Stop criminalizing poor people! Rally April 2

End the Criminalization of Homelessness & Poverty!  Join Us!

 Monday,  April 2, 2012

In Solidarity with the

National Day of Action for the Right to Exist

 Court Square, Springfield

Noon: Gather; 12:30: Music, speakers, then MARCH to Governor’s Office, 436 Dwight St. & Mayor’s Office

Why are the shelters full, when everywhere we see empty homes and buildings?

Why is the City of Springfield ignoring the housing needs of half of its people?

OUR DEMANDS:

City: Replace the housing lost in the tornado!

State: Make shelters available to all in need!

Feds: Fund housing, not wars!

For more info, contact: Arise for Social Justice (413)734-4948

Cosponsors so far: Alliance for Peace and Justice, Anti-Racism Ministry Team of the First Congregational Church in Amherst, UCCWM American Friends Service Committee, PV Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Charles Hamilton Houston Inst. For Race & Justice , Community Labor Rebuilding Coalition, Craig’s Place, Fund Our Communities Not War, Grace Church Peace Fellowship, International Alliance of Inhabitants, Mass Alliance of HUD Tenants, Mass Coalition for the Homeless, Mass Law Reform Institute, Move On, Occupy Amherst, Occupy Western MA General Assembly, Out Now, Peace Pagoda, Picture the Homeless, Pioneer Valley Chapter of the Green/Rainbow Party, Springfield Bank Tenants Association, Springfield No One Leaves,Survivors Incorporated, UAW Local 2322, Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst Social Justice Committee, Western Mass Jobs with Justice, WRAP

¡Poner fin a la penalización por falta de vivienda y por pobreza!

Día Nacional de Acción por el Derecho a Existir:

Lunes, 2 de abril en Court Square, Springfield

(fecha en caso de lluvia: 4 de abril)

Mediodía:      inicio de la recolección

12:30:   música, altavoces

Marchar a la Oficina del Gobernador

Marchar a la Oficina del Alcalde

¡Sin vivienda, todos vamos a ser criminales!

Por qué están llenos los refugios para desamparados, cuando en toda parte hay casas y edificios vacíos?

Por qué ignora la ciudade de Springfield las necesidades de la mitad de sus habitantes?

Nuestros exigencias:

La ciudad: Reponga las viviendas perdidas en el tornado!

El estado: Haga que los refugios para desamparados sean disponibles a todos los necesitados!

El gobierno federal: Financie las viviendas, no las guerras!

Contactar Arise for Social Justice (Levántate por la Justicia Social), 413-734-4948

Occupy Springfield?

Something is happening around the world-- is it ready to happen in Springfield?  We'll find out at least some of the answer  tomorrow.

Thursday I went down to the Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen with Ruben and Christina to pass out flyers.  I haven't been down in about four months, and I've never seen it so crowded.  I had conversations with a lot of people, including folks who volunteer at the kitchen and who told me that people who were homeless were sleeping in doorways and abandoned buildings all over the city.

"They go up to Worthington St. Shelter and they're told there's no room, even though the shelter promosed to always make room for them," one woman said.  This didn't surprise me; I've heard it before,  and made calls to Worthington St. on their behalf where I've been told it was "all a mistake" and to send them back.  But what about the people we don't hear about?

I saw my friend Ahmed come in for lunch.  We nodded to each other. He and his two daughters are refugees from Iraq and had been  living in an apartment in West Springfield before it was destroyed by the June 1 tornado. He's going to Springfield Technical Community College, right across the street from Arise, and a few times a week he comes in with a bag of bread and vegetables that he's scrounged from somewhere, leaves it in our office, and then he or one of his daughters comes back to pick it up later in the afternoon.

The flyers we were passing out were about a rally, this Monday  at 5:30 on city hall steps, called "Take Back Springfield."  Arise, as members of the No One Leaves coalition and as founders of Stop Toxic Incineration in Springfield,  is involved in two areas where corporate control in our city is hurting our people: the foreclosure crisis, typified by Bank of America, and the effort to stop a biomass plant being built in our already asthma-plagued city by Palmer Renewable Energy.  Empty houses, polluted air-- if we don't fight back, we don't stand a prayer.

But on the back of the flyer, we let people know that there has been a call to Occupy Springfield on the same day, starting at 8:30 in the morning at Court Sq.!  We don't know any of the people organizing it, and the timing of the event is not what I would have chosen-- but there you go, it's happening.

In some other cities with an Occupy presence, I know there has been great solidarity between college students, the un- or under-employed and the homeless people who have joined them-- sometimes with political understanding and sometimes because it's safer to sleep out with a crowd than under the bridge.  I can't say I see the potential for that kind of solidarity in Springfield, however.  Maybe I'm not dreaming big enough.  But I think the average person in Springfield still sees homeless families and individuals as lazy, stupid or drug-addicted cheaters.  Yup, some people fit that category--just as there are non-homeless people who cheat on their taxes, treat sick days as vacation days, pad their mileage accounts and get over on the system in every way possible.  but that's not most of us, and never has been.

The Occupy movement has a slogan: We are the 99%.  It's true that if you earn less than $1,137,684 a year, you are in the bottom 99%.  But really, it's the top ten percent that hold more than two-thirds of this country's wealth.  The median income in Springfield is $36,235.  So the median income for Springfield puts us in the bottom 20%!!

I remember the days when I could stop at Savers every couple of months and look for clothing bargains.  I remember the days when I could buy an occasional  book without trepidation of its impact on my utility bills..  I remember when I didn't have to take my medication every other day in order to make it last.  A lot of us remember those days, right?  We don't want much, just enough.  And these days, we're not getting it.  Why is that?  Because wealth is being distributed upward at an astounding rate, and it's been going on for thirty years.  Yet many of us continue to think that if we're not making it, it's our own damn fault.  We continue to think as individuals rather than as members of a society whose strings are being pulled by the elite few.  We work harder and longer for less money, and we stand in line at the convenience store for a chance at MegaMillions.

 
So here we are.  People all over the country are starting to get it.  Are we ready in Springfield?  I don't know.  Maybe Occupy Springfield will be small in numbers and easily dismissed or maybe tomorrow will be the opening gambit in a movement that will grow over time until we have built the power we need to make change.  That's up to us-- me, and you, and the guy sleeping in the doorway and our neighbor across the street.  Hope to see you there.

Putting poor people to good use

Today Liz and I went to a hearing held by the Dept. of Housing and Community Development on the new HomeBASE program, which is supposed to help eligible families avoid homelessness.  The hearing focused on the regulations themselves, and how they might be fine tuned; we were there mostly to talk about the implementation end.

To put that in human terms, when a young woman with a baby (apartment lost in the tornado, didn't know about FEMA, staying for 2 months with a friend in subsidized housing whose own housing is now at risk because of her presence) goes down to the Dept. of Transitional Assistance to apply for Emergency Assistance (necessary before you can apply for HomeBASE) and is twice told she is not eligible and turned away with no written explanation, then something is wrong with the implementation picture.  It was not until she came to Arise with her story and we gave her a flyer (thanks, Mass Law Reform) about HomeBASE, with certain key parts highlighted, and sent her back down to DTA, that she was able to get help.

The hearing today wasn't huge.  Some advocates came, and some agencies charged with administering some aspect of the program, and a couple of poor people.

One of the testifiers (this was an official hearing) is the head of a local housing agency.  Among other things, he spoke about how the housing rate is set too low, and may, through the law of unintended consequences, concentrate poverty in particular areas.  I've heard him speak about the need to have our neighborhoods economically diverse before; and while I agree with some of his analysis in theory, it's really a much more  complicated scenario.  So i thought i knew where he was going.  But I was wrong.

"Poor people should be able to live in more affluent neighborhoods," he stated, "because they need people to hire for the low wage jobs."

My mouth fell open.  I could not believe what I was hearing.  And he went on later to speak about how many homeless families are coming from out of state, and shouldn't these scarce benefits be preserved for the people on his long housing waiting list, a point nicely countered later by someone else who said that studies show a statistically insignificant difference between the needy families who come to our state and our needy families that go some somebody else's state, which also has long waiting lists., etc.

I've been pondering  his remarks all evening.  Let me get this straight: at least a few of us (not too many, mind you) should live in affluent neighborhoods so we can do their dirty work?  Can we all get hired to become maids and gardeners?  Can we wander their snowy neighborhoods with shovels?  (Actually, we do that already.) Work in the convenience  and mega-drug stores?  (We do that already, too.) And wouldn't affluent people really prefer we commute rather than live next door?

As classist, serf-like and  preposterous as his idea is, it also belongs to an era long gone, never to come again.  This isn't the Fifties. Most people's fortunes have been rolling downhill for decades. Sure, we still have a few affluent neighborhoods in Springfield, but they're ragged around the edges, and in a city where nearly thirty percent of us live below the poverty level, there just aren't enough affluent people to go around-- not here, not anywhere.  

Even the HomeBASE program, rotten with good intentions and riddled with  regulations, is predicated on the belief that, starting basically from zero, a homeless family can turn its life around in just one year.Do these policy makers and administrators read the same news that I do?  Is anybody predicting the economy will recover in just one more year?

I have a lot more I could say about we what we, as poor people, need to do, but that's another post.

Obama's failure, a truth-telling tour, and a march on Washington, D.C.

This morning I read an opinion piece by Drew Westen that completely summed up the deep disappointment I feel in our president, Barack Obama.  I urge you to read all of it, but these two paragraphs frame Obama's failure.

When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not  mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their  full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that  cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth  of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that  whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective  response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true  and repugnant face in public. 

IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest  levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate  influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the  eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the  people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of  it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in  storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had  the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the  public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the  New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a  century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the  problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized  creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers  back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the  economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome  it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

 Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West believe that Barack Obama is ignoring the plight of poor people.  They have launched The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience, to help wake this country up to what poor people have to go through every day, how their lives and the lives of their children have been stunted and cast aside.  Their inspiration also comes from Dr. Martin Luther King: "I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to identify with  the poor, I choose to give my life for the hungry, I choose to give my  life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. .  .This is the way I’m going.  If it means suffering a little bit, I’m  going that way.  If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way.  If it  means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice saying  “DO SOMETHING FOR OTHERS.”

Poor people are organizing on our own behalf, too-- not just in the small ways we do every day, but for major mobilizations.  The Assembly to End Poverty, which was formed from the poverty resolution at the 2010 United States Social Forum, is calling for a march on Washington, D.C. on June 30, 2012. I don't know yet how we're going to do it, but Arise, and poor people from all over Western Massachusetts, will be there.

We are fighting for our lives.

Photo from Racole's photostream from Flickr.

The worst is yet to come

Does anyone think, this morning, that the debt ceiling crisis has been "solved?"

I'm no political analyst and it's going to take me (and the rest of the country) some time to figure out exactly how bad the pending deal is going to be for poor, working class and middle class people of this country.  But I got a big hint this morning of where we're headed next during CNN's interview of Sen. John McCain.


McCain mentioned that as a way to stimulate the economy and get businesses investing, he'd like to see a two year moratorium on all government regulations.

Following is a list of some of the federal agencies and bureaus that would be affected by McCain's plan.  Take a look and use your imagination: Just how might the robber baron corporations exploit lack of regulations, both those that currently exist and those that might be proposed?


Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, Bureau of Prisons, Commission on Civil Rights, Council on Environmental Quality, Department of Agriculture,
Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services,Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Division, Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Maritime Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Fish and Wildlife Service, Food and Drug Administration,Food Safety and Inspection Service, Housing and Urban Development, Justice Department, Labor Department,Marine Mammal Commission, Mine Safety and Health Administration, National AIDS Policy Office, National Park Service, National Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Public and Indian Housing, Veterans Health Administration.

Well, I can give you a hint: as of last Friday, 39 anti-environmental riders were attached to the 2012 spending bill for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.  If passed, they would mean that for a year: no greenhouse gas regulations, no new auto efficiency regulations,  no limits on mountaintop coal removal, no strengthening of protections for wetlands, no labeling the toxic ash from coal-fired power plants as hazardous waste-- and much more.  You can read some details in a Sunday Editorial in the New York Times.

So what are we to do?  Our options on a federal level may be limited at the moment, but as a lifelong community organizer, at least one course of action is clear to me: fight for local control on every front of this war against us.  Build our strength and our skills to challenge, from the bottom up, the corporate control over our lives.  Tell the truth!  Oppose illegitimate authority!  Start taking back our power-- at the next street corner, at the steps of city hall, at our state capitals.  And do it now.

Only after the last tree has been cut down.
Only after the last river has been poisoned.
Only after the last fish has been caught.
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

                                           ~ Cree saying

Stooges for the rich

I've been so tied up with the fall-out and next steps from  Tuesday's biomass air permit hrearing that I've only kept half an ear to the national news. I've had time to glance at the headlines and know that our country is  headed for a government shut-down, but only tonight did I pay attention to some of the riders on policy Republicans are insisting be passed with the budget.

A chief target is the Environmental Protection Agency, which would be forbidden to regulate greenhouse gasses-- costs too many jobs, Republicans say.  Of course this put me in mind of Tuesday night's trade union vocal support support for Palmer Renewable Energy's biomass proposal.  Maybe those guys would agree with the Republicans on this one.

Here we are in the middle of the biggest upward transfer of wealth in eighty years and yet there are people out there thinking that making rich people richer is going to be good for them.  Maybe they haven't thought about it that way; the typical Tea Party member is a sheep who cries out for tax cuts and smaller government and then won't be able to get her aging mother into adult day care and her kids into a decent school.  No problem for the rich, though.

Poor and working class people don't think that way.  That doesn't mean we have all that much class consciousness-- hell, poor people would love to be rich-- but our expectations have gotten very low, as low as our economic ranking.  We got pushed down the ladder back in the 80's and 90's and have never accumulated any wealth to speak of in a lifetime of work..  Many poor people under forty don't know that times have ever been different.  We're so numb from assaults we hardly even feel it anymore.

I sat in a meeting today that is trying to promote a campaign to increase state revenue by returning to a higher previous income tax rate with substantial personal exemptions for the bottom 60%.  We spent a good bit of time talking about messaging and finding the right way to convey to the public that essential services are at risk-- firefighters, teachers, nurses, et cetera.

Meanwhile I'm wondering why we aren't out there telling the truth to people: the rich are stealing our lives!  They don't care that they ruin our environment, consign our children to mediocrity, shorten our days.

And they don't even need the money.

The good, the bad, the ugly-- and the shining moments

 I like being busy but I must say that the last two weeks have really been over the top. Just to get caught up with my readers, I'm tossing out a mix of personal and political in this post, then I can be back on track..

First, it is quite likely that some time within the week, I''ll be posting an apology to Springfield Technical Community College for any information that I incorrectly portrayed in my post about their Rosa Parks Day event.  That post is no longer on my blog, but I'll probably be putting it back up so there is some context to my apology.  I am waiting for a response to my request for a meeting before I apologize, so that I can be sure of just what I got wrong.  Meanwhile, one STCCer called me up to yell at me, and I've received emails from two different STCCers, one challenging my political integrity and the other blasting me for my lack of professionalism.  Well, I've never said I don't make mistakes, so I'll keep you updated on this one.

Second, I'm pretty sure the feral cat I've been feeding is dead.  I was on my way out of town on Sunday and saw a gray cat dead by the side of the road only about a block from the abandoned house where it hangs out.  I was telling my older daughter about this, and she took that opportunity to reiterate her belief that it's bad to feed ferals, that instead, I should have captured the cat and taken it to some place where it could be humanely euthanized.  Once again, I could be wrong and she could be right, but that wasn't the choice that I made.

So that's the bad stuff.

Good stuff: we had an Open House/Holiday Party at Arise this evening, and I give it a 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.  Lots of folks came, we had plenty of food, Bill brought a guitar and led kids in a sing-a-long, and we had enough prizes from the dollar store to make just about everyone happy.  One sad thing: almost everyone I talked to tonight had recently lost a job or was looking desperately to find one.  There won't be much under the Christmas tree for most of these kids.  But tonight we were family.

More good stuff: while we were getting ready for the party, Springfield City Councilors Mike Fenton, John Lysak and Melvin Edwards  were holding a press conference with representatives from various neighborhood councils, saying that on Monday, they plan to reconsider Palmer Renewable Energy's permit to build a biomass incinerator in Springfield.  Eighteen months of community organizing may be starting to pay off!  You can read Peter Goonan's story on MassLive.  My favorite quote is Ward Two Mike Fenton saying,
“This is an issue second to none on my agenda.”  I don't know yet if the work of Stop Toxic Incineration in Springfield is finished, but I know we're giving it our all.  If you don't want to live in a city with air even more polluted than it already is, get yourself down to City Council Monday night and help get some of these councilors off the fence.

To add to the opposition, the presidents of Springfield, American International and Western New England Colleges have come out against the plant and have let Mayor Sarno and Council President Jose Tosado know so in a letter!

I've been a community organizer for a long time, and my main interest has always been the rights-- and the empowerment-- of poor people. I suppose being poor myself  hasn't hurt my allegiance to the cause.  But the most successful campaigns Arise has been involved in are those that affect everybody-- poor people most of all, but ultinately all of us.  Ward representation is the best example.  The poorest areas of Springfield were never successful in electing a city councilor under the at large system.  And yet, no neighborhood was represented under the old system.  Only ward representation could change that, and everyone in the city has benefited.  And now, it's the ward councilors who are leading the way in protecting this community's health.  Win or lose, I'm proud of them .

The ugly: Four doors down from Arise's storefront is a Christian coffeehouse called Holy Grounds.  A church bought the entire building about a year and a half ago, and they've done a wonderful job turning the ground floor into a coffee house with a little stage, books on the wall, a serving bar, round tables and some comfortable chairs. I've stopped in a few times because we like to know our neighbors, and the minister has been down to our office once or twice. Our conversations have been innocuous because we haven't appeared to have much in common, but nothing in our exchanges have rung any warning bells, either.

This weekend, WMA Jobs with Justice posted the following information on the AriseAction listserve.  Check out the links.

In the latest edition of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Scott Lively lives in Springfield.  Here’s an intro to him:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Lively.  Abiding Truth Ministries is at 455 State St, Springfield MA 01105; PO Box 2373.Springfield MA 01101; (413) 301-0918; and http://www.defendthefamily.com/.

Lively claims Hitler and his inner circle were gay and that homosexuals helped mastermind the Holocaust. He’s also linked to the murderous Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill.  

Background:

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/spring/holy-war/making-myths

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2009/summer/anti-gay-propaganda

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/winter/the-hard-liners - which ends:

“In 2008, Lively started the Redemption Gate Mission Society, a church that seeks to ‘re-Christianize’ the city of Springfield, Mass., where he lives.” The specific target is mapped at http://www.redemptiongate.org/images/rzoverhead.jpg.Regarding Redemption Gate Mission Society: http://www.redemptiongate.org/.  Redemption Gate and its Holy Grounds Coffee House are at 455 State Street too, and (413) 250-0984 and info@RedemptionGate.org. 

Take a look at who they have speak: http://www.redemptiongate.org/speakersched.htm. 

Finally, don’t miss this Daily Show segment: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-july-28-2010/gay-reichs?xrs=share_fb.

Shiny moments: my younger daughter and her husband are less than a month away from having a baby.  I'll be a grandmother for the second time in twenty-two years!  They decided not to know the sex of the baby beforehand-- the way it used to be-- so I'm eagerly waiting to know if I have another granddaughter or my first grandson.

My first granddaughter is from my oldest daughter, and I want to take a moment  to say how proud of her.  She does closed captioning for the hearing-impaired, reads non-stop, and is one of the most well-informed and solidly progressive people I know.  This fall, she's given it her best shot to qualify for the Boston women's roller derby team!  She's always loved to skate and had a childhood dream of being on a team that apparently persisted somewhere in the back of her mind.  So when she heard the team was recruiting, she became "fresh meat" and practiced twice a week with other fresh meat and with the "dames."  She made the first cut but not the second, which is almost OK, because she says she's never been so sore and bruised in her life.  (She got a black eye the first week of practice.)  But she's made lots of new friends and will stay involved with the team.  

Talk about going for your dream!  She's inspired me.

How can people go hungry when there's so much food?

One in seven people living on this planet is malnourished even though we have an abundance of food.  How does this happen?  Take just nine minutes to watch this video and you'll be able to summarize it for others in less than two.  Thanks for the tip, Fast Company!


How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

Screw the Democrats: or, why I'd rather be a community organizer than be in Congress.

On October 2,  I went to the Annual Fall Party of the National Priorities Project, and, as I might have expected, I left with very mixed feelings.

My longtime friend Jean Grossholtz was being honored, and she honored me with a place at her table.  (That meant I didn't have to pay to attend.) I drove up from Springfield to Holyoke's Log Cabin

Jean is the person who deepened my understanding of what forces shape our lives.  I met her in the early days of   Arise for Social Justice, when she was still teaching at Mt. Holyoke College.

One day when she was visiting Arise she said "Michaelann, you've got to understand what globalization is, because its going to change the face of our world."  Thus I had to learn about things like neoliberalism and deregulation, and I began to understand how much corporations control what happens to us.

Through the years she'd pay other visits to Arise, tipping me off to subsets of globalization such as genetically modified food, the World Trade Organization and the coming water wars.  All of this was years before any of these topics emerged into the mainstream.

Jean is not only a teacher, she is a hardcore activist and organizer.  I'll always be grateful that she made it possible for me to go to Seattle with her for the World Trade Organization demonstrations, where I learned how to avoid tear gas and how to sing "Amazing Grace" with my mouth taped shut.  At eighty-one years of age, she's spending a bit more time finishing her memoirs than organizing, but of course that's a relative statement--she just came back from Europe where she met with her large network of fellow activists to talk about immigration policy.

At the table, Jean told us how she was practicing being gracious for the evening-- she hates public recognition but had finally given in to NPP's director, Jo Comerford, another longtime friend of hers. The room was full of NPP supporters and friends of Jean's, and I saw many people I know but don't see often, people I respect and admire, people I love as individuals but am less comfortable with in the aggregate. 

Jean was called to the podium to receive the Frances Crowe Award, and then she spoke organizing, social change, and the absolute necessity of our all taking responsibility to create a movement-- words I have heard from her before, but she speaks with such passion and commitment that I am always heartened to hear her.

Then several NPP staffpeople spoke.  NPP helps make federal data accessible so that people can understand how our tax dollars are spent.  They have a great website which is about to get even better.  Without hyperbole, the information is infuriating; if the budget was in the hands of the people, we would make very different decisions.   But I remember talking to NPP staff a couple of times about the real power driving legislative decisions.  Why was there no discussion about corporations, campaign contributions, and well-heeled lobbyists?  And this was years before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision striking down spending limits by corporations and special interest groups working to get a candidate elected or influence public opinion.

NPP's keynote speaker for the evening was Congresswoman Donna Edwards, D-Maryland .  She was introduced as someone whose community organizing had helped to bring about the passage of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, so I hoped to hear at least something about community organizing's role in social change.

No such luck.  Instead, we were subjected to a very boring and way too long harangue about why it was important to vote the Democratic ticket this year,  even though the majority of us were disappointed in the Democrats.  Her speech was largely unmemorable, but I do remember her saying, "Who cares what Robert Gibbs has to say about progressives?"    Well, as a progressive, I cared, because to me it showed the complete disdain the Obama administration has for those who helped to get him elected.  Her other main message was not to support third party candidates, who might spoil the election.  Well, screw that, I thought;  thanks for helping me decide to vote for Jill Stein and to let the chips fall where they may.

Finally the speech was over and the evening drew to a close.  I walked up the hill to retrieve my car and pulled out of the parking lot to head toward my working class city, Springfield.  I pretty much had the road to myself as other cars turned left, toward Northampton and Amherst.

Gov. Patrick, shame on you! Clothe our children!

When I was on welfare, I remember how much I looked forward to September.  That was the month that Massachusetts issued a $150 per child clothing allowance to help parents get kids ready for the school year.  No matter the bills still unpaid, I'd take that $150, pull out all my shopping skills, and dress my daughter as best I could.

That $150 allowance hasn't gone up in twenty-plus years, and of course it doesn't go as far as it once did-- even a secondhand pair of pants costs over five bucks at Goodwill-- but for families on public assistance, it lightens the load.

Last night I heard that Massachusetts' Governor Patrick plans to not pay the clothing allowance this year.

Yeah, I know, times are tight, just about everything (except health care) is being cut, but cutting from the bottom brings the whole weight of this economic disaster down on the poorest people's heads.  Local merchants should be unhappy about this, too.

The way I figure it, an additional 66,000 children in Massachusetts will be wearing last year's, now ill-fitting winter jacket, or shoes too small, or unmatched gloves.  I say additional because sixteen years of welfare reform has reduced the welfare caseload but not the number of kids living in poverty whose families don't receive TAFDC benefits..

I'm hoping that maybe, just maybe, if we flood the Governor's office with phone calls, we can get him to reverse his decision. 

Starting Monday, start calling!
Governor Patrick's office:
Phone: 617.725.4005 or  888.870.7770 (in state)

Tell him NOT to make life any harder for Massachusetts' poorest kids.

I do not cry in front of this family

I do not cry in front of this family
homeless with a baby
sitting in my office
waiting for a phone call which may never come
to save them

Instead when I step out back
for the brief sanity of trees and traffic
I see the pigeon that I've seen all day
and realize it has a broken wing.
I'm sorry for your injury,
I say to the pigeon,
I'll get you some water,
You are dead but you don't know it,
won't make it till winter
but today I can offer you
crumbs.

Rockerfeller study tells us what 20% of us already know

Today at Arise a woman we know stopped in with her two kids.  She wanted to know if we knew of any project in the city where she could take her children's school uniforms, outgrown but still in good shape, and trade them for other uniforms that fit?

"If there isn't, there certainly should be," I said.

"Check with the Parent Information Center at Milton Bradley School," Liz said.

Our friend is living on $1,000 a month, which includes some widow's benefits-- that's 50% below the federal poverty level.  She does not receive welfare benefits.  She's looking for work-- and looking, and looking.

A guy came in.  He was looking for a studio apartment, and looking for a job, also.  But he was having trouble finding either, because he had a fairly recent assault and battery charge on his record.

"I didn't do it, but my mom was dying in a nursing home and I didn't want to risk being in jail when she passed away so I pled guilty," he said.  "Do you know any landlords who will give a guy a chance?"  I didn't have a lot of ideas for him.  (In fact, if anybody in the Greater Springfield area has any tips, let me know.)

Recently I find myself describing poverty's affect on people in terms of weather disasters -- dust bowls and tornados -- but there's an older image that came to my mind several "recoveries" ago.  Every time an economic depression washes like a hurricane across this country, there are more and more of us are left swept away, stranded, possibly never to recover.

Today I saw my belief turned into hard proof when Bob Herbert, New York Times, wrote about a rigorous study done by the Rockerfeller Foundation.  First the study created an economic security index to measure the number of people whose income went down by 25% or more in a single year.  Then the study looked at the numbers of economically insecure people after three recessions.

1985:  7.2% unemployment: 12% economically insecure.
2002:  5.8% unemployment: 17% economically insecure.
2009: 9.5% unemployment:  20% economically insecure.

Your house keeps burning down, and there's less to salvage each time.

Economic Dust Bowl: will we ever recover?

Denoris and Waleska help with the kids

Two of the families we've been advocating with this week have shelter for a while.  They were placed by DHCD and have thirty days to prove they're really "eligible" for shelter. So a call to Gerry McCafferty this week got the ball rolling; HAP helped out; and we got great advice from Mass Law Reform Institute and Western Mass. Legal Services.

Of course it was chaos in the office for three days.  Two young women from the summer jobs program at MCDI really helped out keeping the children amused-- the kids were often tired, hungry and stressed, so it was not an easy job.  Simone, our summer intern from McDuffy, helped out, also.

One problem in getting these families placed was that they both come from out of town.  Turns out that they both also have substantial ties to Springfield-- the dad in one family had been in Springfield for four months, looking for work; meanwhile his family was evicted from their apartment in Buffalo..

Now, as long as I've been doing this work, I've been aware of the urban legends about Massachusetts as a magnet for poor families: signs saying "Come to Massachusetts!" posted in NYC bus terminals and Puerto Rican welfare offices.  No one has ever seen the signs, of course, they've only heard of somebody who heard of somebody who has.

But there's a grain of truth in these stories, although Massachusetts is no more a target than any other state with large urban : poverty breaks the ties a poor family has to its community of origin.  I saw this first right here in Springfield.  Used to be that a family could be pretty close to destitute, renting not owning, and yet stay in the same neighborhood for years, building and maintaining ties with neighbors and local schools and businesses.  The loss of these networks comes at great cost to families that have little in the way of material resources.

We are seeing a migration  similar to the Great Dust Bowl, only now it is not soil that has blown away and farms  taken by the bank, but houses, apartments, jobs, stores, teachers, hospitals, social services-- you name it.  This morning's Boston Globe reports on potentially fatal cuts in day care programs for homeless families.  Mass Home Care says 2,400 low-income elderly will lose services that help them stay in their own home. Just as the widow's mite was so much a larger share of her wealth than what the rich man offered,  so these cuts and others like them are a huge share of what make survival possible.

I really don't know where all this is going-- the economy, the community, the individual lives of the poor.  I do know that  every time we have a "recovery," fewer of us get to recover.

Photo: Liz Bewsee

Tornado of homelessness

Hampden County is on a tornado watch....all I want is a soaking rainstorm and a break from the heat.  OK, that's passed, and now we have a rainbow-- a little like the temporary rainbow for some homeless families today.

Seems like as soon as I wrote that I haven't had much direct contact with homeless people recently, I made a liar out of myself.

Last week we at Arise for Social Justice heard from three different single homeless people about health conditions at Worthington St. shelter.  Dust from the shelter renovations, fans taken out of the shelter space and moved to the basement for the workers (does it have to be a choice?), bedbugs, scabies, and today, a suspected case of MRSA.  I've been trying to cut the shelter some slack, because the Friends of the Homeless corporation is finally getting near to finishing the new construction and renovations that former Mayor Ryan said would be finished two years ago (economic downturn, and all that.)  But this is getting way out of hand. We're trying to figure out what we should do.

Last night I saw a quick TV news story about two families threatening to camp out on the steps of the Liberty St. welfare office because they were homeless and being denied shelter by the Dept of Housing and Community Development homeless unit housed in the building.  Now, this is not a new story; Arise has worked with families in this situation for many years.  Has there been an improvement?  Well, DHCD is in charge of homelessness services instead of the Dept. of Transitional Assistance, but the staffperson is the same.  And I have to believe that the same unwritten rule continues to apply: deny as many as possible to keep the statistics as low as possible.  After all, you can't be counted as homeless if you aren't in a shelter or motel.

This morning I was taking the bicycling Students for a Just and Stable future  over to meet the youth-run Gardening the Community folks (they deserve their own post). I hadn't even had a chance to ask Arise organizer Liz if she'd heard about these two families when a woman from an agency I shall not name stopped at Arise and began to tell Liz there were now three or four other families, also denied shelter, who had joined the first two families.  The woman took our business card and a few flyers back down to  Liberty St.  and most of us left for the garden.  Half an hour later, Liz stopped at the garden, snatched up Dave and Louis, two of our members, and headed down to Welfare.

For the next several hours, Liz advocated, Dave consoled, Louis translated.  The DCHD staffperson came out of her office to tell the families that if they didn't leave right now, she was calling the police and then DCF to come and take their children.  Liz spoke to Western Mass legal Services three times and Gerry McCafferty at the Office for Housing to let her know what was happening.

"I'm calling because you said you would not let any family sleep out on the street," Liz said.

"Let me make some calls," Gerry said.

Liz came back at the office to make more calls, and  I answered the phone when Marsha Crutchfield from HAP called.  She asked how I was and I launched into telling her about the homeless families.  But it turned out she was actually calling to say that HAP would put families up for the night at a motel, and the agency was sending a van to welfare to pick them up!  Liz went back down to welfare to let the families know the good news.  At the end of a long day she went home, only to get a call from the father of one of the families-- the motel wanted a $20 deposit on each room and HAP wouldn't pay.  So she went back down to Welfare and paid the deposit.

At least one poor family was lost in the shuffle.  Yesterday some of our members made contact with a woman who needed help. She come up to the office this morning-- a Puerto Rican woman who may have been only in her fifties was raising her three grandchildren and had become homeless.  She'd already been to Welfare once and been told she wasn't eligible for assistance.I asked if they'd let her fill out an application for Emergency Assistance and she said no.  I told her to go back down to the office and insist she be allowed to apply.  Apparently she did, was denied again, and left in tears before anybody noticed.  I hope she's OK; I hope she comes back.

Six years ago, and for nearly two years, Arise had rented two, three bedroom apartments for families in exactly this predicament.  We ran it until we couldn't afford it anymore, until it broke us, really-- we wound up having to give up our office and operated out of people's houses for a year.  But hey-- we're not service providers, we're organizers.  Other agencies get the big bucks to provide shelter  and it's our job to make sure they do it.

We hear there's a big meeting tomorrow with DCHD, HAP and the City of Springfield.  We had better be invited.  Enough of this baloney.  Enough of the indifference, the threats and the cruelty that had children quaking in fear and parents in despair.  Enough.


Graphic: Banksey, from Chris Dever's photostream at Flickr.

Chris Asselin doesn't deserve public office

I didn't think I'd be writing about former state rep and convicted felon Christopher Asselin on my blog quite as soon as today, but two events this weekend made me change my mind.

On Friday, a Facebook friend posted a question on his page,  asking if an "honest mistake" is deserving of latitude if an individual's ethics are in question.  I wrote back, aiming for a little humor :Sure, unless it's Chris Asselin!  Later, I noticed my comment had been removed, and when I checked my friend's friends, sure enough, Chris was among them.

Then, yesterday, I was dress-shopping at the Goodwill on Boston Rd. when I heard a voice saying, "OK, guys, that's enough, time to move on."  Something made me look up-- and it was Chris Asselin!  Now, I've met Chris exactly once in my life, when I paid him a legislative visit, and I doubt he knew who I was, but he said "Hello." and I said hello back.  I don't like to be rude to someone in front of children.

But I feel  obliged to say exactly what I think about Chris Asselin's attempt to regain his state representative seat.

He's an idiot!   He's crazy!  What a jerk!  What an asshole!  He's learned NOTHING!  I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him!

There, now that I have that out of my system, let me explain my thinking.

The Asselin family (those who were charged and convicted) stole from every taxpayer in the city, more than $4 million, if you put it all together, but, in particular, they stole from  poor people, from those who suffer the most and have the least to give.  They lived high on the hog, with nice houses in Springfield and a vacation home on Cape Cod.  If anyone needs a reminder, see this history of corruption in Springfield, which includes the indictment of nine members of the Asselin family.

Now Chris may not be responsible for everything other family members did--  Daddy certainly set a poor example-- but this is what he did admit to: 

As part of a plea deal, Christopher Asselin admitted accepting up to $120,000 in bribes from authority contractors funneled through his father – including improvements to his Springfield home and a swimming pool. He also admitted the same contractors made illegal campaign contributions and financed flyers, signs and fund-raisers  (Emphasis mine.)  Masslive.

Folks who know me are aware that I'm not particularly pro-incarceration, and I wish judges were allowed more creativity in sentencing.  I'd have preferred the judge had sentenced Chris to live in a half-way house for 18 months, with his days spent serving the poor (instead of costing the taxpayers even MORE money).  Chris could have worked third shift at the Worthington St. Shelter, served meals at Loaves and Fishes, helped prepare the bodies of the indigent for burial, washed floors at Arise or the Open Pantry-- you get the idea.That's not what happened, of course, but at least he served his time.

I also support ex-felons' right to vote-- it's a way to share in the responsibility of being a member of society-- BUT-- anyone who has ever been convicted of election fraud in any form should never be allowed to seek public office again.  Is there any one of our current state legislators who'd be willing to introduce such a law?

 How pathetic.  I don't like criticizing people personally and don't usually feel the need to do so.  Chris says he wants a second chance and he deserves one-- but not a second chance at political office, especially when illegal campaign contributions helped him win his first state representative seat.  Please, Chris, do yourself, your family and the residents of Springfield a favor and withdraw from the race.  I don't know in what direction your redemption lies, but it is not toward Boston.  Please.

The Anti-War Movement is Dead

Chris hedges at Truthdig has an important article-- not just about the anti-war movement-- but also the privatization of the federal government.  It's not good news, but it's news we've got to know.


As an anti-poverty activist, the following paragraph jumped out at me:

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

(Congratulations, by the way, to Truthdig for winning the Webby award for best political blog.)

To kill a bee

This afternoon I was standing by the sunny back door of Arise for Social Justice when a fat bumblebee hovered briefly by me and contemplated the door.

"Nothing you want in there," I said, but the bee proceeded  to enter and I followed behind, hoping to move it back toward the open door, but no-- the bee continued its journey into the main room.  I walked ahead, announcing, in a calm voice, that a bee had entered the room.

One guy immediately expressed great physical alarm, flinching, flailing his arms and jumping around.

"Oh, are you allergic?" I said.

"No, no, just don't want to get stung."

"It won't sting you," I said.

Another guy grabbed a newspaper, rolled it up and went bee stalking.  I continued to the front door, where the bee seemed to be headed, but before I got it open, my brave friend swatted the bee against a window and killed it dead.

"Why did you do that?" I said.  "We need bees, bees are good."

"Then why do they always try to sting you?" a woman asked.

"They don't try to sting you, if they sting you, they die, bees are in trouble right now, we need them to pollinate our food."  Now came the blank looks:  Pollinate?  Bees?  Food? As if none of these things have anything do to with each other.  And of course for many people, they don't.

Coriander and coconut, cocoa and pumpkin, avocado and apricot, almond and cherry: we'd have none of these without our poor, stressed bees.

It was the wrong moment for a nature lesson at Arise-- didn't want to make folks feel either cowardly or cruel-- but the huge gap between our sense of ourselves and our relation to the rest of the world has been much on my mind.  If we can't find a way to close this gap, we're not long for this world-- or is it that the world is not long for us?


Now, you might think this kind of conceptual gap is widest among  poor or uneducated city people, but that would be a mistake.   I know many people who care deeply about the environment but who treat it as a thing in itself,  without making deep connections to human life.  They may know enough about industrial agriculture to want to eat well, and enough about corporations to know how outgunned we are, but they see human beings  as observers of the equation, not as participants unless to do damage.  But as Merry said to Treebeard, "You're part of this world, aren't you?"

Layer this on top of the genuine class differences between the lovers of the environment and the dwellers of the inner city.  Sometimes I feel like I'm standing astride a chasm.

I'm generalizing madly, of course.  Many people do get it-- just not enough, nowhere near, not if we're to have a chance.  And that's why I'm a community organizer, not a policy person, though God knows we need them..  We're not going to be able to save this planet, and ourselves on it, until most of us understand that humans and the environment are not just connected, but  inseparable.  Only then will we be willing to fight for our lives.

 Photo from petrichor's photostream at Flickr.

If you intended to murder an infant

If you intended to murder an infant and you had roughly three hours in which to accomplish that deed, what method would you choose?

(I can barely stand to read these words as I write them.)

Would you decide to plunge the infant into cold water, set him naked in front of an air conditioner and then hope for the best?

I'm writing, of course, about the dreadful death of a six week old baby in West Springfield's Clarion Motel in the first hours after midnight on Sunday.

According to MassLive, West Springfield police received a call from the infant's mother, 22 year old Erica Luce, requesting assistance, about 3 am. The baby was taken by ambulance to Baystate Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

The mother told WWLP she had been visiting a next door neighbor while her three year old son and infant son slept, checking on them every fifteen minutes, but then she dropped off to sleep in her friend's room, awakening with a bad feeling. that she found her baby naked, wet and in front of the air conditioner.

So why am I writing this post?  I'm writing this in part because of a conversation my daughter and I had yesterday afternoon about this baby's death..  I'd said that something about the situation just didn't feel right,  but that I probably wouldn't write about it because I didn't know enough.  She'd said, Why not?  It doesn't stop you from writing about the cops when you think that something doesn't seem right.  And she was completely on target.


A few weeks ago, I wrote the following:  I know from experience how hard it can be to criticize one of "your own kind."  You already know there's a set of stereotypes that will instantly kick into play and which will go far beyond the specific person to castigate an entire group.  And you already know too much about how hard life can be for that kind of person, and that very  few people who haven't lived that life will be capable of  taking that into consideration.

Sure enough, much of the comments on the news story about this baby's death-- I don't even know the poor baby's name-- have been drawn from the stereotypes people have about welfare, single mothers and poverty.

So let me say some of what I know-- some from my own experience and some from years of observation-- no, that's not the right word, let's say thirty years of relationships with other poor, single mothers on welfare.

Tolstoy said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way but I've found there's much that ties us together.  So I will generalize, knowing there are exceptions, and also leaving out whole categories of families on welfare such as those for whom relying on public assistance comes after a long fall from the working or middle class (and yes, there are a lot of them).  I am deliberately writing about the mothers on welfare that seem to most closely fit the stereotypes. 

Almost every girl and young woman who has an unplanned pregnancy, or a pregnancy without a solid plan for the future,  lacks a deep sense of self-worth.  We think we know what we're doing but we don't.  Still, most of us are ready to make the best of the situation, and most of us have grand plans for our children's lives, and how they'll be different from our own.

But it's hard, harder than we'd ever guess.  It shouldn't be impossible to raise children well in a single parent household and mostly the problem comes down to money.  The level of economic insecurity that comes with living on welfare is almost impossible to conceive-- housing always at risk, utility shut-offs looming, the constant and energy-sapping tension that comes from not knowing the face of the next disaster waiting around the corner.

Having more children usually makes things much worse.  But a second pregnancy comes along because we think we've found a relationship that will last until our children are grown up and can fend for themselves.  And nine times out of ten, we're wrong.

So getting a good job and getting off welfare is what makes the most sense, right?  But here's what I've seen in the last thirty years and every reader knows this is true: there are just fewer and fewer good jobs out there.  As a young mother, I worked in two factories; they are long closed.  I worked in two bookstores; now we don't have a single bookstore in the city.  I have aunts that worked at Forbes & Wallace selling gloves and hats and actually retired from there.

Still, the vast majority of mothers on welfare will eventually enter the workforce.  Welfare reform has "worked," if you want to call it that.  In 1997 Massachusetts had a 3.2% unemployment rate and a welfare caseload of  80,000; the monthly cash assistance for a family of three was $579.  Now, in January 2010,  we have an unemployment rate of 9.4% (or 17.2%, if you go by the "underemployment" rate) a welfare caseload of 50,500 families; the monthly cash assistance for a family of three is $618!   (That's less than a 7% increase in 13 years.)  Where is everyone, you might ask, if they're not on welfare and not working?  But maybe you really don't want to know about the kind of life that goes with the poverty they're experiencing.

Some mothers find alternatives to welfare because they have a child with a disability.  The vast majority of these disabilities are real  but there are also those parents will grasp at any straw to find a way to have income.  Maybe they're pushed by their kid's school into complicity with pathologizing their children.  Maybe they willingly and with relief accept some explanation for their children's behavior  because without that explanation, they feel like failures even more than they do already. 

Getting an education can really help a single mom leave welfare-- but childcare is hard to come by, transportation costs money, and a sick kid can throw everything into chaos.  And there still have to be jobs available at the end of the process.  Just how many cosmetologists do we need, anyway?.

There is no room here to make a summary of all the other ills that can affect poor families, and many of those ills, like domestic violence and addiction, cut across all class lines.  It's just if you're a poor single mom, it's like being hit when you're already down.

I can hear the voices now:  Throw them off!  Make them self-reliant!  But we're not exactly talking about the pioneer days, with wagon trains,  homesteading and subsistence farming.  We have to fit into the structure that already exists.

And this is where I feel like throwing up my hands because we are so completely going in the wrong direction.  According to Webster's, a society is " a highly structured system of human organization for large-scale community living that normally furnishes protection, continuity, security, and a national identity for its members."  Society has to work for most of us-- the regular people with regular lives who deserve to be able to get by.  Instead more and more of us are being left behind.

Some will call my attempt to place welfare moms in a larger context the same as making excuses for them. I would never deny the power of an individual to change her whole family's life for the better, because it happens every day.But why do we have to build our lives in the heart of a hurricane?

Photos from Gabba Gabba Hey!'s photostream at Flickr.,House Of Sims' photostream

"Begging" online-- what's left after more homeless cuts?

Driving through the South End yesterday,  I noticed that the can recycling center on Main St. is closed.  How far away do people with shopping carts have to go now to redeem their bottles?  It's funny that no matter how poor the average person may feel, he doesn't feel poor enough to keep from tossing that can in the trash.  So literally, one man's trash becomes another man's treasure.

Earlier this week the Boston Globe's David Abel wrote an article on the phenomenon of "online begging," where homeless people-- and others--  ask for donations.  There are definitely some advantages for the potential giver-- you do it on your own time, not under the pressure of a personal "ask" on the street, and if the person doing the asking actually has a blog, you get a chance to know a little about a person before you decide.  I've given a little bit this way-- not a lot, but probably  a larger amount than if I were digging in my pocket for spare change.  Of course, you can still be scammed.

So let's talk about scammers a little bit.

There are scammers like the guy who approached me in a parking lot last summer, begging for four bucks to take a bus back to Greenfield for a job interview.  I happened to stop at the same store the next day and he was still there, begging for another four bucks for the very same reason!  (I had a few choice comments.)  Then there are scammers who steal your identity and run up your bills-- truly among the evil, if you ask me.
Some get caught, most don't, but what they do is against the law.

But to be a really big scammer, you have to work on Wall St.  There, you can be the giant puppermaster and juggler.  You can play with derivatives, which are harder to understand than the Standard Model of quantum physics and which are tied to nothing of tangible value at all, and if you start dropping your balls, then 300 million people become your victims-- and that's just in this country.  We lose our jobs, we lose our homes and retirement savings, or, if we have none of these things in the first place, we lose those few social services and subsidies that help us survive and maybe offer a bit of hope for the future.

Of course when we have less income, there's less tax revenue, and then mayors and governors like Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick start making budget cuts.  Every one of the cuts that Patrick is making are going to hurt real people.  One thousand people who had a job today with the Commonwealth won't have that job tomorrow. I know the prescription drug program for low-income seniors has been cut once again.  You name it, the cuts are there.

But the cuts that really get me are the disproportional share of cutt to homeless shelter and services.

Thanks to the recession, the number of homeless families in Massachusetts has doubled in one year to more than 3,000.  Every shelter for single people is full and  the Governor is cutting $2.9 million from the $36.6 million Homeless Individual Assistance Account, Line 7004-0102, putting 500 shelter beds across the state in jeopardy.  Cities and towns take one step forward in their plans to get homeless people off the streets and out of the shelters, and then are forced to take two steps back.

The Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless is assessing these cuts right now and will be public soon with action steps.  Meanwhile, if you're a still-housed regular person, I hope you think twice about repeating the "Get a job" mantra when you start to sense there are more homeless people ion the street than last year.  Just be glad it's not you, and if you can spare any change, don't stop yourself.