Memoirous

“I Don’t Have To Run Anymore” – Misty’s Story My mother was a former nun. She left the convent to take care of my grandmother. All my life she has been a Christian woman, a great listener. She’s a very non-judgmental person. Every time I got in trouble she was there for me. To this day, she’s my best friend. My father worked two jobs. He provided for us and worked hard but he was an alcoholic. We didn’t see him much. My parents divorced when I was 5. As I got older, I wanted love and I went looking for it. When I reached my teens I started to drink and smoke marijuana. I was looking for affection and attention. At fifteen I became pregnant and I dropped out of high school. After I had my baby, Carlos, I got work at a local grocery store and by 16 I had my own apartment. Rent was $300 a month back then. My aunt helped with babysitting. I was 19 when I found out I was HIV positive. . . TO READ MORE CLICK HERE Cornerstone Community Outreach, the shelter where I volunteer,...

Palm Sunday signals in the liturgical calendar the tumultuous week called Holy. I say tumultuous because nothing says crazy more than a triumphal entry followed by a crucifixion. Holy Week reveals the cracks in humanity, man’s capability of othering. It is a time of turning inward and outward with terrible results. Which leads me into a review for the documentary The Overnighters . Jesse Moss and his film crew followed a local pastor around as he searched for ways to accommodate the overwhelming tide of workers flooding a small North Dakotan town during the onslaught of the oil and gas boom. One minute you are hailed as a hero for showing compassion and the next you are the sacrificial goat left out to draw flies. The congregation knows all about the Golden Rule to do unto others, but certainly not for this long or not when the sanctuary carpet is getting ruined. My favorite line was when the pastor’s wife casually comments: I can’t wait for things to go back to how they we...

I subscribe to a number of blogs, one of which is Setting Prisoners Free by Jeremy Nicholls where he writes and photojournals about the homeless in Chicago. Check it out! I will frequently re-post or share snippets from his blog. Jeremy is a case manager with Cornerstone Community Outreach ( CCO ) here in Uptown, Chicago. CCO recently has had a number of successful housing victories. The social work field is very statistic oriented. Numbers play a large part in who gets money—and outcomes—that's the lingo for what we sometimes refer to as miracles. Men and women who have been chronically without an address, living on the streets, homeless. Jeremy has tried to breakdown what’s behind this phenomena of housing some of the hardest of the hard-to-place. Though there are a number of factors he has cited one thing in particular: iPads. This from his post “Making Housing Happen” : I believe 2 tools have helped create many stories of successful movement. Firstly, carry...

Yesterday there was a march in support of the homeless and the agencies that work among marginalized populations in Uptown (Chicago). The march was called as a result of some political missteps from the ward alderman who has tried to shut down various services in the area. All in the name of “public safety.” Of course this is a euphemism for NOT IN MY BACKYARD. For those of my readers who might feel I’ve taken up too much of my memoirous blog writing about James Cappleman and the plight of ethnic/cultural diversity in Uptown—sorry. At some point art and action need to intersect. I’m passionate about many things—writing and story amongst them, and I volunteer time at a homeless shelter working with the residents on memoir, being able to tell their story. Putting all this together—I am concerned about the recent actions of the alderman that are targeting “the least of these”—remember the golden rule?—to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Since takin...

Where is He Going To Put These People? http://www.suntimes.com/news/brown/18522480-452/aldermans-reason-for-shuttering-cubicle-hotel-cock-and-bull.html A series of articles in the Chicago Sun-Times by Mark Brown So today I sat down and worked on a timeline pieced together from newspaper articles on-line mostly from last year and early this year. Cappleman Promises: a timeline 1/31/2007 before coming into office campaigned that he would fight to preserve and maintain existing “affordable” housing in the 46 th ward. 1/2012 after elected alderman, Cappleman came into office and established a “Problem Building List” targeting several SROs, a type of housing often the last stop before homelessness and shelters http://james46.org/problem-building-list/ 2/27/2013 From article by Mark Brown: I asked Cappleman if he’d worked to build any new single-room occupancy housing in his ward since taking office two years ago. The answer was no. The Chateau, 3820-3838 N...

Things I miss seeing in Uptown: Rows of posters for upcoming concerts plastered along gray, grimy walls Patients from Wilson Care spilling out in the morning in their pajamas to buy cigarettes The lady in leotards standing at the corner with her boom box, jiggling defiantly The escapee from Weiss Hospital with IV tubing poking out of his hand, his blue gown open in the back for all to see Now add to that list: The Wilson Men's Club The last of the old pay-by the night/week hotels that cater to the down-and-outers. This type of facility is by no stretch of the imagination a hotel or even a club, but offered a bed. I’ve never been inside the Wilson Men’s Club but I heard that men sleep in cages made of chicken wire. That is before there were improvements. Now I’ve heard there are walls—they just don’t go all the way down to the floor. Cubicles. I suppose it’s strange to miss seeing these things. I mean shouldn’t I be glad it’s cleaner, safer (comparably...

This is horrible. Kafkaesque. I woke up with a sudden realization—I’m not a bug. Much worse. I am middle-aged. I expected to feel this way after my parent’s death early last year. I’ve been feeling slower, not as enthusiastic about exercise—something I never went two days in a row without doing. I wouldn’t get into running shoes for anything less than 5 miles. But I suspect it wasn’t this that nudged me into melancholy. Perhaps when a friend mentioned he was having cataract surgery. What! No worries, he responded, it’s outpatient! Or when a Facebook friend from highschool announced that he was retiring from teaching at the end of the school year. Congratulations! Or that a good friend, even younger than I, was gifted with their first grandchild. Mazel tov! These are significant milemarkers. We gauge how far we’ve come and where we might be going next. Where are we going next? I think what I’m feeling is a brittleness, a great uncertainty. That what I once thoug...

Young and Homeless Craig Blankenhorn for The New York Times Missy Race, 22, and her 10-month-old son, David Martinez, are living in transitional housing. Because she is unable to afford daycare, it’s difficult for her to go on job interviews: “If I bring David with me, I know I won’t get the job because it’s unprofessional.”  By CRAIG BLANKENHORN Published: August 31, 2012 SADLY for the children across America who are homeless today, neither presidential campaign is expected to pay much attention to them, with big policy speeches or new ideas about improving their situation. Multimedia Young and Homeless There are 1.6 million homeless children in the United States. I want to be the witness to this, to provide evidence of their bleak condition. I want to speak for the victimized children of our country who aren’t even fully cognizant of their own poverty. Infants, young children and teenagers are living on the...

I work at a homeless shelter working amongst women--but every time I go there are always, especially as it is summer, swarms of children playing out front or in the lobby area. It breaks my heart. Here is a link to an article I just read at Salon: http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/how_america_became_a_country_that_lets_little_kids_go_homeless_salpart/ about kids and homelessness. Here is also a link to a video where Demarra from the shelter where I volunteer tells her story of being a homeless student: http://www.ccolife.org/?p=2919 Here are some excerpts from the Salon article: "After hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005, advocates for the homeless were horrified to find that the storms had left one in 50 American kids without a home, a record high, according to a report by the  Coalition for Family Homelessness.  But only a few years later the financial crisis outperformed nature in casting catastrophe on poor Americans. After record...

I volunteer at Cornerstone Community Outreach a homeless shelter in Chicago. I do two programs there with both the men and the women. If planned budget cuts go through there is the possibility we will love at least 58 beds from the shelter. At this point we serve at any given time 500 people daily through the shelters we staff and Leland Building, a next-step program. We house, feed, and provide clothes and other necessities in order to assist families, men, and women to get back on their feet. Here is a link to CCO Life where you can view a really sad video about what it is like to be a homeless school student. Please call these reps before 5pm today! You could simply say, “Please don’t cut homeless shelters out of the Illinois budget!” The reps know the issues and you don’t have to talk forever or sound like you know all about it. If you get voice mail leave a message. Cuts ARE happening we need to let them know that the poorest of the poor shouldn’t be losing servic...

  This is from NPR http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/13/143632180/report-homelessness-among-children-up-38-percent-since-2007 More than 1.6 million American children were homeless at some point in 2010, the nonprofit National Center on Family Homelessness reports today , adding that the number is about a 38 percent increase from 2007. The figure, which includes children under the age of 18 who are living with one or more parents or caregivers on the streets, in shared housing because of "economic hardship" and in "emergency or transitional shelters," underscores how the recession that began in late 2007 "has been a man-made disaster for vulnerable children," Ellen L. Bassuk, founder of the national center, says in a statement . She adds that: "There are more homeless children today than after the natural disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which caused historic levels of homelessness in 2006. T...