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Friends,
please refrain from commenting at this point in time please. Google hasn't figured out how to actually display comments that were posted. At this point in time their software displays below a given post the profile name of whoever posted a comment, but displays no actual comment. I hope they'll come to grips with this sooner rather than later, or else I shall change the template that I'm using. My apologies for any inconvenience caused.
udo schuklenk
25 Şubat 2013 Pazartesi
Stop the bike vs car wars - we're all at fault
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No matter what mode of transportation you name: cars, bikes, feet, bus, trains, airplanes, or rollerblade, someone is going to gripe about people that use that form of transportation. With a background in bicycle advocacy, I have heard more than my share of gripes about the way bicyclists and motorists operate.
Instead of arguing who's right or wrong, or what road users break the law more often, I try to diffuse the tension and give people a little perspective with a couple of thoughts.
First, my personal opinion is that all road users should obey all traffic laws all the time. That includes signalling turns, not speeding, yielding to pedestrians, not going through an "orange" light, full stop at stop signs, etc. But we all know that everyone breaks at least some laws every time they take to the road. Yes, even you. Let's try to concentrate on stopping people from doing things that are going to endanger other people.
And before all my biking friends jump down my throat, and if anyone else is interested in a perspective on why bicyclists blow stop signs, here's a little article from Toronto to give the other side.
My second approach, to try to get people off the "who's worse" train, is that it's not the vehicle that causes bad behavior. It's the person using the vehicle. And most bicyclists are also drivers. They are probably scofflaws when they drive as well. You may see them, or only pay attention when they are on their bikes, but they probably get behind the wheel and break the law there too. If someone is in a hurry or is reckless when riding their bike, then they are likely in a hurry and reckless in a car as well.
And finally, people ask me what they can do to improve the driving (or biking) of others. As an elected official, people constantly asked me how to get people to stop speeding, or how to get people to yield to pedestrians. Well, it's not easy, and we all have a part. We have to speak up, and it may be speaking up to those we love.
How often do each of us ride in a car with someone else, and notice that person speeding, blowing a red, not coming to a full stop before making a turn, or not yielding to a pedestrians? And how many of us say something to our spouse, friend, co-worker, neighbor, parent or sibling? If we see our neighbor blow the stop sign at the end of the block every day, and don't say anything about it, how can we expect anyone else to get through to that person?
So yes, the police can run around ticketing people for every little thing, but that is going to cost you, the taxpayer a ton of money. Contrary to what some people think, it costs the city money to enforce those laws. The time required to stop someone, do a license check, write the ticket, file the paperwork, and then possibly go to court when the person contests the ticket, is far more in staff time and resources than the money coming in from that ticket. That's not to say that we shouldn't enforce traffic laws, but we are never going to get perfect compliance by using law enforcement only.
Why do people yield to pedestrians in California and many other parts of the US? Because that's just the way things are done, and you learn that from the time you start to walk. It's cultural, like being stoic about cold weather in Wisconsin. (Or a more negative cultural tradition, drunk driving.)
We all have to start being responsible for our own behavior and also speaking up when we get the chance. Don't sit silent if you see someone speeding, and you are sitting in the car next to him. Say something. And let's all watch our own behavior as well. none of us is perfect, regardless of whether we walk, bike, drive, roll, or run.
We can make the streets safer for everyone, but we all have to be part of that change.
No matter what mode of transportation you name: cars, bikes, feet, bus, trains, airplanes, or rollerblade, someone is going to gripe about people that use that form of transportation. With a background in bicycle advocacy, I have heard more than my share of gripes about the way bicyclists and motorists operate.Instead of arguing who's right or wrong, or what road users break the law more often, I try to diffuse the tension and give people a little perspective with a couple of thoughts.
First, my personal opinion is that all road users should obey all traffic laws all the time. That includes signalling turns, not speeding, yielding to pedestrians, not going through an "orange" light, full stop at stop signs, etc. But we all know that everyone breaks at least some laws every time they take to the road. Yes, even you. Let's try to concentrate on stopping people from doing things that are going to endanger other people.
And before all my biking friends jump down my throat, and if anyone else is interested in a perspective on why bicyclists blow stop signs, here's a little article from Toronto to give the other side.
My second approach, to try to get people off the "who's worse" train, is that it's not the vehicle that causes bad behavior. It's the person using the vehicle. And most bicyclists are also drivers. They are probably scofflaws when they drive as well. You may see them, or only pay attention when they are on their bikes, but they probably get behind the wheel and break the law there too. If someone is in a hurry or is reckless when riding their bike, then they are likely in a hurry and reckless in a car as well.
And finally, people ask me what they can do to improve the driving (or biking) of others. As an elected official, people constantly asked me how to get people to stop speeding, or how to get people to yield to pedestrians. Well, it's not easy, and we all have a part. We have to speak up, and it may be speaking up to those we love.
How often do each of us ride in a car with someone else, and notice that person speeding, blowing a red, not coming to a full stop before making a turn, or not yielding to a pedestrians? And how many of us say something to our spouse, friend, co-worker, neighbor, parent or sibling? If we see our neighbor blow the stop sign at the end of the block every day, and don't say anything about it, how can we expect anyone else to get through to that person?
So yes, the police can run around ticketing people for every little thing, but that is going to cost you, the taxpayer a ton of money. Contrary to what some people think, it costs the city money to enforce those laws. The time required to stop someone, do a license check, write the ticket, file the paperwork, and then possibly go to court when the person contests the ticket, is far more in staff time and resources than the money coming in from that ticket. That's not to say that we shouldn't enforce traffic laws, but we are never going to get perfect compliance by using law enforcement only.
Why do people yield to pedestrians in California and many other parts of the US? Because that's just the way things are done, and you learn that from the time you start to walk. It's cultural, like being stoic about cold weather in Wisconsin. (Or a more negative cultural tradition, drunk driving.)
We all have to start being responsible for our own behavior and also speaking up when we get the chance. Don't sit silent if you see someone speeding, and you are sitting in the car next to him. Say something. And let's all watch our own behavior as well. none of us is perfect, regardless of whether we walk, bike, drive, roll, or run.
We can make the streets safer for everyone, but we all have to be part of that change.
Don't make people pay for parking they don't need
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Below is an email I wrote a year ago regarding a development in our neighborhood. I happened to find a printed copy while cleaning out some files, and decided to post it. While this was written about one particular project, it summarizes a problem that is common to many residential developments: Parking is included in the cost of more expensive apartments, and if a resident doesn't need the parking, they have no way of recovering the cost of the parking they are paying for.
Despite what some people think, not everyone owns a car. Especially in urban areas, parking can be quite costly, and no one should be forced to pay for it if they don't want it.
So below is the letter I wrote to city commissions when our neighborhood association wanted to force the developer guarantee a parking spot as part of the rent for all residents. They wanted to avoid more people parking on the streets in the neighborhood, but I thought their concerns were misplaced.
Despite what some people think, not everyone owns a car. Especially in urban areas, parking can be quite costly, and no one should be forced to pay for it if they don't want it.
So below is the letter I wrote to city commissions when our neighborhood association wanted to force the developer guarantee a parking spot as part of the rent for all residents. They wanted to avoid more people parking on the streets in the neighborhood, but I thought their concerns were misplaced.
I know I may be in the minority among the people you hear from, but I will reiterate what I said at the meeting Monday night. Requiring all tenants to pay for a parking spot, whether they own a car or not, is both unfair, and bad for the neighborhood. If [the project] includes a parking spot with every apartment, you are forcing people to pay for something they don't need, don't want, and won't use. And it's not a community asset, like a green roof, patio, or work out room, that tenants may or may not use. A parking spot adds significantly to the cost of an apartment, so makes the apartment less affordable.
It also makes the apartment only attractive to those who own cars. Is that what [the neighborhood] wants? Is that good for the neighborhood? Do we want to only have drivers and car owners moving into an already crowded area? I don't think so.
To make sure I had my facts straight, I checked with [a representative of the developer.] They do not want to allow tenants to reassign the spot - the one they are required to pay for - to a friend, work colleague, or other party. Tenants would not be able to resell or rent the spot to someone else. [The building owners] considers that too much of a security risk.
So the expensive parking spot included with the apartment will not only be unused by the tenant, but will not be able to be used to get one more car off the neighborhood streets during the day. Again, is this in the interest of the neighborhood?
So, my request to you is: Do not ask that a parking spot be included with each apartment. It is bad public policy and bad for the neighborhood. If you are determined to require a parking spot be paid for by each tenant, then ask that [the building owners] allow the spots to be reassigned to outside parties. This will be more fair to tenants that do not own cars, and it will also get cars off our neighborhood streets.
As to commercial and visitor parking - i.e. short term parking - as a neighbor that lives one block from the site, I can tell you that there IS parking available on our neighborhood streets, although one might have to walk a block or two. Despite what some think, we live in an urban area, and one cannot expect to park directly in front of one's destination. The streets are a public area, and anyone can use them, including for parking. We have two hour limits during the day, and that's appropriate. I have no problem with commercial customers parking on my block, nor do I think that a lack of commercial or visitor parking will doom the project.
When we visit the Monroe, Atwood, or Williamson St areas, whether to visit friends, shop, or enjoy dinner or a drink, we often have to park on the street, and possibly several blocks away. (OK, Monroe has a parking garage at Trader Joes, but the east side areas do not.) That does not keep us from visiting these areas, nor does it seem to impede the success of businesses. Just as with our neighborhood, these areas were built for and continue to be accessible by foot, bike, and transit. People who live and visit these area expect that parking may be less convenient, but they also enjoy a wonderful neighborhood experience, highlighted by easy, pleasant walking.
Please don't let a few loud voices push you to make suggestions to the city committees that are in opposition to the interests of the neighborhood and the best practices of urban design. Several people have contacted me since the meeting to tell me they agree with me, so I am not alone. We all know that those opposed are often the loudest and most strident, but maybe not the majority.
What do you mean you don't have guest bike parking?
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Today I am at the Wisconsin Bike Summit, being held at Inn on the Park in Madison. Since the weather and outlook was a typically late-winter mix of precipitation - a bit of wet snow, and maybe rain and/or snow later - I thought it would be best to try to find sheltered bike parking, if possible. My bike has weathered many years of abuse, but I'd rather not have a wet ride when I get ready to leave.
The Inn on the Park has valet car parking, so as I rolled up, I thought I'd ask if they had indoor or covered bike parking as well. After all, the Concourse, just a couple blocks away, has bike racks in their garage, and they have provided a separate bike room for storage for some conferences.
Alas, they looked at me as if I had two heads when I asked about sheltered bike parking. So I parked at the side of the building and covered my seat with the plastic bag I keep stashed under my seat.
Now, being a local, I was pretty sure that there was no covered bike parking at Inn on the Park. I also know where to find covered bike parking within a couple of blocks, but I was late for my meeting, so was hoping that some accommodations were made for the Bike Summit and the anticipated large number of people arriving by bike today.
I also wanted to make a point as a customer, and this is really the lesson from this blog post. People who drive are quick to tell businesses if they find it difficult or inconvenient to park. Ask almost any business, and they will be glad to tell you how important [car] parking is to their customers. No conference hotel would dismiss the [car] parking concerns of their customers. Yet I was being sent out into wet weather to fend for myself with my vehicle.
Bicyclists need to be more vocal about their needs as well. Accommodating bicycle parking needs is relatively simple and inexpensive. Yet we as bicyclists meekly accept locking up to a sign post, overcrowded rack, or in the rain. We as customers need to ask for safe and convenient bicycle parking.
I'm not suggesting being mean or indignant, just asking, "Excuse me, could you tell me where I can park my bike?" And if you get a blank stare, or if the bicycle parking is not serving your needs, drop a note to the management suggesting how they can better provide for bicyclists. After all, you are a customer too.
The Inn on the Park has valet car parking, so as I rolled up, I thought I'd ask if they had indoor or covered bike parking as well. After all, the Concourse, just a couple blocks away, has bike racks in their garage, and they have provided a separate bike room for storage for some conferences.
Alas, they looked at me as if I had two heads when I asked about sheltered bike parking. So I parked at the side of the building and covered my seat with the plastic bag I keep stashed under my seat.
Now, being a local, I was pretty sure that there was no covered bike parking at Inn on the Park. I also know where to find covered bike parking within a couple of blocks, but I was late for my meeting, so was hoping that some accommodations were made for the Bike Summit and the anticipated large number of people arriving by bike today.
I also wanted to make a point as a customer, and this is really the lesson from this blog post. People who drive are quick to tell businesses if they find it difficult or inconvenient to park. Ask almost any business, and they will be glad to tell you how important [car] parking is to their customers. No conference hotel would dismiss the [car] parking concerns of their customers. Yet I was being sent out into wet weather to fend for myself with my vehicle.
Bicyclists need to be more vocal about their needs as well. Accommodating bicycle parking needs is relatively simple and inexpensive. Yet we as bicyclists meekly accept locking up to a sign post, overcrowded rack, or in the rain. We as customers need to ask for safe and convenient bicycle parking.
I'm not suggesting being mean or indignant, just asking, "Excuse me, could you tell me where I can park my bike?" And if you get a blank stare, or if the bicycle parking is not serving your needs, drop a note to the management suggesting how they can better provide for bicyclists. After all, you are a customer too.
Keeping older people mobile shouldn't just involve wider roads and bigger signs
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This is a theme in transportation policy: If people are driving off the road or otherwise having crashes, the obvious solution is to make the road more "forgiving," that is make it easier to drive faster and without paying attention. The solution isn't to make people drive slower or be more alert; it's an engineering problem, not a human problem.
Talk about enabling bad behavior. How would the tough-love people feel about fixing the problem of irresponsibility in other areas of our lives by making sure there aren't harsh consequences? I'd love to hear this in a debate among conservatives.
Here's another example, a report on "Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving Mobility and Safety for Older Americans."
As a baby boomer myself, I hate to think that national researchers think I won't be mobile soon. But I admit that not only am I on the young end of baby boom, but we all get older, and it's probably a good idea to think about all those people that will need to stay connected to the world. We have built a country where driving is almost required to participate, so this report emphasizes bigger, brighter signs, wider roads with fewer curves, and less things to run into on the side of the road - like bus shelters, benches, trees, or buildings.
No mention at all that maybe people shouldn't drive, if they can't use the roads in a safe and responsible manner. How about building communities where driving is but one option to move around? How about making sure that people that can't drive can walk, take transit, or get a ride another way for their daily activities, entertainment, and social interactions?
But I'm going to let the words that came via email this morning, from David Burwell at the Carnegie Endowment, speak to that issue:
Talk about enabling bad behavior. How would the tough-love people feel about fixing the problem of irresponsibility in other areas of our lives by making sure there aren't harsh consequences? I'd love to hear this in a debate among conservatives.
Here's another example, a report on "Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving Mobility and Safety for Older Americans."
As a baby boomer myself, I hate to think that national researchers think I won't be mobile soon. But I admit that not only am I on the young end of baby boom, but we all get older, and it's probably a good idea to think about all those people that will need to stay connected to the world. We have built a country where driving is almost required to participate, so this report emphasizes bigger, brighter signs, wider roads with fewer curves, and less things to run into on the side of the road - like bus shelters, benches, trees, or buildings.
No mention at all that maybe people shouldn't drive, if they can't use the roads in a safe and responsible manner. How about building communities where driving is but one option to move around? How about making sure that people that can't drive can walk, take transit, or get a ride another way for their daily activities, entertainment, and social interactions?
But I'm going to let the words that came via email this morning, from David Burwell at the Carnegie Endowment, speak to that issue:
Report of the Week: The Transportation Research Information Program (TRIP) the research affiliate of the Highway Users Alliance, has blessed America with a new report documenting innovative strategies for keeping our senior drivers safe on the roads. Noting that while seniors represent only 8% of the driving public but 18% of driver fatalities, the TRIP report, Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving Mobility and Safety for Older Americans, suggests such innovations as requiring "clearer, brighter and simpler signs with large letters." Great idea--and how about the pedestrians, bicyclists and other road users--maybe we (actually, they, since your reporter is a baby boomer) all should be required to carry bright signs in large letters saying "please don't hit me!" Wider left turn lanes are another helpful idea, along with longer turning and exit lanes--providing more pavement for those pesky walkers and bicyclists to cross. One can page through the entire report for programs to provide baby boomers with options to driving--ride-sharing, mixed use developments that reduce the need to travel, more transit options--nope, not there. But this is a Highway Users Alliance publication after all. If seniors don't want to use the highways they are on their own. http://www.tripnet.org/docs/Older_Drivers_TRIP_Report_Feb_2012.pdf.
24 Şubat 2013 Pazar
Dogs to Watch for February 20
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DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 9, post #2.
RK'S CONK GONK, Palm Beach, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 14, post #6.
MISTIE BASS, Southland, 02/20/2013, T, race 20, post #3.
TWISTING TWISTER, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 6, post #8.
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 10, post #3.
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 5, post #4.
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 9, post #2.
RK'S CONK GONK, Palm Beach, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 14, post #6.
MISTIE BASS, Southland, 02/20/2013, T, race 20, post #3.
TWISTING TWISTER, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 6, post #8.
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 10, post #3.
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 5, post #4.
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
Dogs to Watch for February 23
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DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 7, post #5.
DLT EXTRACTOR, Gulf Greyhound, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 11, post #5.
MAGIC TEMPURA, Orange Park, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 8, post #6.
BELLA INFRARED, Southland, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 16, post #8.
GABLE GO SHAUNEE, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 6, post #1.
JW TITLEIST, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 10, post #3.
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 6, post #2.
UMR HYDRO, Tri-State, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 13, post #5.
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 5, post #4.
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 7, post #5.
DLT EXTRACTOR, Gulf Greyhound, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 11, post #5.
MAGIC TEMPURA, Orange Park, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 8, post #6.
BELLA INFRARED, Southland, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 16, post #8.
GABLE GO SHAUNEE, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 6, post #1.
JW TITLEIST, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 10, post #3.
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 6, post #2.
UMR HYDRO, Tri-State, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 13, post #5.
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 5, post #4.
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
Results: Dogs to Watch for February 22
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JET FORCE, Bluffs Run, 02/22/2013, Afternoon, race 11 post #7. Result: 2-7-8- .
GMC DIANE SAWYER, Mardi Gras, 02/22/2013, S, race 1 post #6.
WW'S GUCCI, Orange Park, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 15 post #7. Result: 8-5-1- .
BELLA DA BULL, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 17 post #3. Result: 3-7-6- .
SHANETT, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 18 post #8. Result: 4-1-2- .
RED PERSISTENCE, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 9 post #5. Result: 7-4-1- .
REDROCK MIRROR, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11 post #1. Result: 1-8-3- .
KB'S HASLET, Wheeling, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11 post #5. Result: 2-4-6- .
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
JET FORCE, Bluffs Run, 02/22/2013, Afternoon, race 11 post #7. Result: 2-7-8- .
GMC DIANE SAWYER, Mardi Gras, 02/22/2013, S, race 1 post #6.
WW'S GUCCI, Orange Park, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 15 post #7. Result: 8-5-1- .
BELLA DA BULL, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 17 post #3. Result: 3-7-6- .
SHANETT, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 18 post #8. Result: 4-1-2- .
RED PERSISTENCE, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 9 post #5. Result: 7-4-1- .
REDROCK MIRROR, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11 post #1. Result: 1-8-3- .
KB'S HASLET, Wheeling, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11 post #5. Result: 2-4-6- .
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
Results: Dogs to Watch for February 23
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DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 7 post #5. Result: 3-4-7- .
DLT EXTRACTOR, Gulf Greyhound, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 11 post #5. Result: 3-1-7- .
MAGIC TEMPURA, Orange Park, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 8 post #6. Result: 2-1-5- .
BELLA INFRARED, Southland, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 16 post #8. Result: 2-7-3- .
GABLE GO SHAUNEE, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 6 post #1. Result: 5-1-6- .
JW TITLEIST, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 10 post #3. Result: 5-1-4- .
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 6 post #2. Result: 8-1-7- .
UMR HYDRO, Tri-State, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 13 post #5. Result: 8-3-2- .
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 5 post #4. Result: 8-7-1- .
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 7 post #5. Result: 3-4-7- .
DLT EXTRACTOR, Gulf Greyhound, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 11 post #5. Result: 3-1-7- .
MAGIC TEMPURA, Orange Park, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 8 post #6. Result: 2-1-5- .
BELLA INFRARED, Southland, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 16 post #8. Result: 2-7-3- .
GABLE GO SHAUNEE, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 6 post #1. Result: 5-1-6- .
JW TITLEIST, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 10 post #3. Result: 5-1-4- .
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 6 post #2. Result: 8-1-7- .
UMR HYDRO, Tri-State, 02/23/2013, Afternoon, race 13 post #5. Result: 8-3-2- .
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/23/2013, Evening, race 5 post #4. Result: 8-7-1- .
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
23 Şubat 2013 Cumartesi
Mayor Bloomberg - 'Let Them Eat Pain!'
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Now lets keep in mind that State and Federal Governments have already been putting restrictions on these types of medicines, some of which need to be accounted for pill-by-pill. But since drug addicts are still finding ways to obtain these drugs, the Mayor's next plan to fight this kind of drug abuse is to take the drugs away from those who will legitimately benefit from them. This is not really a surprise given that this is the same solution he has for combating gun crime, basically targeting those who legally own and would like to legally own weapons.
Mayor Bloomberg's latest rant is that he is going to restrict the availability of painkillers to people who need them at NY area hospitals. His reasoning is that there are people in New York City who are addicted to them. This however will do nothing but punish responsible people who do not abuse these medications, leaving some in pain.
So because people are dying from prescription medicine abuse, abuse that I have no control over, the Mayor's logic is that I must have less or even no pain killers because people who don't need it, are consuming too much.
As for Mayor Bloomberg's comment that some people are just going to have to suffer a little bit, this is the same guy who can't suffer for a minute and wait for his car to cool down on a hot summer day and has his car cooled down by a custom-made air conditioner system. All this from the same guy who puts strict anti-idling laws in place and then breaks them.
Enough with the politicians who think they are better than the rest of us. If we are going to start openly treating people as part of distinct social classes, then lets do it all the way. This way we can stop treating the majority of the population like crap because of a tiny minority. Lets single out this tiny minority and give them the fair treatment that they have earned.
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Now lets keep in mind that State and Federal Governments have already been putting restrictions on these types of medicines, some of which need to be accounted for pill-by-pill. But since drug addicts are still finding ways to obtain these drugs, the Mayor's next plan to fight this kind of drug abuse is to take the drugs away from those who will legitimately benefit from them. This is not really a surprise given that this is the same solution he has for combating gun crime, basically targeting those who legally own and would like to legally own weapons.Mayor Bloomberg's latest rant is that he is going to restrict the availability of painkillers to people who need them at NY area hospitals. His reasoning is that there are people in New York City who are addicted to them. This however will do nothing but punish responsible people who do not abuse these medications, leaving some in pain.
“Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true, so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect … There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer, and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.” - Politicker
So because people are dying from prescription medicine abuse, abuse that I have no control over, the Mayor's logic is that I must have less or even no pain killers because people who don't need it, are consuming too much. As for Mayor Bloomberg's comment that some people are just going to have to suffer a little bit, this is the same guy who can't suffer for a minute and wait for his car to cool down on a hot summer day and has his car cooled down by a custom-made air conditioner system. All this from the same guy who puts strict anti-idling laws in place and then breaks them.
Enough with the politicians who think they are better than the rest of us. If we are going to start openly treating people as part of distinct social classes, then lets do it all the way. This way we can stop treating the majority of the population like crap because of a tiny minority. Lets single out this tiny minority and give them the fair treatment that they have earned.
Proscecution of Gun Crime Goes Down Under Democrat Presidents
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It is interesting to note that Democrats are calling for new gun laws but at the same time they are refusing to enforce existing gun laws. Take the national background check for purchasing a firearm. Thousands of people who are not allowed to purchase a firearm are stopped each year during the background check process. Many of these people caught lying on their applications in an attempt to illegally purchase a firearm. Almost none of these cases are prosecuted. This was highlighted in a recent post. Even the (mostly) distasteful Mayor of New York, Mayor Bloomberg, finds this a truly inexcusable act of neglegence o behalf of the Government.
This kind of inaction is nothing new. Under President Clinton, there were complaints that his Administration was not serious in going after gun criminals. Worse, the then Administration actually hailed the law as working simply because they stopped and turned away criminal gun purchases. This would be like catching a bank robber, taking the money that he stole and then sending him on his way and calling it a success. this is sheer insanity.
You know that this is bad when even the NRA is complaining that the Government needs to do more to put gun criminals behind bars....
As I have said before, Democrats want gun criminals on the streets. Otherwise they loose a campaign issue. Gun crime victims mean little to Democrats other than votes on election day. If they really cared about the people they would push for putting gun criminals behind bars.-------------------- --------------------
Some, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, are also pressing the Justice Department (DOJ) to get more aggressive in going after those convicted of trying to buy firearms by filing fraudulent background information. Citing 2009 figures, Bloomberg hammered the DOJ recently for prosecuting only 77 of 71,000 cases where people were found to have lied on their background checks."These are gun criminals trying to buy guns illegally – and the federal government is just letting them walk," Bloomberg said during a speech in December. - The HillThe Sandy Hook shooter tried to buy a gun a couple days before his attack. How many other dangerous people have tried and simply been turned away with no follow-up by the Federal Government? Do we have to wait until they too start shooting people?
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President Clinton, Al Gore and their Congressional anti-gun allies continue to hold up the Brady Act as an effective crime-fighting tool, but they can`t explain why the 500,000 felons, drug dealers, stalkers and fugitives who walked into federally licensed dealers to purchase guns illegally were simply turned away. They committed multiple federal felonies, crimes punishable with 10-year prison terms. But these felons, drug dealers, stalkers and fugitives were not arrested. They were not prosecuted. They didn`t go to prison, and no community was made safer. - NRA ILA (17 October 2000!)How many other crimes did these half million criminals who were left on the streets commit during the time that they could have been behind bars. How many people did they kill as a result of failure of the Government to put them in jail? I am going to make a guess that it was more than one. As our current Vice President notes, action should be taken if it can save even just one life. So how about enforcing our existing laws. That should save many more than one life...
Biden talked also about taking responsible action. "As the president said, if you're actions result in only saving one life, they're worth taking. But I'm convinced we can affect the well-being of millions of Americans and take thousands of people out of harm's way if we act responsibly."Well Mr. Vice President, how about pushing for the Brady Bill to be enforced...
Biden, as he himself noted, helped write the Brady bill. - The Weekly Standard
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FY 1992-1998 |
As I have said before, Democrats want gun criminals on the streets. Otherwise they loose a campaign issue. Gun crime victims mean little to Democrats other than votes on election day. If they really cared about the people they would push for putting gun criminals behind bars.
Idiot Politician of the Day - Republican Senator John McCain
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John McCain is a Republican Senator from Arizona. He ran for President against Barack Obama and lost. I voted for John McCain because he would have been a better President than Barack Obama. That does not mean that Senator McCain is not an idiot. Being an idiot is not what cost him the election, especially given that he lost the election to an even worse Senator. That said, if this is what Senator McCain thinks counts as serving his country, then I say that Senator McCain has served our Country long enough.
Senator McCain has become a useful idiot and an enabler of the left. Take the calls for more gun control. Lets forget that the Democrat suggestions and demands are unreasonable. You don't hear Senator McCain defending the rights of Americans. No. Instead he is eager to find compromise with the democrats. This compromise will be at the expense of our rights. And for what? So that Senator McCain can continue to be a big-ish man in Congress. Forget it.
The point of Senate Confirmation is to ensure that Presidential appointees are competent and qualified to serve in the positions that they have been appointed to. If you think that Hagel is unqualified, than do what you can to keep this unqualified idiot from a position in charge of the Pentagon.Senators have such powers, especially when they act together. McCain would rather move along. That is unfortunate. Many people busted their asses working to help McCain become President. It would be nice if McCain busted his ass once in a while in return...
Given that you can't teach this old dog any new tricks, can't we just send him home.-------------------- --------------------
John McCain is a Republican Senator from Arizona. He ran for President against Barack Obama and lost. I voted for John McCain because he would have been a better President than Barack Obama. That does not mean that Senator McCain is not an idiot. Being an idiot is not what cost him the election, especially given that he lost the election to an even worse Senator. That said, if this is what Senator McCain thinks counts as serving his country, then I say that Senator McCain has served our Country long enough.Earlier, the former Republican presidential nominee said he expects Hagel to be confirmed as defense secretary even though he doesn’t plan to vote for him.Senator McCain is playing old-school Senate games. The President however is counting on the Republican Senators to play by these rules as he breaks them and uses them to his advantage. After all, it was President Obama who declared that the Senate was on recess so that he could push through some of his political appointees that the Senate was holding pro-forma sessions specifically to prevent the President from appointing without confirmation from the Senate.
“I don’t believe he is qualified,” McCain said. “But I don’t believe that we should hold up his nomination any further.” - HotAir.com
Senator McCain has become a useful idiot and an enabler of the left. Take the calls for more gun control. Lets forget that the Democrat suggestions and demands are unreasonable. You don't hear Senator McCain defending the rights of Americans. No. Instead he is eager to find compromise with the democrats. This compromise will be at the expense of our rights. And for what? So that Senator McCain can continue to be a big-ish man in Congress. Forget it.
The point of Senate Confirmation is to ensure that Presidential appointees are competent and qualified to serve in the positions that they have been appointed to. If you think that Hagel is unqualified, than do what you can to keep this unqualified idiot from a position in charge of the Pentagon.Senators have such powers, especially when they act together. McCain would rather move along. That is unfortunate. Many people busted their asses working to help McCain become President. It would be nice if McCain busted his ass once in a while in return...
Given that you can't teach this old dog any new tricks, can't we just send him home.
Philadelphia Perpetuates the Myth To Clamp Down On Public Feedings of the City's Most Vulnerable and Poor
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Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has yanked a page straight out of the old "Quality of Life" crimes playbook to inflict some shiny new misery on people who are already challenged to survive on a daily basis.
Waaaayyy back in November 2007, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (the Law Center) worked collaboratively to publish Feeding Intolerance: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness. Back then, they provided a spreadsheet that listed the US cities that had some sort of ordinance or ban on street feeding:
Almost 6 years later, not much has changed and in fact, this spreadsheet is woefully outdated today because a number of new cities need to be added, including Nashville and now, Philly (and Nashville initiated theirs so long ago that it's barely worth mentioning and is only listed here because I happen to live here).
Why, you might ask, are Mayors like Nutter still justifying their actions years later based on debunked excuses for implementing punitive measures on peeps who are hungry?
Well, Mayors across the country participate each year via via The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, and they strategize on how best to eradicate homelessness. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan (supposedly, anyway) organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today, each represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.
Now I would really like to think that all these participating Mayors were honestly interested in ending homelessness by providing real options for their city and the people who're experiencing perhaps one of the most traumatic and challenging times of their lives. This real policy change is accomplished by promoting housing-first strategies and approaches for the city's most vulnerable, ensuring a well-trained staff of direct service providers, and facilitating a collaborative and coordinated cross-agency effort that utilizes evidence-based and promising practices empirically proven to end - not manage - homelessness.
But I also know that these approaches are not always fully embraced by communities - at first, anyway. And money is tight in every city, as we're all painfully aware. I also know that trying to navigate through the political land mines saturating the field of social policy choices bring with it high risk for those who're considering pushing upstream against the currents of the mighty river of Status Quo.
I've got more than a sneaking suspicion that because these risks, should they go bad, have very high consequences to the good Mayors; and because those experiencing homelessness don't contribute to campaigns; nor are they typically a block of courted voters, since they don't usually vote (with any regularity, anyway); our Mayors tend to take a path of least resistance in terms of potential political ramifications and execute the "end" of homelessness through illusion, rather than through good, solid systemic policy change.
And that path of least resistance seems to usually culminate in the Mayor of a given city, in this most recent case, Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," trotting out these lame justifications for the enactment of quality of life criminalization measures rather than to tackle the real issues related to the systemic problems that often lie at the root of an individual's homelessness, hunger, and poverty....
But earlier this year, city officials passed an ordinance banning public feeding of groups of more than three people in any city park – taking care, of course, to exempt city-sanctioned special events, family picnics and other gatherings the city finds more palatable.
The law targets church groups and charities that give meals to the homeless on land along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, home to major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the newly opened Barnes Foundation art collection.
Why make it so hard to feed the homeless in the City of Brotherly Love?
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s official explanation for the ban is that he wants to move feeding the homeless inside (though the city is vague about how or when this will happen). Moreover, the city argues, church feeding programs are health hazards that create a mess in the park. The mayor offered part of the plaza surrounding City Hall as a temporary alternative location.
Religious leaders dismiss the city’s objections to meal distribution in public parks as bogus, pointing out that no one has gotten sick from the food distributed and volunteers clean up the space used. Moreover, many of the homeless who live in the park are reluctant to travel elsewhere (leaving their few possessions) – and some are too disabled to do so.
According to critics of the law, the real reason for the ban is the proximity of the feeding programs to tourist attractions, especially the new $150 million building housing the Barnes Foundation collection that opened in May.
To stop the law from taking effect, religious groups (with support from the American Civil Liberties Union) filed suit in federal court charging that prohibiting churches from feeding the homeless in city parks violates religious freedom ( Chosen 300 Ministries, Inc. v. City of Philadelphia).
The city responded by claiming that because the law “imposes no restrictions upon praying or preaching or reading the Gospel or engaging with the homeless,” the ban on feeding doesn’t interfere with the churches’ right to practice their faith.
In July, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn, Jr., rejected the city’s argument and granted a temporary injunction barring implementation of the law. In a written opinion issued two weeks ago explaining his order, the judge wrote that government has no business ascribing some of the churches’ religious activities more religious significance than others.
To support his conclusion that the park feeding ban violated the religious freedom of the ministries, Yohn relied not on the First Amendment, as might be expected, but on the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the protections of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause in 1990, declaring that government no longer had to show a compelling state interest before denying religious exemptions to generally applicable government laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religion ( Employment Division v. Smith ).
In response to the court’s 1990 ruling, some states – including Pennsylvania – have passed legislation restoring the “compelling interest” test.
According to Yohn, Philadelphia’s public feeding ban would likely fail that test because the city has not shown that governmental interests are strong enough to override religious freedom in this case. Moreover, the city has not provided a truly viable alternative for relocating the feeding programs.
Philadelphia is not the only city trying to move homeless people and those who serve them out of public parks. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, more than 50 other cities have passed anti-camping and anti-feeding ordinances.
Nutter is appealing the court injunction. But whatever happens in the courts, church leaders in Philadelphia promise to keep the meals coming – even if it means defying the law.
After all, when it comes to helping “the least of these,” they believe in obeying a higher law.
By | 02:37 PM ET, 08/23/2012
Waaaayyy back in November 2007, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (the Law Center) worked collaboratively to publish Feeding Intolerance: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness. Back then, they provided a spreadsheet that listed the US cities that had some sort of ordinance or ban on street feeding:
Almost 6 years later, not much has changed and in fact, this spreadsheet is woefully outdated today because a number of new cities need to be added, including Nashville and now, Philly (and Nashville initiated theirs so long ago that it's barely worth mentioning and is only listed here because I happen to live here). Why, you might ask, are Mayors like Nutter still justifying their actions years later based on debunked excuses for implementing punitive measures on peeps who are hungry?
Well, Mayors across the country participate each year via via The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, and they strategize on how best to eradicate homelessness. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan (supposedly, anyway) organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today, each represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.
Now I would really like to think that all these participating Mayors were honestly interested in ending homelessness by providing real options for their city and the people who're experiencing perhaps one of the most traumatic and challenging times of their lives. This real policy change is accomplished by promoting housing-first strategies and approaches for the city's most vulnerable, ensuring a well-trained staff of direct service providers, and facilitating a collaborative and coordinated cross-agency effort that utilizes evidence-based and promising practices empirically proven to end - not manage - homelessness.
But I also know that these approaches are not always fully embraced by communities - at first, anyway. And money is tight in every city, as we're all painfully aware. I also know that trying to navigate through the political land mines saturating the field of social policy choices bring with it high risk for those who're considering pushing upstream against the currents of the mighty river of Status Quo.
I've got more than a sneaking suspicion that because these risks, should they go bad, have very high consequences to the good Mayors; and because those experiencing homelessness don't contribute to campaigns; nor are they typically a block of courted voters, since they don't usually vote (with any regularity, anyway); our Mayors tend to take a path of least resistance in terms of potential political ramifications and execute the "end" of homelessness through illusion, rather than through good, solid systemic policy change.
And that path of least resistance seems to usually culminate in the Mayor of a given city, in this most recent case, Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," trotting out these lame justifications for the enactment of quality of life criminalization measures rather than to tackle the real issues related to the systemic problems that often lie at the root of an individual's homelessness, hunger, and poverty....
In Philadelphia parks, churches fight to feed the homeless
By Church ministries have been feeding homeless people in Philadelphia’s public parks for decades – not as a charitable gesture, but as an act of faith.But earlier this year, city officials passed an ordinance banning public feeding of groups of more than three people in any city park – taking care, of course, to exempt city-sanctioned special events, family picnics and other gatherings the city finds more palatable.
The law targets church groups and charities that give meals to the homeless on land along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, home to major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the newly opened Barnes Foundation art collection.
Why make it so hard to feed the homeless in the City of Brotherly Love?
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s official explanation for the ban is that he wants to move feeding the homeless inside (though the city is vague about how or when this will happen). Moreover, the city argues, church feeding programs are health hazards that create a mess in the park. The mayor offered part of the plaza surrounding City Hall as a temporary alternative location.
Religious leaders dismiss the city’s objections to meal distribution in public parks as bogus, pointing out that no one has gotten sick from the food distributed and volunteers clean up the space used. Moreover, many of the homeless who live in the park are reluctant to travel elsewhere (leaving their few possessions) – and some are too disabled to do so.
According to critics of the law, the real reason for the ban is the proximity of the feeding programs to tourist attractions, especially the new $150 million building housing the Barnes Foundation collection that opened in May.
To stop the law from taking effect, religious groups (with support from the American Civil Liberties Union) filed suit in federal court charging that prohibiting churches from feeding the homeless in city parks violates religious freedom ( Chosen 300 Ministries, Inc. v. City of Philadelphia).
The city responded by claiming that because the law “imposes no restrictions upon praying or preaching or reading the Gospel or engaging with the homeless,” the ban on feeding doesn’t interfere with the churches’ right to practice their faith.
In July, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn, Jr., rejected the city’s argument and granted a temporary injunction barring implementation of the law. In a written opinion issued two weeks ago explaining his order, the judge wrote that government has no business ascribing some of the churches’ religious activities more religious significance than others.
To support his conclusion that the park feeding ban violated the religious freedom of the ministries, Yohn relied not on the First Amendment, as might be expected, but on the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the protections of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause in 1990, declaring that government no longer had to show a compelling state interest before denying religious exemptions to generally applicable government laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religion ( Employment Division v. Smith ).
In response to the court’s 1990 ruling, some states – including Pennsylvania – have passed legislation restoring the “compelling interest” test.
According to Yohn, Philadelphia’s public feeding ban would likely fail that test because the city has not shown that governmental interests are strong enough to override religious freedom in this case. Moreover, the city has not provided a truly viable alternative for relocating the feeding programs.
Philadelphia is not the only city trying to move homeless people and those who serve them out of public parks. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, more than 50 other cities have passed anti-camping and anti-feeding ordinances.
Nutter is appealing the court injunction. But whatever happens in the courts, church leaders in Philadelphia promise to keep the meals coming – even if it means defying the law.
After all, when it comes to helping “the least of these,” they believe in obeying a higher law.
By | 02:37 PM ET, 08/23/2012
" I totally understand the 'no money, no mission' paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing, true, lasting change is not possible."
To contact us Click HERE
Dr. Centrone elucidates a common situation those experiencing homelessness know all too well in just about every city in the country. It is certainly true that in some towns providers have more effectively collaborated to accomplish far more together than they ever could have individually, but the truth is that even in most of those places, increased collaboration among agencies, services and resource allocators continues to be elusive and below the level that is actually available.
Homeless services have never been at the top of the priorities list for funding opportunities from their local, state and federal purse-holders. They've always had to fight for very scarce resources and for a very long time, because so little was known about both the numbers of homeless in a given community and how best to serve them, oversight was....tepid; how does one provide oversight if one doesn't know the scope of - or the remedy(ies) needed to - correct the problem?
As a result, agencies have learned to be protective of their funding streams while at the same time figuring out for themselves how best to address the niche they carved out as a result of the funding stream.
Let me explain:
Because these funds originate at the Federal level (usually), it's challenging, to say the least, for Federal policy makers seeking to provide some help to local entities for their problems or issues to know exactly what this might entail. They work around this in a couple of ways; first, by providing "block grants" to states so that the state itself can decide what priorities it will set and then release RFPs for the available funds. Second, the feds put out federal RFPs (duh) targeting specific approaches known as Evidence Based Practices (EBPs) or Promising Practices.
Understand I'm being overly broad and vague myself on this as I don't want to put you to sleep, nor am I in any way, shape or form a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on grants and funding procurement. But I do know probably just enough about them to be dangerous to myself and others with it, and part of this danger I think many of us share when we apply for funding at the local level.
This is because as I mentioned earlier, we find ourselves tied to the requirements - and the restrictions - within the grant itself. And if the grant is disbursed over a period of years, as many of them can be, whole departments; hell, whole organizations may be built upon them.
This is a key point, because what then becomes an issue - sometimes the overarching issue - is keeping that funding in order to keep the staff employed in order to keep bringing the service(s) to the population being served; the “no money, no mission” paradigm.
There's little incentive to collaborate or to share resources because a. the requirements of the grant narrow the scope of what the agency is able to do, and b.the agency is already running on a shoestring and the last thing they want to do is to give a competitor for those scarce resources any of the goodies - or the inside info around the grant requirements - they worked their tails off to get for themselves. There's also little incentive to change funding streams, since winning a grant is always "iffy" and it used to be much easier to write a continuation application rather than a new RFP.
Let be LOUD and clear here; agencies DO want to collaborate, and they often DO SO even when they know it can be potentially harmful to the funding they receive for the job they're doing. It's just that for a very long time, there wasn't really a directive to find ways to to collaborate, nor was there a paradigm shift from - and this is a critically important point - managing homelessness to ending homelessness.
Over the last 5-7 years, the Federal government has ramped up their investigative efforts around homelessness and have begun to understand much more clearly the scope of the problem. This in turn has helped to identify the remedies needed to accomplish this shift.
What they've discovered is what most folks on the ground providing services have known for quite some time; the precursors leading to - as well as the issues chaining people to - homelessness are varied, complex, and there is no "one size fits all" answer.
And, s it is so often, when we figure out one thing, new challenges and barriers suddenly materialize or come more sharply into view as a result.
Now one of the bigger problems we're all facing is getting people to understand the need for the paradigm shift from management of homelessness to the idea of ending homelessness, and this is no easy task. People have some very deeply held beliefs around the causes and conditions of homelessness, and there are widely held stereotypical beliefs that, while often erroneous, continue to be pervasive and hard to eliminate.
All of this "discovery" and tactical shifting takes time, especially when it must come from something like the Federal government, who is as far removed from the realities of the daily life on the ground in Murfreesboro, TN or Round Rock, TX or Davenport, IA., as is a citizen of Zimbabwe.
The key here of course is to raise awareness, but it is also to ensure that as money flows from federal to state to local programs, those programs are evaluated based on outcomes tied tightly to ending - not managing - homelessness. If, as your program has contact with individuals experiencing homelessness, you are releasing them back onto the streets when your "treatment" is complete rather than being able to release them into housing, we need to rethink continuing funding to this organization under a homeless services grant.
Let me be crystal clear here; services to address the immediate needs of those experiencing homelessness are essential and must be continued. HOWEVER, these services should NOT be stand alone services, and we must begin to hold agencies accountable for helping to end homelessness with every individual they engage with who is currently experiencing homelessness. If your service is not directly connected in some way, shape or form in the measurable reduction of people experiencing homelessness in your community, funding for your program should come from some other source to allow the scarce dollars allocated to homelessness to be used solely to assist with ending it.
I know this sounds a little extreme, but if we want to reduce the costs associated with homelessness and bring an end to the scourge itself, there is only one real answer:
we must put people into houses.
At the end of our talk today at the San Diego, California Region IX Health Care for the Homeless Conference, I had an opportunity to speak with a service provider. He told me about his efforts to get organizations to build a coalition in his community. He told me about the six months it took him to schedule the first meeting of the homeless services agencies in his area.
He told me that he had not given up hope that the coalition will pay off with great dividends. I complimented him on his efforts and reassured him that his efforts would indeed pay off. I told him that he may never know the impact of his efforts, but, I told him, if his efforts led to ending the experience of chronic homelessness for one person, then it was worthwhile.
I enjoy speaking at these conferences. They are full of amazing people working in homeless services. I love to reconnect with old friends, inspiring thought leaders, and change agents. The people who work in homeless health clinics, supportive housing programs, mental health and substance use treatment programs around the country are gifted and courageous people.
I spoke at this conference with my colleague Steven Samra. We talked about our work on a new model of outreach we are calling “Housing-Focused Outreach” (HFO). Steven and I, along with the leadership and thoughtful intellect of Ken Kraybill, have been incubating the ideas of HFO for a few years. Our ideas are not unique. They are born from the work of Dr. Sam Tsemberis at Pathways to Housing, and the visionary work of the 100,000 Homes Project. Our ideas are also born from our years of experience in serving people experiencing homelessness and the work we have all been doing over recent years in visiting supportive housing programs around the United States.
The talk was about shifting the paradigm of service delivery. We are considering how to develop and operationalize a new model to impact agency level activities. A summary of our conversation, a work in progress, looks like this:
(1) In order to truly end chronic homelessness, we [homeless service providers, peers, and advocates] need to lead with housing and build effective bridges to supportive services.
(2) The only way to ensure adequate access to housing and supportive services is to build bridges of collaboration with a number of organizations and resources.
We talk about the fact that most communities around the country have the pieces to put together a really effective model to end chronic homelessness. The issue, however, is that these pieces are fractured and disjointed from one another. Our main predicate for the Housing Focused Outreach model is training service providers to be experts in building partnerships.
When we give this talk, we hear repeatedly how little collaboration actually occurs on the ground. I hear over and over again at talks like this: “Oh, that [collaborating with partner agencies] won’t work . . . we are all fighting for the same pot of money, and we can’t really collaborate or we will lose our agency level effectiveness.”
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the “no money, no mission” paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing, true, lasting change is not possible. I am not sure how we can get more people invested in the idea that collaboration is one of greatest and most underutilized tools. One thing I do know: it will take some serious ego slaying and a strong commitment to service.
Dr. Centrone elucidates a common situation those experiencing homelessness know all too well in just about every city in the country. It is certainly true that in some towns providers have more effectively collaborated to accomplish far more together than they ever could have individually, but the truth is that even in most of those places, increased collaboration among agencies, services and resource allocators continues to be elusive and below the level that is actually available. Homeless services have never been at the top of the priorities list for funding opportunities from their local, state and federal purse-holders. They've always had to fight for very scarce resources and for a very long time, because so little was known about both the numbers of homeless in a given community and how best to serve them, oversight was....tepid; how does one provide oversight if one doesn't know the scope of - or the remedy(ies) needed to - correct the problem?
As a result, agencies have learned to be protective of their funding streams while at the same time figuring out for themselves how best to address the niche they carved out as a result of the funding stream.
Let me explain:
WARNING: BRAIN GLAZING FUNDING INFORMATION COMING!grants are narrowly targeted. It's not like an agency can send in a "proposal" with a vague and overly broad request to "help people who are homeless" to someone like Housing and Urban Development (HUD) or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) That proposal must be pretty specific to the announcement of funding opportunity (a Request For Proposal/RFP. or Request for Application/RFA). As a result, organizations often find themselves building their approach around a specific RFP, which then also essentially ties their hands to remain within the parameters of the requirements laid out in the RFP.
Because these funds originate at the Federal level (usually), it's challenging, to say the least, for Federal policy makers seeking to provide some help to local entities for their problems or issues to know exactly what this might entail. They work around this in a couple of ways; first, by providing "block grants" to states so that the state itself can decide what priorities it will set and then release RFPs for the available funds. Second, the feds put out federal RFPs (duh) targeting specific approaches known as Evidence Based Practices (EBPs) or Promising Practices.
Understand I'm being overly broad and vague myself on this as I don't want to put you to sleep, nor am I in any way, shape or form a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on grants and funding procurement. But I do know probably just enough about them to be dangerous to myself and others with it, and part of this danger I think many of us share when we apply for funding at the local level.
This is because as I mentioned earlier, we find ourselves tied to the requirements - and the restrictions - within the grant itself. And if the grant is disbursed over a period of years, as many of them can be, whole departments; hell, whole organizations may be built upon them.
This is a key point, because what then becomes an issue - sometimes the overarching issue - is keeping that funding in order to keep the staff employed in order to keep bringing the service(s) to the population being served; the “no money, no mission” paradigm.
There's little incentive to collaborate or to share resources because a. the requirements of the grant narrow the scope of what the agency is able to do, and b.the agency is already running on a shoestring and the last thing they want to do is to give a competitor for those scarce resources any of the goodies - or the inside info around the grant requirements - they worked their tails off to get for themselves. There's also little incentive to change funding streams, since winning a grant is always "iffy" and it used to be much easier to write a continuation application rather than a new RFP.
Let be LOUD and clear here; agencies DO want to collaborate, and they often DO SO even when they know it can be potentially harmful to the funding they receive for the job they're doing. It's just that for a very long time, there wasn't really a directive to find ways to to collaborate, nor was there a paradigm shift from - and this is a critically important point - managing homelessness to ending homelessness.
Over the last 5-7 years, the Federal government has ramped up their investigative efforts around homelessness and have begun to understand much more clearly the scope of the problem. This in turn has helped to identify the remedies needed to accomplish this shift.
What they've discovered is what most folks on the ground providing services have known for quite some time; the precursors leading to - as well as the issues chaining people to - homelessness are varied, complex, and there is no "one size fits all" answer.
And, s it is so often, when we figure out one thing, new challenges and barriers suddenly materialize or come more sharply into view as a result.
Now one of the bigger problems we're all facing is getting people to understand the need for the paradigm shift from management of homelessness to the idea of ending homelessness, and this is no easy task. People have some very deeply held beliefs around the causes and conditions of homelessness, and there are widely held stereotypical beliefs that, while often erroneous, continue to be pervasive and hard to eliminate.
All of this "discovery" and tactical shifting takes time, especially when it must come from something like the Federal government, who is as far removed from the realities of the daily life on the ground in Murfreesboro, TN or Round Rock, TX or Davenport, IA., as is a citizen of Zimbabwe.
The key here of course is to raise awareness, but it is also to ensure that as money flows from federal to state to local programs, those programs are evaluated based on outcomes tied tightly to ending - not managing - homelessness. If, as your program has contact with individuals experiencing homelessness, you are releasing them back onto the streets when your "treatment" is complete rather than being able to release them into housing, we need to rethink continuing funding to this organization under a homeless services grant.
Let me be crystal clear here; services to address the immediate needs of those experiencing homelessness are essential and must be continued. HOWEVER, these services should NOT be stand alone services, and we must begin to hold agencies accountable for helping to end homelessness with every individual they engage with who is currently experiencing homelessness. If your service is not directly connected in some way, shape or form in the measurable reduction of people experiencing homelessness in your community, funding for your program should come from some other source to allow the scarce dollars allocated to homelessness to be used solely to assist with ending it.
I know this sounds a little extreme, but if we want to reduce the costs associated with homelessness and bring an end to the scourge itself, there is only one real answer:
we must put people into houses.
Slaying the Ego in Homeless Services Delivery by Wayne Centrone
Posted on September 11, 2012 by C4 ThoughtAt the end of our talk today at the San Diego, California Region IX Health Care for the Homeless Conference, I had an opportunity to speak with a service provider. He told me about his efforts to get organizations to build a coalition in his community. He told me about the six months it took him to schedule the first meeting of the homeless services agencies in his area.
He told me that he had not given up hope that the coalition will pay off with great dividends. I complimented him on his efforts and reassured him that his efforts would indeed pay off. I told him that he may never know the impact of his efforts, but, I told him, if his efforts led to ending the experience of chronic homelessness for one person, then it was worthwhile.
I enjoy speaking at these conferences. They are full of amazing people working in homeless services. I love to reconnect with old friends, inspiring thought leaders, and change agents. The people who work in homeless health clinics, supportive housing programs, mental health and substance use treatment programs around the country are gifted and courageous people.
I spoke at this conference with my colleague Steven Samra. We talked about our work on a new model of outreach we are calling “Housing-Focused Outreach” (HFO). Steven and I, along with the leadership and thoughtful intellect of Ken Kraybill, have been incubating the ideas of HFO for a few years. Our ideas are not unique. They are born from the work of Dr. Sam Tsemberis at Pathways to Housing, and the visionary work of the 100,000 Homes Project. Our ideas are also born from our years of experience in serving people experiencing homelessness and the work we have all been doing over recent years in visiting supportive housing programs around the United States.
The talk was about shifting the paradigm of service delivery. We are considering how to develop and operationalize a new model to impact agency level activities. A summary of our conversation, a work in progress, looks like this:
(1) In order to truly end chronic homelessness, we [homeless service providers, peers, and advocates] need to lead with housing and build effective bridges to supportive services.
(2) The only way to ensure adequate access to housing and supportive services is to build bridges of collaboration with a number of organizations and resources.
We talk about the fact that most communities around the country have the pieces to put together a really effective model to end chronic homelessness. The issue, however, is that these pieces are fractured and disjointed from one another. Our main predicate for the Housing Focused Outreach model is training service providers to be experts in building partnerships.
When we give this talk, we hear repeatedly how little collaboration actually occurs on the ground. I hear over and over again at talks like this: “Oh, that [collaborating with partner agencies] won’t work . . . we are all fighting for the same pot of money, and we can’t really collaborate or we will lose our agency level effectiveness.”
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the “no money, no mission” paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing, true, lasting change is not possible. I am not sure how we can get more people invested in the idea that collaboration is one of greatest and most underutilized tools. One thing I do know: it will take some serious ego slaying and a strong commitment to service.
22 Şubat 2013 Cuma
TIPS for February 21
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Daytona Beach Thu E, Race 13 #3: R Booze Cruise
Gulf Greyhound Thu E, Race 05 #8: KILLER DOTTY
Orange Park Thu E, Race 13 #1: Gs Nike
Palm Beach Thu A, Race 05 #3: Superior Scammer
Palm Beach Thu A, Race 14 #2: Algoa Runaway
Southland Thu E, Race 03 #6: Jovita
Southland Thu E, Race 05 #6: Hl's Matt
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 01 #7: Hl's Joe America
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 05 #1: Edna Oakley
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 08 #7: Se's Chick Click
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 15 #8: Pd Dark Force
Daytona Beach Thu E, Race 13 #3: R Booze Cruise
Gulf Greyhound Thu E, Race 05 #8: KILLER DOTTY
Orange Park Thu E, Race 13 #1: Gs Nike
Palm Beach Thu A, Race 05 #3: Superior Scammer
Palm Beach Thu A, Race 14 #2: Algoa Runaway
Southland Thu E, Race 03 #6: Jovita
Southland Thu E, Race 05 #6: Hl's Matt
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 01 #7: Hl's Joe America
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 05 #1: Edna Oakley
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 08 #7: Se's Chick Click
Derby Lane Thu E, Race 15 #8: Pd Dark Force
Results: Dogs to Watch for February 20
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DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 9 post #2. Result: 8-3-1- .
RK'S CONK GONK, Palm Beach, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 14 post #6. Result: 1-6-2- .
MISTIE BASS, Southland, 02/20/2013, T, race 20 post #3. Result: 1-3-8- .
TWISTING TWISTER, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 6 post #8. Result: 4-7-5- .
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 10 post #3. Result: 6-1-7- .
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 5 post #4. Result: 4-2-6- .
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
DODGE CALIBER, Birmingham, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 9 post #2. Result: 8-3-1- .
RK'S CONK GONK, Palm Beach, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 14 post #6. Result: 1-6-2- .
MISTIE BASS, Southland, 02/20/2013, T, race 20 post #3. Result: 1-3-8- .
TWISTING TWISTER, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Afternoon, race 6 post #8. Result: 4-7-5- .
VENUS ESPINOSA, Derby Lane, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 10 post #3. Result: 6-1-7- .
GAME PLANE, Tucson, 02/20/2013, Evening, race 5 post #4. Result: 4-2-6- .
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
TIPS for February 22
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Daytona Beach Fri E, Race 05 #2: Iruska Fantastik
Mobile Fri E, Race 02 #4: Sneakin About
Orange Park Fri E, Race 02 #2: Nothing At All
Sarasota Fri A, Race 06 #1: Fraulein Sara
Sarasota Fri E, Race 11 #8: RJ's Jeanette
Southland Fri E, Race 08 #5: Hl's Bandeta
Sanford Orlando Fri A, Race 01 #8: Luxury
Sanford Orlando Fri A, Race 08 #3: Yahoo Bikini
Sanford Orlando Fri E, Race 06 #5: Gable Ironhide
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 02 #3: Kay All In
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 04 #4: Golden Squire
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 05 #2: Kaias Powwow
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 11 #4: Poinciana Jo
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 14 #1: Sovereign Ruler
TriState Fri E, Race 09 #5: Mac's Baroness
Wheeling Fri A, Race 02 #2: Mv Sippewissett
Wheeling Fri A, Race 11 #3: Walt Hero
Daytona Beach Fri E, Race 05 #2: Iruska Fantastik
Mobile Fri E, Race 02 #4: Sneakin About
Orange Park Fri E, Race 02 #2: Nothing At All
Sarasota Fri A, Race 06 #1: Fraulein Sara
Sarasota Fri E, Race 11 #8: RJ's Jeanette
Southland Fri E, Race 08 #5: Hl's Bandeta
Sanford Orlando Fri A, Race 01 #8: Luxury
Sanford Orlando Fri A, Race 08 #3: Yahoo Bikini
Sanford Orlando Fri E, Race 06 #5: Gable Ironhide
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 02 #3: Kay All In
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 04 #4: Golden Squire
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 05 #2: Kaias Powwow
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 11 #4: Poinciana Jo
Derby Lane Fri E, Race 14 #1: Sovereign Ruler
TriState Fri E, Race 09 #5: Mac's Baroness
Wheeling Fri A, Race 02 #2: Mv Sippewissett
Wheeling Fri A, Race 11 #3: Walt Hero
Dogs to Watch for February 22
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JET FORCE, Bluffs Run, 02/22/2013, Afternoon, race 11, post #7.
GMC DIANE SAWYER, Mardi Gras, 02/22/2013, S, race 1, post #6.
WW'S GUCCI, Orange Park, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 15, post #7.
BELLA DA BULL, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 17, post #3.
SHANETT, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 18, post #8.
RED PERSISTENCE, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 9, post #5.
REDROCK MIRROR, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11, post #1.
KB'S HASLET, Wheeling, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11, post #5.
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
JET FORCE, Bluffs Run, 02/22/2013, Afternoon, race 11, post #7.
GMC DIANE SAWYER, Mardi Gras, 02/22/2013, S, race 1, post #6.
WW'S GUCCI, Orange Park, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 15, post #7.
BELLA DA BULL, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 17, post #3.
SHANETT, Southland, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 18, post #8.
RED PERSISTENCE, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 9, post #5.
REDROCK MIRROR, Tucson, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11, post #1.
KB'S HASLET, Wheeling, 02/22/2013, Evening, race 11, post #5.
Visit trackinfo.com for complete entries and program pages.
TIPS for February 23
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Birmingham Sat A, Race 01 #1: JAKE'S CRAZYJANE
Birmingham Sat A, Race 02 #3: CTW FAIRY TALE
Birmingham Sat A, Race 04 #3: WK FA BOY
Birmingham Sat A, Race 11 #3: TB'S MOOMENTUM
Birmingham Sat A, Race 12 #5: MV'S SAMSON
Mardi Gras Sat A, Race 06 #2: Hallo Kiowa Lady
Mobile Sat E, Race 01 #4: Nfl Wily
Orange Park Sat A, Race 05 #2: Ww's Heartland
Orange Park Sat A, Race 09 #3: Bb's Alonzo
Orange Park Sat A, Race 13 #2: Amf Set The Pace
Orange Park Sat E, Race 14 #1: Amf Golden Cat
Palm Beach Sat E, Race 12 #5: Cbj Teddy Bear
Palm Beach Sat E, Race 14 #4: Kb's Kazoo
Sanford Orlando Sat A, Race 09 #8: Bob's Eric
Sanford Orlando Sat A, Race 14 #6: Kb's Deflector
Sanford Orlando Sat E, Race 05 #7: Nitro Barry
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 02 #6: Kay Big Blind
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 03 #8: Friecracker Gus
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 04 #8: Tnt Temptress
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 06 #5: Ed N Eddie
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 07 #2: Kb's Tantrum
TriState Sat E, Race 04 #6: Mac's Kelsey
Birmingham Sat A, Race 01 #1: JAKE'S CRAZYJANE
Birmingham Sat A, Race 02 #3: CTW FAIRY TALE
Birmingham Sat A, Race 04 #3: WK FA BOY
Birmingham Sat A, Race 11 #3: TB'S MOOMENTUM
Birmingham Sat A, Race 12 #5: MV'S SAMSON
Mardi Gras Sat A, Race 06 #2: Hallo Kiowa Lady
Mobile Sat E, Race 01 #4: Nfl Wily
Orange Park Sat A, Race 05 #2: Ww's Heartland
Orange Park Sat A, Race 09 #3: Bb's Alonzo
Orange Park Sat A, Race 13 #2: Amf Set The Pace
Orange Park Sat E, Race 14 #1: Amf Golden Cat
Palm Beach Sat E, Race 12 #5: Cbj Teddy Bear
Palm Beach Sat E, Race 14 #4: Kb's Kazoo
Sanford Orlando Sat A, Race 09 #8: Bob's Eric
Sanford Orlando Sat A, Race 14 #6: Kb's Deflector
Sanford Orlando Sat E, Race 05 #7: Nitro Barry
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 02 #6: Kay Big Blind
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 03 #8: Friecracker Gus
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 04 #8: Tnt Temptress
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 06 #5: Ed N Eddie
Derby Lane Sat A, Race 07 #2: Kb's Tantrum
TriState Sat E, Race 04 #6: Mac's Kelsey
21 Şubat 2013 Perşembe
Quebec at the forefront of assisted dying effort in Canada
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Exciting developments in Quebec. There is a cross-party consensus in the provincial parliament that assisted dying ought to be available to certain patients, namely those who are on palliative care, who suffer from a terminal illness and who consider their lives not worth living any longer. There is currently contradictory information in the media-reporting about whether assisted dying extends all the way to voluntary euthanasia or just assisted suicide. What seems clear is that the legislators avoid - likely for legal reasons - from calling what they proposing what it is.
I have not been able to get my hands on an English version of what is reportedly a 400pp legal document indicating that Quebec is on firm legal grounds, constitutionally, if it decided to go ahead with this plan.
Here is how the Huffington Post has reported the gist of it:
'Under the recommendations, patients themselves would have to make the request to a doctor on the basis of unbearable physical or psychological suffering. Two physicians would have to approve the request, which would have to be made in writing.
Doctors would not face criminal charges in these circumstances, the report said. Any law should state that the refusal, interruption, abstention from care or the application of a terminal sedative in those circumstances could not be considered a suicide.The Quebec panel, which was headed by lawyer Jean-Pierre Menard, said people suffering from an incurable or degenerative illness should be allowed to ask for medical assistance to help them die.'
I have not been able to get my hands on an English version of what is reportedly a 400pp legal document indicating that Quebec is on firm legal grounds, constitutionally, if it decided to go ahead with this plan.
Here is how the Huffington Post has reported the gist of it:
'Under the recommendations, patients themselves would have to make the request to a doctor on the basis of unbearable physical or psychological suffering. Two physicians would have to approve the request, which would have to be made in writing.
'Discrimination' - always a wrong?
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I recall teaching in South Africa, in this case a large class of medical students (likely 300+ were in the lecture theatre). For some reason or other that I do not recall a student replied in response to a particular scenario (I think it was a resource allocation justice case study) that that would be discriminatory, implying that that in its own right would make it a wrong.
Indeed, in common language usage people often wield the discrimination flag when they think they have been wronged in an unfair way. Gay people in Russia claim that they are discriminated against, and that therefore they have been wronged. Some religious people claim discrimination in various contexts, for instance when they are asked to do certain things that their profession requires of them as professionals. They consider this form of religious discrimination wrong. British readers will see these sorts of claims frequently pop up in reporting of the Daily Telegraph.
What people tend to miss is that discrimination simply describes that someone is making choices for or against something. Say, I choose coffee over other beverages in the morning, that means I discriminate against those other beverages. Or I choose to fly in the front of the bus if I can afford to avoid the back of the bus, certainly on all flights longer than, say 5 hours or so. I discriminate against the cramped seating conditions in the back of the bus.
Discrimination is about making choices between options, it is about drawing distinctions.
Now, it seems to me that someone just claiming 'discrimination' is begging the question then. What question? The question of whether or not a particular discriminatory act is justifiable or not. Many people claiming 'discrimination' tend to beg this question. Think of discrimination based on ethnicity. Is it always wrong? If so, most affirmative action programs in operation today would then be wrong, too. Perhaps we should try, in our common usage of the term, to distinguish between 'just discrimination' and 'unjust discrimination'. 'Discrimination' claims without the qualifier should probably be ignored because it is unclear wether there is a problem to begin with. They constitute mere handwaving in the public sphere kind of activities. Once someone claims 'unjust discrimination' we should ask for a justification of the 'unjust' claim. It certainly is not the case, that 'Discrimination of any kind is wrong.'
Simple enough, isn't it?
I recall teaching in South Africa, in this case a large class of medical students (likely 300+ were in the lecture theatre). For some reason or other that I do not recall a student replied in response to a particular scenario (I think it was a resource allocation justice case study) that that would be discriminatory, implying that that in its own right would make it a wrong.Indeed, in common language usage people often wield the discrimination flag when they think they have been wronged in an unfair way. Gay people in Russia claim that they are discriminated against, and that therefore they have been wronged. Some religious people claim discrimination in various contexts, for instance when they are asked to do certain things that their profession requires of them as professionals. They consider this form of religious discrimination wrong. British readers will see these sorts of claims frequently pop up in reporting of the Daily Telegraph.
What people tend to miss is that discrimination simply describes that someone is making choices for or against something. Say, I choose coffee over other beverages in the morning, that means I discriminate against those other beverages. Or I choose to fly in the front of the bus if I can afford to avoid the back of the bus, certainly on all flights longer than, say 5 hours or so. I discriminate against the cramped seating conditions in the back of the bus.
Discrimination is about making choices between options, it is about drawing distinctions.
Now, it seems to me that someone just claiming 'discrimination' is begging the question then. What question? The question of whether or not a particular discriminatory act is justifiable or not. Many people claiming 'discrimination' tend to beg this question. Think of discrimination based on ethnicity. Is it always wrong? If so, most affirmative action programs in operation today would then be wrong, too. Perhaps we should try, in our common usage of the term, to distinguish between 'just discrimination' and 'unjust discrimination'. 'Discrimination' claims without the qualifier should probably be ignored because it is unclear wether there is a problem to begin with. They constitute mere handwaving in the public sphere kind of activities. Once someone claims 'unjust discrimination' we should ask for a justification of the 'unjust' claim. It certainly is not the case, that 'Discrimination of any kind is wrong.'
Simple enough, isn't it?
Canada's Conservative government delivers to religion
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Canada's conservative PM Stephen Harper finally delivers on a promise made to his conservative religious constituency. He establishes today an Office of Religious Freedoms. Thankfully it seems to be a window dressing activity, soon to be forgotten, given its measly 5 mio C$ annual budget. There ain't much it can do with that amount of money.
What's wrong with a taxpayer funded outfit designed to protect religious freedoms in other parts of the world? Nothing in principle, but... there is no good reason to privilege people's interest in holding religious views (that are fundamentally ideological views about the world) over other ideological views of the world. Why not establish an office aimed at protecting moral views of the world, conscience views or whatnot, if one sees the urgent need to protect people's (however implausible) views about how the world came about, or if one sees the need to protect their medieval takes on sexual mores or any number of other issues.
Clearly this outfit serves to realize a promise the current Canadian government made to its religious hard core of voters. While its 5 bio C$ budget suggests that even this government doesn't quite see the point of putting a lot of money into protecting people's religious freedoms in other parts of the world, it is still money that could have gone to better causes (eg the protection of people's human rights, including their right to hold ideological views of the world).
Addendum: Turns out my suspicions about this outfit were well justified. It is headed by a Catholic 'Dean' of a religious college graduating reportedly some 16 or so students. The college reportedly praises itself as an institution celebrating a model of 'education' that was in operation prior to the enlightenment age. I can't help but wonder whether Mr Harper was keen on discrediting his religious freedom operation before it even got into action. If that's what he aimed for, he certainly succeeded.
What's wrong with a taxpayer funded outfit designed to protect religious freedoms in other parts of the world? Nothing in principle, but... there is no good reason to privilege people's interest in holding religious views (that are fundamentally ideological views about the world) over other ideological views of the world. Why not establish an office aimed at protecting moral views of the world, conscience views or whatnot, if one sees the urgent need to protect people's (however implausible) views about how the world came about, or if one sees the need to protect their medieval takes on sexual mores or any number of other issues.
Clearly this outfit serves to realize a promise the current Canadian government made to its religious hard core of voters. While its 5 bio C$ budget suggests that even this government doesn't quite see the point of putting a lot of money into protecting people's religious freedoms in other parts of the world, it is still money that could have gone to better causes (eg the protection of people's human rights, including their right to hold ideological views of the world).
Addendum: Turns out my suspicions about this outfit were well justified. It is headed by a Catholic 'Dean' of a religious college graduating reportedly some 16 or so students. The college reportedly praises itself as an institution celebrating a model of 'education' that was in operation prior to the enlightenment age. I can't help but wonder whether Mr Harper was keen on discrediting his religious freedom operation before it even got into action. If that's what he aimed for, he certainly succeeded.
Philadelphia Perpetuates the Myth To Clamp Down On Public Feedings of the City's Most Vulnerable and Poor
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Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has yanked a page straight out of the old "Quality of Life" crimes playbook to inflict some shiny new misery on people who are already challenged to survive on a daily basis.
Waaaayyy back in November 2007, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (the Law Center) worked collaboratively to publish Feeding Intolerance: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness. Back then, they provided a spreadsheet that listed the US cities that had some sort of ordinance or ban on street feeding:
Almost 6 years later, not much has changed and in fact, this spreadsheet is woefully outdated today because a number of new cities need to be added, including Nashville and now, Philly (and Nashville initiated theirs so long ago that it's barely worth mentioning and is only listed here because I happen to live here).
Why, you might ask, are Mayors like Nutter still justifying their actions years later based on debunked excuses for implementing punitive measures on peeps who are hungry?
Well, Mayors across the country participate each year via via The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, and they strategize on how best to eradicate homelessness. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan (supposedly, anyway) organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today, each represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.
Now I would really like to think that all these participating Mayors were honestly interested in ending homelessness by providing real options for their city and the people who're experiencing perhaps one of the most traumatic and challenging times of their lives. This real policy change is accomplished by promoting housing-first strategies and approaches for the city's most vulnerable, ensuring a well-trained staff of direct service providers, and facilitating a collaborative and coordinated cross-agency effort that utilizes evidence-based and promising practices empirically proven to end - not manage - homelessness.
But I also know that these approaches are not always fully embraced by communities - at first, anyway. And money is tight in every city, as we're all painfully aware. I also know that trying to navigate through the political land mines saturating the field of social policy choices bring with it high risk for those who're considering pushing upstream against the currents of the mighty river of Status Quo.
I've got more than a sneaking suspicion that because these risks, should they go bad, have very high consequences to the good Mayors; and because those experiencing homelessness don't contribute to campaigns; nor are they typically a block of courted voters, since they don't usually vote (with any regularity, anyway); our Mayors tend to take a path of least resistance in terms of potential political ramifications and execute the "end" of homelessness through illusion, rather than through good, solid systemic policy change.
And that path of least resistance seems to usually culminate in the Mayor of a given city, in this most recent case, Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," trotting out these lame justifications for the enactment of quality of life criminalization measures rather than to tackle the real issues related to the systemic problems that often lie at the root of an individual's homelessness, hunger, and poverty....
But earlier this year, city officials passed an ordinance banning public feeding of groups of more than three people in any city park – taking care, of course, to exempt city-sanctioned special events, family picnics and other gatherings the city finds more palatable.
The law targets church groups and charities that give meals to the homeless on land along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, home to major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the newly opened Barnes Foundation art collection.
Why make it so hard to feed the homeless in the City of Brotherly Love?
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s official explanation for the ban is that he wants to move feeding the homeless inside (though the city is vague about how or when this will happen). Moreover, the city argues, church feeding programs are health hazards that create a mess in the park. The mayor offered part of the plaza surrounding City Hall as a temporary alternative location.
Religious leaders dismiss the city’s objections to meal distribution in public parks as bogus, pointing out that no one has gotten sick from the food distributed and volunteers clean up the space used. Moreover, many of the homeless who live in the park are reluctant to travel elsewhere (leaving their few possessions) – and some are too disabled to do so.
According to critics of the law, the real reason for the ban is the proximity of the feeding programs to tourist attractions, especially the new $150 million building housing the Barnes Foundation collection that opened in May.
To stop the law from taking effect, religious groups (with support from the American Civil Liberties Union) filed suit in federal court charging that prohibiting churches from feeding the homeless in city parks violates religious freedom ( Chosen 300 Ministries, Inc. v. City of Philadelphia).
The city responded by claiming that because the law “imposes no restrictions upon praying or preaching or reading the Gospel or engaging with the homeless,” the ban on feeding doesn’t interfere with the churches’ right to practice their faith.
In July, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn, Jr., rejected the city’s argument and granted a temporary injunction barring implementation of the law. In a written opinion issued two weeks ago explaining his order, the judge wrote that government has no business ascribing some of the churches’ religious activities more religious significance than others.
To support his conclusion that the park feeding ban violated the religious freedom of the ministries, Yohn relied not on the First Amendment, as might be expected, but on the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the protections of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause in 1990, declaring that government no longer had to show a compelling state interest before denying religious exemptions to generally applicable government laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religion ( Employment Division v. Smith ).
In response to the court’s 1990 ruling, some states – including Pennsylvania – have passed legislation restoring the “compelling interest” test.
According to Yohn, Philadelphia’s public feeding ban would likely fail that test because the city has not shown that governmental interests are strong enough to override religious freedom in this case. Moreover, the city has not provided a truly viable alternative for relocating the feeding programs.
Philadelphia is not the only city trying to move homeless people and those who serve them out of public parks. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, more than 50 other cities have passed anti-camping and anti-feeding ordinances.
Nutter is appealing the court injunction. But whatever happens in the courts, church leaders in Philadelphia promise to keep the meals coming – even if it means defying the law.
After all, when it comes to helping “the least of these,” they believe in obeying a higher law.
By | 02:37 PM ET, 08/23/2012
Waaaayyy back in November 2007, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (the Law Center) worked collaboratively to publish Feeding Intolerance: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness. Back then, they provided a spreadsheet that listed the US cities that had some sort of ordinance or ban on street feeding:
Almost 6 years later, not much has changed and in fact, this spreadsheet is woefully outdated today because a number of new cities need to be added, including Nashville and now, Philly (and Nashville initiated theirs so long ago that it's barely worth mentioning and is only listed here because I happen to live here). Why, you might ask, are Mayors like Nutter still justifying their actions years later based on debunked excuses for implementing punitive measures on peeps who are hungry?
Well, Mayors across the country participate each year via via The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, and they strategize on how best to eradicate homelessness. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan (supposedly, anyway) organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today, each represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.
Now I would really like to think that all these participating Mayors were honestly interested in ending homelessness by providing real options for their city and the people who're experiencing perhaps one of the most traumatic and challenging times of their lives. This real policy change is accomplished by promoting housing-first strategies and approaches for the city's most vulnerable, ensuring a well-trained staff of direct service providers, and facilitating a collaborative and coordinated cross-agency effort that utilizes evidence-based and promising practices empirically proven to end - not manage - homelessness.
But I also know that these approaches are not always fully embraced by communities - at first, anyway. And money is tight in every city, as we're all painfully aware. I also know that trying to navigate through the political land mines saturating the field of social policy choices bring with it high risk for those who're considering pushing upstream against the currents of the mighty river of Status Quo.
I've got more than a sneaking suspicion that because these risks, should they go bad, have very high consequences to the good Mayors; and because those experiencing homelessness don't contribute to campaigns; nor are they typically a block of courted voters, since they don't usually vote (with any regularity, anyway); our Mayors tend to take a path of least resistance in terms of potential political ramifications and execute the "end" of homelessness through illusion, rather than through good, solid systemic policy change.
And that path of least resistance seems to usually culminate in the Mayor of a given city, in this most recent case, Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," trotting out these lame justifications for the enactment of quality of life criminalization measures rather than to tackle the real issues related to the systemic problems that often lie at the root of an individual's homelessness, hunger, and poverty....
In Philadelphia parks, churches fight to feed the homeless
By Church ministries have been feeding homeless people in Philadelphia’s public parks for decades – not as a charitable gesture, but as an act of faith.But earlier this year, city officials passed an ordinance banning public feeding of groups of more than three people in any city park – taking care, of course, to exempt city-sanctioned special events, family picnics and other gatherings the city finds more palatable.
The law targets church groups and charities that give meals to the homeless on land along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, home to major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the newly opened Barnes Foundation art collection.
Why make it so hard to feed the homeless in the City of Brotherly Love?
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s official explanation for the ban is that he wants to move feeding the homeless inside (though the city is vague about how or when this will happen). Moreover, the city argues, church feeding programs are health hazards that create a mess in the park. The mayor offered part of the plaza surrounding City Hall as a temporary alternative location.
Religious leaders dismiss the city’s objections to meal distribution in public parks as bogus, pointing out that no one has gotten sick from the food distributed and volunteers clean up the space used. Moreover, many of the homeless who live in the park are reluctant to travel elsewhere (leaving their few possessions) – and some are too disabled to do so.
According to critics of the law, the real reason for the ban is the proximity of the feeding programs to tourist attractions, especially the new $150 million building housing the Barnes Foundation collection that opened in May.
To stop the law from taking effect, religious groups (with support from the American Civil Liberties Union) filed suit in federal court charging that prohibiting churches from feeding the homeless in city parks violates religious freedom ( Chosen 300 Ministries, Inc. v. City of Philadelphia).
The city responded by claiming that because the law “imposes no restrictions upon praying or preaching or reading the Gospel or engaging with the homeless,” the ban on feeding doesn’t interfere with the churches’ right to practice their faith.
In July, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn, Jr., rejected the city’s argument and granted a temporary injunction barring implementation of the law. In a written opinion issued two weeks ago explaining his order, the judge wrote that government has no business ascribing some of the churches’ religious activities more religious significance than others.
To support his conclusion that the park feeding ban violated the religious freedom of the ministries, Yohn relied not on the First Amendment, as might be expected, but on the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act.
That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the protections of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause in 1990, declaring that government no longer had to show a compelling state interest before denying religious exemptions to generally applicable government laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religion ( Employment Division v. Smith ).
In response to the court’s 1990 ruling, some states – including Pennsylvania – have passed legislation restoring the “compelling interest” test.
According to Yohn, Philadelphia’s public feeding ban would likely fail that test because the city has not shown that governmental interests are strong enough to override religious freedom in this case. Moreover, the city has not provided a truly viable alternative for relocating the feeding programs.
Philadelphia is not the only city trying to move homeless people and those who serve them out of public parks. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, more than 50 other cities have passed anti-camping and anti-feeding ordinances.
Nutter is appealing the court injunction. But whatever happens in the courts, church leaders in Philadelphia promise to keep the meals coming – even if it means defying the law.
After all, when it comes to helping “the least of these,” they believe in obeying a higher law.
By | 02:37 PM ET, 08/23/2012
" I totally understand the 'no money, no mission' paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing, true, lasting change is not possible."
To contact us Click HERE
Dr. Centrone elucidates a common situation those experiencing homelessness know all too well in just about every city in the country. It is certainly true that in some towns providers have more effectively collaborated to accomplish far more together than they ever could have individually, but the truth is that even in most of those places, increased collaboration among agencies, services and resource allocators continues to be elusive and below the level that is actually available.
Homeless services have never been at the top of the priorities list for funding opportunities from their local, state and federal purse-holders. They've always had to fight for very scarce resources and for a very long time, because so little was known about both the numbers of homeless in a given community and how best to serve them, oversight was....tepid; how does one provide oversight if one doesn't know the scope of - or the remedy(ies) needed to - correct the problem?
As a result, agencies have learned to be protective of their funding streams while at the same time figuring out for themselves how best to address the niche they carved out as a result of the funding stream.
Let me explain:
Because these funds originate at the Federal level (usually), it's challenging, to say the least, for Federal policy makers seeking to provide some help to local entities for their problems or issues to know exactly what this might entail. They work around this in a couple of ways; first, by providing "block grants" to states so that the state itself can decide what priorities it will set and then release RFPs for the available funds. Second, the feds put out federal RFPs (duh) targeting specific approaches known as Evidence Based Practices (EBPs) or Promising Practices.
Understand I'm being overly broad and vague myself on this as I don't want to put you to sleep, nor am I in any way, shape or form a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on grants and funding procurement. But I do know probably just enough about them to be dangerous to myself and others with it, and part of this danger I think many of us share when we apply for funding at the local level.
This is because as I mentioned earlier, we find ourselves tied to the requirements - and the restrictions - within the grant itself. And if the grant is disbursed over a period of years, as many of them can be, whole departments; hell, whole organizations may be built upon them.
This is a key point, because what then becomes an issue - sometimes the overarching issue - is keeping that funding in order to keep the staff employed in order to keep bringing the service(s) to the population being served; the “no money, no mission” paradigm.
There's little incentive to collaborate or to share resources because a. the requirements of the grant narrow the scope of what the agency is able to do, and b.the agency is already running on a shoestring and the last thing they want to do is to give a competitor for those scarce resources any of the goodies - or the inside info around the grant requirements - they worked their tails off to get for themselves. There's also little incentive to change funding streams, since winning a grant is always "iffy" and it used to be much easier to write a continuation application rather than a new RFP.
Let be LOUD and clear here; agencies DO want to collaborate, and they often DO SO even when they know it can be potentially harmful to the funding they receive for the job they're doing. It's just that for a very long time, there wasn't really a directive to find ways to to collaborate, nor was there a paradigm shift from - and this is a critically important point - managing homelessness to ending homelessness.
Over the last 5-7 years, the Federal government has ramped up their investigative efforts around homelessness and have begun to understand much more clearly the scope of the problem. This in turn has helped to identify the remedies needed to accomplish this shift.
What they've discovered is what most folks on the ground providing services have known for quite some time; the precursors leading to - as well as the issues chaining people to - homelessness are varied, complex, and there is no "one size fits all" answer.
And, s it is so often, when we figure out one thing, new challenges and barriers suddenly materialize or come more sharply into view as a result.
Now one of the bigger problems we're all facing is getting people to understand the need for the paradigm shift from management of homelessness to the idea of ending homelessness, and this is no easy task. People have some very deeply held beliefs around the causes and conditions of homelessness, and there are widely held stereotypical beliefs that, while often erroneous, continue to be pervasive and hard to eliminate.
All of this "discovery" and tactical shifting takes time, especially when it must come from something like the Federal government, who is as far removed from the realities of the daily life on the ground in Murfreesboro, TN or Round Rock, TX or Davenport, IA., as is a citizen of Zimbabwe.
The key here of course is to raise awareness, but it is also to ensure that as money flows from federal to state to local programs, those programs are evaluated based on outcomes tied tightly to ending - not managing - homelessness. If, as your program has contact with individuals experiencing homelessness, you are releasing them back onto the streets when your "treatment" is complete rather than being able to release them into housing, we need to rethink continuing funding to this organization under a homeless services grant.
Let me be crystal clear here; services to address the immediate needs of those experiencing homelessness are essential and must be continued. HOWEVER, these services should NOT be stand alone services, and we must begin to hold agencies accountable for helping to end homelessness with every individual they engage with who is currently experiencing homelessness. If your service is not directly connected in some way, shape or form in the measurable reduction of people experiencing homelessness in your community, funding for your program should come from some other source to allow the scarce dollars allocated to homelessness to be used solely to assist with ending it.
I know this sounds a little extreme, but if we want to reduce the costs associated with homelessness and bring an end to the scourge itself, there is only one real answer:
we must put people into houses.
At the end of our talk today at the San Diego, California Region IX Health Care for the Homeless Conference, I had an opportunity to speak with a service provider. He told me about his efforts to get organizations to build a coalition in his community. He told me about the six months it took him to schedule the first meeting of the homeless services agencies in his area.
He told me that he had not given up hope that the coalition will pay off with great dividends. I complimented him on his efforts and reassured him that his efforts would indeed pay off. I told him that he may never know the impact of his efforts, but, I told him, if his efforts led to ending the experience of chronic homelessness for one person, then it was worthwhile.
I enjoy speaking at these conferences. They are full of amazing people working in homeless services. I love to reconnect with old friends, inspiring thought leaders, and change agents. The people who work in homeless health clinics, supportive housing programs, mental health and substance use treatment programs around the country are gifted and courageous people.
I spoke at this conference with my colleague Steven Samra. We talked about our work on a new model of outreach we are calling “Housing-Focused Outreach” (HFO). Steven and I, along with the leadership and thoughtful intellect of Ken Kraybill, have been incubating the ideas of HFO for a few years. Our ideas are not unique. They are born from the work of Dr. Sam Tsemberis at Pathways to Housing, and the visionary work of the 100,000 Homes Project. Our ideas are also born from our years of experience in serving people experiencing homelessness and the work we have all been doing over recent years in visiting supportive housing programs around the United States.
The talk was about shifting the paradigm of service delivery. We are considering how to develop and operationalize a new model to impact agency level activities. A summary of our conversation, a work in progress, looks like this:
(1) In order to truly end chronic homelessness, we [homeless service providers, peers, and advocates] need to lead with housing and build effective bridges to supportive services.
(2) The only way to ensure adequate access to housing and supportive services is to build bridges of collaboration with a number of organizations and resources.
We talk about the fact that most communities around the country have the pieces to put together a really effective model to end chronic homelessness. The issue, however, is that these pieces are fractured and disjointed from one another. Our main predicate for the Housing Focused Outreach model is training service providers to be experts in building partnerships.
When we give this talk, we hear repeatedly how little collaboration actually occurs on the ground. I hear over and over again at talks like this: “Oh, that [collaborating with partner agencies] won’t work . . . we are all fighting for the same pot of money, and we can’t really collaborate or we will lose our agency level effectiveness.”
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the “no money, no mission” paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing, true, lasting change is not possible. I am not sure how we can get more people invested in the idea that collaboration is one of greatest and most underutilized tools. One thing I do know: it will take some serious ego slaying and a strong commitment to service.
Dr. Centrone elucidates a common situation those experiencing homelessness know all too well in just about every city in the country. It is certainly true that in some towns providers have more effectively collaborated to accomplish far more together than they ever could have individually, but the truth is that even in most of those places, increased collaboration among agencies, services and resource allocators continues to be elusive and below the level that is actually available. Homeless services have never been at the top of the priorities list for funding opportunities from their local, state and federal purse-holders. They've always had to fight for very scarce resources and for a very long time, because so little was known about both the numbers of homeless in a given community and how best to serve them, oversight was....tepid; how does one provide oversight if one doesn't know the scope of - or the remedy(ies) needed to - correct the problem?
As a result, agencies have learned to be protective of their funding streams while at the same time figuring out for themselves how best to address the niche they carved out as a result of the funding stream.
Let me explain:
WARNING: BRAIN GLAZING FUNDING INFORMATION COMING!grants are narrowly targeted. It's not like an agency can send in a "proposal" with a vague and overly broad request to "help people who are homeless" to someone like Housing and Urban Development (HUD) or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) That proposal must be pretty specific to the announcement of funding opportunity (a Request For Proposal/RFP. or Request for Application/RFA). As a result, organizations often find themselves building their approach around a specific RFP, which then also essentially ties their hands to remain within the parameters of the requirements laid out in the RFP.
Because these funds originate at the Federal level (usually), it's challenging, to say the least, for Federal policy makers seeking to provide some help to local entities for their problems or issues to know exactly what this might entail. They work around this in a couple of ways; first, by providing "block grants" to states so that the state itself can decide what priorities it will set and then release RFPs for the available funds. Second, the feds put out federal RFPs (duh) targeting specific approaches known as Evidence Based Practices (EBPs) or Promising Practices.
Understand I'm being overly broad and vague myself on this as I don't want to put you to sleep, nor am I in any way, shape or form a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on grants and funding procurement. But I do know probably just enough about them to be dangerous to myself and others with it, and part of this danger I think many of us share when we apply for funding at the local level.
This is because as I mentioned earlier, we find ourselves tied to the requirements - and the restrictions - within the grant itself. And if the grant is disbursed over a period of years, as many of them can be, whole departments; hell, whole organizations may be built upon them.
This is a key point, because what then becomes an issue - sometimes the overarching issue - is keeping that funding in order to keep the staff employed in order to keep bringing the service(s) to the population being served; the “no money, no mission” paradigm.
There's little incentive to collaborate or to share resources because a. the requirements of the grant narrow the scope of what the agency is able to do, and b.the agency is already running on a shoestring and the last thing they want to do is to give a competitor for those scarce resources any of the goodies - or the inside info around the grant requirements - they worked their tails off to get for themselves. There's also little incentive to change funding streams, since winning a grant is always "iffy" and it used to be much easier to write a continuation application rather than a new RFP.
Let be LOUD and clear here; agencies DO want to collaborate, and they often DO SO even when they know it can be potentially harmful to the funding they receive for the job they're doing. It's just that for a very long time, there wasn't really a directive to find ways to to collaborate, nor was there a paradigm shift from - and this is a critically important point - managing homelessness to ending homelessness.
Over the last 5-7 years, the Federal government has ramped up their investigative efforts around homelessness and have begun to understand much more clearly the scope of the problem. This in turn has helped to identify the remedies needed to accomplish this shift.
What they've discovered is what most folks on the ground providing services have known for quite some time; the precursors leading to - as well as the issues chaining people to - homelessness are varied, complex, and there is no "one size fits all" answer.
And, s it is so often, when we figure out one thing, new challenges and barriers suddenly materialize or come more sharply into view as a result.
Now one of the bigger problems we're all facing is getting people to understand the need for the paradigm shift from management of homelessness to the idea of ending homelessness, and this is no easy task. People have some very deeply held beliefs around the causes and conditions of homelessness, and there are widely held stereotypical beliefs that, while often erroneous, continue to be pervasive and hard to eliminate.
All of this "discovery" and tactical shifting takes time, especially when it must come from something like the Federal government, who is as far removed from the realities of the daily life on the ground in Murfreesboro, TN or Round Rock, TX or Davenport, IA., as is a citizen of Zimbabwe.
The key here of course is to raise awareness, but it is also to ensure that as money flows from federal to state to local programs, those programs are evaluated based on outcomes tied tightly to ending - not managing - homelessness. If, as your program has contact with individuals experiencing homelessness, you are releasing them back onto the streets when your "treatment" is complete rather than being able to release them into housing, we need to rethink continuing funding to this organization under a homeless services grant.
Let me be crystal clear here; services to address the immediate needs of those experiencing homelessness are essential and must be continued. HOWEVER, these services should NOT be stand alone services, and we must begin to hold agencies accountable for helping to end homelessness with every individual they engage with who is currently experiencing homelessness. If your service is not directly connected in some way, shape or form in the measurable reduction of people experiencing homelessness in your community, funding for your program should come from some other source to allow the scarce dollars allocated to homelessness to be used solely to assist with ending it.
I know this sounds a little extreme, but if we want to reduce the costs associated with homelessness and bring an end to the scourge itself, there is only one real answer:
we must put people into houses.
Slaying the Ego in Homeless Services Delivery by Wayne Centrone
Posted on September 11, 2012 by C4 ThoughtAt the end of our talk today at the San Diego, California Region IX Health Care for the Homeless Conference, I had an opportunity to speak with a service provider. He told me about his efforts to get organizations to build a coalition in his community. He told me about the six months it took him to schedule the first meeting of the homeless services agencies in his area.
He told me that he had not given up hope that the coalition will pay off with great dividends. I complimented him on his efforts and reassured him that his efforts would indeed pay off. I told him that he may never know the impact of his efforts, but, I told him, if his efforts led to ending the experience of chronic homelessness for one person, then it was worthwhile.
I enjoy speaking at these conferences. They are full of amazing people working in homeless services. I love to reconnect with old friends, inspiring thought leaders, and change agents. The people who work in homeless health clinics, supportive housing programs, mental health and substance use treatment programs around the country are gifted and courageous people.
I spoke at this conference with my colleague Steven Samra. We talked about our work on a new model of outreach we are calling “Housing-Focused Outreach” (HFO). Steven and I, along with the leadership and thoughtful intellect of Ken Kraybill, have been incubating the ideas of HFO for a few years. Our ideas are not unique. They are born from the work of Dr. Sam Tsemberis at Pathways to Housing, and the visionary work of the 100,000 Homes Project. Our ideas are also born from our years of experience in serving people experiencing homelessness and the work we have all been doing over recent years in visiting supportive housing programs around the United States.
The talk was about shifting the paradigm of service delivery. We are considering how to develop and operationalize a new model to impact agency level activities. A summary of our conversation, a work in progress, looks like this:
(1) In order to truly end chronic homelessness, we [homeless service providers, peers, and advocates] need to lead with housing and build effective bridges to supportive services.
(2) The only way to ensure adequate access to housing and supportive services is to build bridges of collaboration with a number of organizations and resources.
We talk about the fact that most communities around the country have the pieces to put together a really effective model to end chronic homelessness. The issue, however, is that these pieces are fractured and disjointed from one another. Our main predicate for the Housing Focused Outreach model is training service providers to be experts in building partnerships.
When we give this talk, we hear repeatedly how little collaboration actually occurs on the ground. I hear over and over again at talks like this: “Oh, that [collaborating with partner agencies] won’t work . . . we are all fighting for the same pot of money, and we can’t really collaborate or we will lose our agency level effectiveness.”
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the “no money, no mission” paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing, true, lasting change is not possible. I am not sure how we can get more people invested in the idea that collaboration is one of greatest and most underutilized tools. One thing I do know: it will take some serious ego slaying and a strong commitment to service.
20 Şubat 2013 Çarşamba
Trail Food: Justin's Honey Peanut Butter
To contact us Click HERE
While shopping at a local Target department store, we were browsed the food aisles looking for possible backpacking fare. While standing in front of a wall of peanut butter, we noticed some small boxes with individual packets of peanut butter. From the four boxes we selected a small packet of Justin's Honey Peanut Butter to sample at the office. Today was the day.
The packet of peanut butter stated to knead before opening. Being a military veteran, this brought back memories of little green packets of peanut butter in the ubiquitous Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs). We once failed to knead and were punished with oil and a thick peanut flavored nougat. We rolled the packet between our palms rapidly.
Finding a small nick along the side, we opened the packet slightly and squeezed a dollop onto a waiting cracker. We definitely tasted peanut butter, but not a heavy taste of peanut butter. On our second dollop we distinctly could identify the taste of honey. Finally, we tore open the pouch and dug in with a small plastic spoon. The peanut butter was tasty, but a bit mealy feeling in the mouth. Perhaps we had not spent enough tie kneading it before use.
The packet indicates Justin's Honey Peanut Butter is kosher and gluten-free. A 1.15 oz. (32 grams) packet provides 190 calories. The very high calories to weight ratio and the good taste makes packets of Justin's Honey Peanut Butter a new inclusion on our backpacking meal plan this year. Last year we flagged a bit after a few days out, so we'll toss in some peanut butter packets to see if that helps us maintain our appetite around day four.
UPDATE 5/31/12 - We bought ten packets of Justin's Honey Peanut Butter for our upcoming 10-day section hike of New York.
Disclosure: We select and purchase the product(s) reviewed. We have no material connection to either the manufacturer nor the retailer(s).
While shopping at a local Target department store, we were browsed the food aisles looking for possible backpacking fare. While standing in front of a wall of peanut butter, we noticed some small boxes with individual packets of peanut butter. From the four boxes we selected a small packet of Justin's Honey Peanut Butter to sample at the office. Today was the day.The packet of peanut butter stated to knead before opening. Being a military veteran, this brought back memories of little green packets of peanut butter in the ubiquitous Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs). We once failed to knead and were punished with oil and a thick peanut flavored nougat. We rolled the packet between our palms rapidly.
Finding a small nick along the side, we opened the packet slightly and squeezed a dollop onto a waiting cracker. We definitely tasted peanut butter, but not a heavy taste of peanut butter. On our second dollop we distinctly could identify the taste of honey. Finally, we tore open the pouch and dug in with a small plastic spoon. The peanut butter was tasty, but a bit mealy feeling in the mouth. Perhaps we had not spent enough tie kneading it before use.
The packet indicates Justin's Honey Peanut Butter is kosher and gluten-free. A 1.15 oz. (32 grams) packet provides 190 calories. The very high calories to weight ratio and the good taste makes packets of Justin's Honey Peanut Butter a new inclusion on our backpacking meal plan this year. Last year we flagged a bit after a few days out, so we'll toss in some peanut butter packets to see if that helps us maintain our appetite around day four.
UPDATE 5/31/12 - We bought ten packets of Justin's Honey Peanut Butter for our upcoming 10-day section hike of New York.
Disclosure: We select and purchase the product(s) reviewed. We have no material connection to either the manufacturer nor the retailer(s).
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