laws to permit sleeping in cars overnight in some areas. City Manager Rick Cole said most of the car campers are temporarily unemployed, "and in this economy, temporary can go on a long time."
Looking Back at the Homeless in the U.S.
Journal articles on cities' strategies for the homeless:
Homeless Veterans: Big Cities Try in Vain To Find Dwellings for More and More ex-G.I.'s (Nov. 15, 1945)
Skid Row Cleanup: Some Big Cities Switch From Arresting Drunks to Try Rehabilitation (Feb. 14, 1967)
Some Bums Objecting, But Chicago May Build A Brand-New Skid Row (Jan. 5, 1968)
Journal Community
Discuss: What's the right approach to dealing with homeless people?
After years of enforcing a tough anticamping law to break up homeless clusters, Sacramento recently formed a task force to look into designating homeless tracts because shelters are overflowing. One refuge in the California capital, St. John's Shelter for Women and Children, is turning away about 350 people a night, compared with 25 two years ago, said executive director Michele Steeb.
Some communities may be "less inclined to crack down quite as hard on people" because of the recession, said Barry Lee, a professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University.
Municipal leniency isn't universal. New York City officials last month shut down a tent city on a vacant lot in East Harlem. It was erected partly as shelter and partly to campaign for more-affordable housing. Seattle authorities have repeatedly booted off public land a tent city that popped up last year.
Anticipating Tuesday's vote on the homeless proposal in Tampa, hundreds of neighbors in a nearby 325-house subdivision have formed the "Stop Tent City" coalition. They are gathering petitions, passing out lawn signs and threatening lawsuits. Hal Hart, a paralegal and a neighbor who is part of the coalition, testified at the county meeting that a tent city would "devalue my home" and "devalue my community." He lives 300 feet from the proposed park.
Some homeless are battling mental illness or addictions, or both. Municipal officials in the U.S. acknowledge the tent cities can breed crime and unsanitary conditions, but with public shelter scarce, they say they have to weigh whether to spend police time to break up encampments that are likely to resurface elsewhere.
Pastors in Champaign, Ill., last week asked the City Council to allow people to live in organized tent communities of as many as 50 people. Legalizing the camps is more compassionate and cost-effective than forcing "poor people who are camping because they have a lack of better choices to constantly have to fear being rousted and cited by police," says Joan Burke, advocacy director for Sacramento Loaves & Fishes, a homeless-assistance agency.
In Nashville, Mr. Harris, director of the city's homeless commission, said tent cities have existed for years, but he has seen the numbers surge. He now knows of 30 encampments. While some people are chronically homeless, he said, foreclosures have forced others into the streets, as has Tennessee's 10.8% unemployment rate, the highest in 25 years.
Nashville estimates that on any given day, the city has 4,000 homeless people and 765 shelter beds. About 25% of the homeless have jobs, Mr. Harris said, but can't afford housing. A nonprofit coalition of 160 churches called Room in the Inn said it received 816 requests for financial assistance to ward off evictions or electricity shutoffs in July, up from 499 in July 2008.
More housing could be available soon. Tennessee will receive $53 million in federal stimulus money to help pay for the development of affordable rental housing across the state, the federal government announced last month.
While no one is suggesting that the tent city that popped up on police radar last summer is a permanent solution, local churches and synagogues are trying to give residents there a sense of order. The Otter Creek Church of Christ built residents a shower, with a fiberglass stall, plywood door and garden hose, and on Friday, associate minister Doug Sanders went to the tent city in what is the start of a church project to help residents institute some type of formal rules -- for everything from cleaning the shower to determining the progress residents should have to show toward finding housing.
The city and local nonprofits have found permanent housing for about 25 people from the tent city.
Many haven't been so lucky. David Olson, 47 years old, said last week he and his wife wound up under the Nashville overpass after he lost a job making cement pipes in Iowa four months ago. The couple came to Nashville for a remodeling job that turned out to be a scam. "I've got five years' experience in carpentry and 10 years' roofing and I can't find a job," he said.
Mr. Olson, his arms and shirt caked with dirt, said life is hard in the swampy woods. The couple woke up to mud after a night of rain. His wife said she is frightened by the dogs that roam around the encampment.
As mosquitoes buzzed, they tried to set up camp on higher ground. They struggled to secure a tarpaulin over their tent to keep out the rain. Mr. Olson's wife, holding onto a pole to prop up the tarp, cried. "I'm not used to living like this."
Write to Jennifer Levitz at jennifer.levitz@wsj.com Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A3
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Last summer, police responding to complaints about campfires under a highway overpass found dozens of homeless people living on public land along the Cumberland River.
Eviction notices went up -- and then were suspended by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat, who said housing for the homeless should be found first.
A year later, little has been found -- and Nashville, with help from local nonprofits, is now servicing a tent city, arranging for portable toilets, trash pickup, a mobile medical van and visits from social workers. Volunteers bring in firewood for the camp's 60 or so dwellers.
View SlideshowJosh Anderson for The Wall Street Journal
Jack Adkins sat in what he calls his "office" at his home in Tent City in Nashville.
Nashville is one of several U.S. cities that these days are accommodating the homeless and their encampments, instead of dispersing them. With local shelters at capacity, "there is no place to put them," said Clifton Harris, director of Nashville's Metropolitan Homeless Commission, says of tent-city dwellers.
In Florida, Hillsborough County plans to consider a proposal Tuesday by Catholic Charities to run an emergency tent city in Tampa for more than 200 people. Dave Rogoff, the county health and services director, said he preferred to see a "hard roof over people's heads." But that takes real money, he said: "We're trying to cut $110 million out of next year's budget."
Ontario, a city of 175,000 residents about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, provides guards and basic city services for a tent city on public land.
A church in Lacey, Wash., near the state capital of Olympia, recently started a homeless camp in its parking lot after the city changed local ordinances to permit it. The City Council in Ventura, Calif., last month revised its laws to permit sleeping in cars overnight in some areas. City Manager Rick Cole said most of the car campers are temporarily unemployed, "and in this economy, temporary can go on a long time."
Looking Back at the Homeless in the U.S.
Journal articles on cities' strategies for the homeless:
Homeless Veterans: Big Cities Try in Vain To Find Dwellings for More and More ex-G.I.'s (Nov. 15, 1945)
Skid Row Cleanup: Some Big Cities Switch From Arresting Drunks to Try Rehabilitation (Feb. 14, 1967)
Some Bums Objecting, But Chicago May Build A Brand-New Skid Row (Jan. 5, 1968)
Journal Community
Discuss: What's the right approach to dealing with homeless people?
After years of enforcing a tough anticamping law to break up homeless clusters, Sacramento recently formed a task force to look into designating homeless tracts because shelters are overflowing. One refuge in the California capital, St. John's Shelter for Women and Children, is turning away about 350 people a night, compared with 25 two years ago, said executive director Michele Steeb.
Some communities may be "less inclined to crack down quite as hard on people" because of the recession, said Barry Lee, a professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University.
Municipal leniency isn't universal. New York City officials last month shut down a tent city on a vacant lot in East Harlem. It was erected partly as shelter and partly to campaign for more-affordable housing. Seattle authorities have repeatedly booted off public land a tent city that popped up last year.
Anticipating Tuesday's vote on the homeless proposal in Tampa, hundreds of neighbors in a nearby 325-house subdivision have formed the "Stop Tent City" coalition. They are gathering petitions, passing out lawn signs and threatening lawsuits. Hal Hart, a paralegal and a neighbor who is part of the coalition, testified at the county meeting that a tent city would "devalue my home" and "devalue my community." He lives 300 feet from the proposed park.
Some homeless are battling mental illness or addictions, or both. Municipal officials in the U.S. acknowledge the tent cities can breed crime and unsanitary conditions, but with public shelter scarce, they say they have to weigh whether to spend police time to break up encampments that are likely to resurface elsewhere.
Pastors in Champaign, Ill., last week asked the City Council to allow people to live in organized tent communities of as many as 50 people. Legalizing the camps is more compassionate and cost-effective than forcing "poor people who are camping because they have a lack of better choices to constantly have to fear being rousted and cited by police," says Joan Burke, advocacy director for Sacramento Loaves & Fishes, a homeless-assistance agency.
In Nashville, Mr. Harris, director of the city's homeless commission, said tent cities have existed for years, but he has seen the numbers surge. He now knows of 30 encampments. While some people are chronically homeless, he said, foreclosures have forced others into the streets, as has Tennessee's 10.8% unemployment rate, the highest in 25 years.
Nashville estimates that on any given day, the city has 4,000 homeless people and 765 shelter beds. About 25% of the homeless have jobs, Mr. Harris said, but can't afford housing. A nonprofit coalition of 160 churches called Room in the Inn said it received 816 requests for financial assistance to ward off evictions or electricity shutoffs in July, up from 499 in July 2008.
More housing could be available soon. Tennessee will receive $53 million in federal stimulus money to help pay for the development of affordable rental housing across the state, the federal government announced last month.
While no one is suggesting that the tent city that popped up on police radar last summer is a permanent solution, local churches and synagogues are trying to give residents there a sense of order. The Otter Creek Church of Christ built residents a shower, with a fiberglass stall, plywood door and garden hose, and on Friday, associate minister Doug Sanders went to the tent city in what is the start of a church project to help residents institute some type of formal rules -- for everything from cleaning the shower to determining the progress residents should have to show toward finding housing.
The city and local nonprofits have found permanent housing for about 25 people from the tent city.
Many haven't been so lucky. David Olson, 47 years old, said last week he and his wife wound up under the Nashville overpass after he lost a job making cement pipes in Iowa four months ago. The couple came to Nashville for a remodeling job that turned out to be a scam. "I've got five years' experience in carpentry and 10 years' roofing and I can't find a job," he said.
Mr. Olson, his arms and shirt caked with dirt, said life is hard in the swampy woods. The couple woke up to mud after a night of rain. His wife said she is frightened by the dogs that roam around the encampment.
As mosquitoes buzzed, they tried to set up camp on higher ground. They struggled to secure a tarpaulin over their tent to keep out the rain. Mr. Olson's wife, holding onto a pole to prop up the tarp, cried. "I'm not used to living like this."
Write to Jennifer Levitz at jennifer.levitz@wsj.com Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A3
Monday, August 10, 2009
Picture the Homeless
http://tentcitysolutions.com/Home/tabid/150/Default.aspx
Picture the Homeless is a grassroots organization, founded and led by homeless people. We are organizing for social justice around issues like housing, police violence, and the shelter-industrial complex. Our name is about challenging images, stigma, media (mis) representation - as well as putting forward an alternative vision of community.
http://www.picturethehomeless.org/misson.html
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Refugee: The Scope of the Challenge and of our Approach
We've recently become privy to (just barely aware of) the complexity of issues that face those who don't have a home. Simultaneously, the term, "Homelessness," is quickly coming to light as a misnomer for the larger scope of the problem that faces both those with and without roofs; a panoply of challenges accompanies the widespread lack of housing in our city. Indeed, the full collection of issues and our approach to them highlight how strongly connected we are to our nation and other nations that face what is indeed a refugee crisis.
Many of our fellow citizens are without homes, jobs, stable sources of nourishment; survive despite medical and legal difficulties; many of our fellow citizens live under a social stigma, which itself tells the story of how we have allowed our system to continuously stack the odds against the underdog, to all but preclude second chances for those who didn't start off with pocket full of rabbit's feet, for those without parachutes--golden be they only in dreams; many of our fellow citizens are refugees.
Let us acknowledge, not only the complexity of the issue, but our capacity to address its multiple facets. Though we focus on providing shelter and a sense of home within it, we do not work on this or remaining gamut of challenges alone. We have several comrades in arms to tackle the many sides and take the many inroads; it is perhaps our broader challenge to focus as well as collaborate.
I intend explore the parallels between our national (and local refugee) communities and those throughout history and the globe; this may afford a broader understanding of the issue and provide some new avenues of attack.
Many of our fellow citizens are without homes, jobs, stable sources of nourishment; survive despite medical and legal difficulties; many of our fellow citizens live under a social stigma, which itself tells the story of how we have allowed our system to continuously stack the odds against the underdog, to all but preclude second chances for those who didn't start off with pocket full of rabbit's feet, for those without parachutes--golden be they only in dreams; many of our fellow citizens are refugees.
Let us acknowledge, not only the complexity of the issue, but our capacity to address its multiple facets. Though we focus on providing shelter and a sense of home within it, we do not work on this or remaining gamut of challenges alone. We have several comrades in arms to tackle the many sides and take the many inroads; it is perhaps our broader challenge to focus as well as collaborate.
I intend explore the parallels between our national (and local refugee) communities and those throughout history and the globe; this may afford a broader understanding of the issue and provide some new avenues of attack.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
NPR Talk of the Nation: "Housing First" as a Solution for Homelessness
You can read a short article and listen to the 30 minute segment from Talk of the Nation with Neil Conan on Monday, August 3rd here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111504713
August 3, 2009
Dr. Jessie Gaeta co-founded the Home & Healthy for Good project. The program gets the chronically homeless in Massachusetts into permanent housing first, then focuses on medical treatment.
This approach works better than many traditional programs, and costs less in the long run.
August 3, 2009
Dr. Jessie Gaeta co-founded the Home & Healthy for Good project. The program gets the chronically homeless in Massachusetts into permanent housing first, then focuses on medical treatment.
David, a former Marine who was homeless for decades and is now a Home & Healthy for Good tenant housed through MHSA and MHSA Member Agency Pine Street Inn, sits in his bedroom. Tara Morris
Home & Healthy for Good is part of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance. The program has provided homes to nearly 400 chronically homeless individuals. In addition to lowering homeless rates, the program has saved the state Office of Medicaid thousands of dollars per person.
As Dr. Gaeta explained to host Neal Conan, "this is a form of what we call permanent, supportive housing, meaning that the housing is coupled very tightly with wraparound services in the home, in the form of, most typically, a case manager, who is a link for this new tenant to mainstream services... Mental health, medical health, addiction, vocational training, life skills, that sort of thing."
This approach works better than many traditional programs, and costs less in the long run.
Read the homeless man's response
The following is an excerpt from a blog on homelessness. It was started by a man who, for 3 days and nights, went to live on the streets of Boston with no money, food, etc. There were comments from people encouraging him and wanting to know about his experience. Then there was this comment from a man who identified himself as "kettlebelly":
"July 27, 2009 - 10:44pm I'm homeless now, was 20 years ago for a year, and am now again for 2 years and for the forseeable future. I'm highly educated, but have mental problems, hence my life. I have a pretty good laptop that I'm borrowing from someone that had an extra, and spend a lot of time online. There are quite a few of us these days (hi-tech hobos). For two years I've been sleeping under a well hidden table in a warehouse with my pals, the rats. I use a public shower, and get food any way I can. Here's the worst of how society treats us: "To bear witness to homelessness first hand and experience how society treats “homeless” individuals to validate or contradict what I have already learned about homelessness through observation and conversation alone. " The first thing you learn being homeless is that there is no 'society' and it's not treating us any which way. Only individuals exist, and only individuals treat with us. You're one of those people that who loves humanity but not real people. We don't want society to care for us. We want real individuals to care for us, to value us, talk to us, deal with us. Not social workers who's job it is, but people who might find some value in us because of who and what we can offer. You want to help us because you think it makes you a good person. That's what you care about, your image. I don't want to be the cloth you use to polish your image. You, for instance, are condescending and paternalistic and think, despite what you say, that you can get a bead on homelessness from the outside. You empty your pockets, put your water bottle on the dresser, rip the knees of your calvin klein's, and give your house-key to your girl friend and join the ranks of the homeless for three days. Wow. Welcome to the brotherhood, dood. But there is no 'outside' to homelessness. You can't know *any* of it from the outside. Homelessness is not so much about not having a home, it's about being alone, completely alone, and not seeing any way out because you're a fu-up or fk'ed up, or both. It's being crippled inside or out or both. But it's the inside of it that is what makes it a bad thing. You want to know what it's like to be homeless? Quit your job, give away all your money and your posessions, take a bus to a distant city without telling anyone you know. When you get off the bus, the first thing you should do is find a place to sleep that night. Walk around until you find a likely place. Then collect cardboard, old clothes, anything, to make a bed. Make sure that it's as hidden as you can make it. Then look for food, or money, or help. Ask other homeless where to get food. They'll tell you. Live like that for 6 months, then we can talk. It still won't be the same, because you won't have gotten there by struggling and failing and hating yourself and your inability to control yourself, which is why you're there. But it will be better than what you did, which is nothing. But don't play pretend for 3 days with your job, comfy little bed and shower waiting for you. And don't do all this so that you can lecture 'society' on what it should do or feel. Or if you do, then at least realize that you are playing this game so that you can impress your friends and co-workers, not because you care about helping the homeless. The truth is you *can't* help the homeless. Nor your imaginary 'society'. But you don't want to hear that. You want to hear that you're a bold and committed saint, dedicated to helping the lot of those less fortunate blah blah blah, and that what you're doing will make a difference. Fine."
-Submitted by Robin Rufus from the blog http://changents.com/change-agents/impactdesigners/field-reports/30654
"July 27, 2009 - 10:44pm I'm homeless now, was 20 years ago for a year, and am now again for 2 years and for the forseeable future. I'm highly educated, but have mental problems, hence my life. I have a pretty good laptop that I'm borrowing from someone that had an extra, and spend a lot of time online. There are quite a few of us these days (hi-tech hobos). For two years I've been sleeping under a well hidden table in a warehouse with my pals, the rats. I use a public shower, and get food any way I can. Here's the worst of how society treats us: "To bear witness to homelessness first hand and experience how society treats “homeless” individuals to validate or contradict what I have already learned about homelessness through observation and conversation alone. " The first thing you learn being homeless is that there is no 'society' and it's not treating us any which way. Only individuals exist, and only individuals treat with us. You're one of those people that who loves humanity but not real people. We don't want society to care for us. We want real individuals to care for us, to value us, talk to us, deal with us. Not social workers who's job it is, but people who might find some value in us because of who and what we can offer. You want to help us because you think it makes you a good person. That's what you care about, your image. I don't want to be the cloth you use to polish your image. You, for instance, are condescending and paternalistic and think, despite what you say, that you can get a bead on homelessness from the outside. You empty your pockets, put your water bottle on the dresser, rip the knees of your calvin klein's, and give your house-key to your girl friend and join the ranks of the homeless for three days. Wow. Welcome to the brotherhood, dood. But there is no 'outside' to homelessness. You can't know *any* of it from the outside. Homelessness is not so much about not having a home, it's about being alone, completely alone, and not seeing any way out because you're a fu-up or fk'ed up, or both. It's being crippled inside or out or both. But it's the inside of it that is what makes it a bad thing. You want to know what it's like to be homeless? Quit your job, give away all your money and your posessions, take a bus to a distant city without telling anyone you know. When you get off the bus, the first thing you should do is find a place to sleep that night. Walk around until you find a likely place. Then collect cardboard, old clothes, anything, to make a bed. Make sure that it's as hidden as you can make it. Then look for food, or money, or help. Ask other homeless where to get food. They'll tell you. Live like that for 6 months, then we can talk. It still won't be the same, because you won't have gotten there by struggling and failing and hating yourself and your inability to control yourself, which is why you're there. But it will be better than what you did, which is nothing. But don't play pretend for 3 days with your job, comfy little bed and shower waiting for you. And don't do all this so that you can lecture 'society' on what it should do or feel. Or if you do, then at least realize that you are playing this game so that you can impress your friends and co-workers, not because you care about helping the homeless. The truth is you *can't* help the homeless. Nor your imaginary 'society'. But you don't want to hear that. You want to hear that you're a bold and committed saint, dedicated to helping the lot of those less fortunate blah blah blah, and that what you're doing will make a difference. Fine."
-Submitted by Robin Rufus from the blog http://changents.com/change-agents/impactdesigners/field-reports/30654
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Our Purpose
The purpose of this organization is:
to begin and support a self-governing itinerant shelter system for the homeless of Michigan that is a safe place free from drugs, alcohol, and violence;
to inform, solicit, and accurately execute all decisions made by the democratic governing body of each partnering tent community;
to connect the homeless population with available resources that promote recovery, community, service, and healing;
to aid members of the camp to transition toward healthier, more stable lifestyles and positive contributions to society and local communities;
to increase public interest in and awareness of homelessness in Michigan;
to support and conduct non-partisan research, educational, and informational activities to establish the efficacy of tent communities; and
to discover the best practice for the governance and operation of tent communities and to disseminate those results to existing and new tent communities.
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