Colorado: It is time for a Bill of Rights for the Quality of Life of Vulnerable Citizens Having No Where to Rest

Quality of Life: The legislature may guarantee it of the poor too

January 7, 2013

OPINION By STEW JENKINS

“The inalienable right to life and liberty. So simply stated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, would be guaranteed to desperately impoverished Californians by proposed amendments to multiple statutes if the “Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights and Fairness Act”, Assembly Bill 5, is adopted.

Who would have thought in California that a statute would be needed to open public places, public parking lots, sidewalks, parks and streets to permit people to move, use, and innocently rest without being subjected to local criminal ordinances and police harassment?

Who would have thought that Cities would make it a crime to give or share food in a public place with a poor person, and that a State Statute would be necessary to protect your right to feed a needy neighbor. But in the second decade of the 21st Century, that is exactly what Cities like San Luis Obispo have triggered Assembly member Tom Ammiano propose. His Assembly Bill 5 would supersede local ordinances like those adopted by San Luis Obispo, and many other California Cities, that target the poor forced to shelter under bridges and in their vehicles.

To illustrate the need, Ammiano’s bill starts by setting out findings on the tragic history of local California communities using “ugly laws” (1867), “anti-Okie laws” (1937), “sundown laws” (abolished in 1968), “vagrancy laws” (revise in 1961, and struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983), and now “quality of life” and “civil sidewalk” ordinances used to force homeless people to flee local jurisdictions and impose de facto segregation against poor people. These local ordinances, Ammiano says, “tend to condemn large groups of inhabitants to dwell in segregated districts or under depressed living conditions that result in crowded, unsanitary, substandard, and unhealthful accommodations [which] result in criminalization of homeless persons who choose not to migrate [out of the towns seeking to exclude them].”

Simple things are proposed in the Act to keep local governments from targeting poor people, guaranteeing the right to use public restrooms and public showers at all times, the right to occupy, rest and use a vehicle that is legally parked, the right of the individual to decide whether or not to enter a public or private shelters, and the right to vote and to enroll children in public schools.

Ammiano’s proposed AB 5 clarifies that no homeless person may be denied equal access to benefits administered or funded by any agency that receives financial assistance from the state. And finally, his Bill proposes state funding of community compliance, and of community construction/acquisition of housing to raise the “quality of life” of the poorest among us.

Assembly Bill 5 may benefit from some minor amendments in committee, but it is a comprehensive way to return California to being a leader in human rights for all. Ammiano deserves support to get AB 5 passed, and signed by the Governor.”

Stew Jenkins is a San Luis Obispo based attorney known for his civil rights cases.

Homeless and Poverty in Canada from “thehub@edu.yorku.ca”

 

“Yukon Government Releases Poverty Reduction Strategy”

“A Better Yukon for All, the Government of Yukon’s Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Strategy
Government of Yukon

A strategy to change how government does business to support social inclusion and poverty reduction was released today by Health and Social Services Minister Doug Graham.

“This strategy will help government respond to the needs of Yukon’s vulnerable citizens by improving government programs and services and making them more accessible,” Graham said. “Ultimately, it’s about removing barriers that prevent people from having a better life.”

Continue reading

REPORTS 
Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy 2012 Annual Report
In its fourth year, the Poverty Reduction Strategy continues to make a real difference in the lives of children, youth and families from low-income backgrounds in Ontario.
Government of Ontario

Hunger Count 2012 Alberta Provincial Report
Though the provincial economy is in relatively good shape, Albertans faces a number of challenges including a meagre minimum wage, rising inflation, and a shortage of affordable housing.
Alberta Food Bank Network Association

Green and Affordable Housing in Canada – Research Summary
This research can be used to attract further government investment for energy efficient renovations in social housing. It signals an emerging transformation in housing and energy policy, where green and affordable housing can be seen as a proven, cost-effective approach to creating healthy, vibrant communities. 
Homeless Hub

JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Is work good for you?” Does paid employment produce positive social capital returns for people with severe and enduring mental health conditions? 
by Dominy, Martin; Hayward-Butcher, Toby
This paper seeks to examine whether paid employment produces positive social capital returns for people with severe and enduring mental health needs. 
Mental Health and Social Inclusion

From gatekeeper to friend and back again: embracing the world of the street drug user
by Briggs, Daniel
The main aim of this article is to provide an account of how gatekeeper field relations are developed and experienced in the context of researching street drug users. 
Drugs and Alcohol Today

Early Reading Skills & Academic Achievement Trajectories of Students Facing Poverty, Homelessness, and High Residential Mobility 
Herbers, J. E; Cutuli, J. J; Supkoff, L. M; et al.
Results underscore the early emergence and persistence of achievement gaps related to poverty, the high and accumulating risk for high residential mobility students, and the significance of oral reading in first grade as both an early indicator of risk and a potential protective factor.”
Educational Researcher

Memorial Service for Those Who Died Who Had No Where to Stay

Throughout the land, across the world, throughout history unto the beginning to the end we raise our torch to those who cry out in anguish, fear and turmoil that here we will remember we will rise holding hands ring out our hands covet the memory of our love for one another by ushering in this season with expectation that there will be a place in a manger for all of the citizens throughout through and through to be safe sound missed praised spill tears for kiss wash bless

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless will be hosting the 26th annual Homeless Persons’ Memorial Vigil next Wednesday, December 19th on the steps of the Denver City and County Building at 5:30 p.m. We sincerely hope you will be able to join us.

 

This is just a friendly reminder to assist us with identifying those that died this year by completing the form below.

 

If you haven’t done so already, please use the link to the form below to submit information by Monday, December 17th:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GN5VVZB

 

 

 

 

Homeless Persons Memorial Vigil 2012

Speaker’s Program Notes – DRAFT

 

Date:                           December 19, 2012

Location:                     DenverCity and CountyBuilding, 1437 Bannock Street

Time:                           5:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.

Contacts:                     BJ Iacino (303) 285-5223 – office; (720) 937-2728 – cell

                                    Meg Costello (303) 285-5220 – office; (303) 589-3158 – cell

 

Schedule

 

4:00                             City crew sets-up staging area and sound – Meg arrives.

4:30                             Rev Cynthia & Freddy Rodriguez arrive to rehearse.

                                    BJ arrives.

4:45                             Refreshments set up; Christmas lights are off.

4:45                             All volunteers in place. Materials/candles etc set up.

5:00                             Blazen Lights arrives and sets out switch for building lights.

 

5:15-5:25 p.m.                        John, Randle & Mayor Hancock arrive.

 

5:00 p.m.                     Freddy Rodriguez begins music

 

5:30 p.m.                     (1)  BJ Begins Program, Introduces Cynthia

 

                                    (2)  Cynthia sings “God will take care of you…”

                                    (3)  Cynthia delivers prayer.

 

5:40  p.m.                    (4)  John Parvensky Speaks

• Welcome.
• Background and purpose of the Vigil.
• John Introduces Mayor Michael B. Hancock

 

5:45 p.m.                     (5)  Mayor Hancock Speaks.

 

5:48 p.m.                     (6) Randle reads poem

 

5:50 p.m.                     (7) Cynthia sings “Amazing Grace”

 

5:55 p.m.                     (8)  John announces start of name reading ceremony, turns program over to Mayor Hancock to begin reading the names.

Audience response following each name is “We will remember.”

Freddy hits triangle after each name…

 

                                    (9)  Mayor Hancock Reads

Reads x names

 

                                    (10) Randle Loeb Reads

Reads x names

 

.                       (11)  Cynthia James Reads

Reads x names

 

                                    (12)  John Parvensky Speaks

• Reads x names, plus late entries
• Asks for names from attendees
• Concludes the reading of the names

 

6:10 p.m.                     (13)  Cynthia Sings “Blessed Always”

• Program concludes.

 

                                    BJ turns on lights.

Press availability with John and the Mayor, etc.

 

“Once in a Lifetime” – Talking Heads – Veteran’s Crisis Line – Suicide Life Ring

U.S.  New York Times May 16, 2013 THE HARD ROAD BACK Baffling Rise in Suicides Plagues U.S. Military By JAMES DAO and ANDREW W. LEHREN Of the crises facing American troops today, suicide ranks among the most emotionally wrenching – and baffling.  Video: Living in Limbo | Graphic: A Rise in Military Suicides  In Calculation of Military Rates, the Numbers Are Not All Straightforward  Lens Blog: Still Shooting After the End of War  More Multimedia Features in This Series

 

 

Avalanche of Intention

AFAREWELLLETTER.pps 2531K   View   Download

Gabriel Marquez “Gabo”

a collection of love beads

like this

right now–Let’s start an intention avalanche.We all need positive intentions right now.If I don’t see your name, I’ll understand. May I ask my “FB Family,”wherever you might be, to kindly copy, paste, and share this status to give a moment of support to all those who have family problems; health struggles, job issues, worries of any kind and…just need to know that someone cares.Do it for all of us for nobody is immune.I hope to see this on the walls of all my friends just for moral support.I know some will!!

I did it for a friend and you can too.

Share some faith, love, and spiritual healing for all in need.

Here you go!

Copied from my dear friend Robin, and for all of those who we touch……………………………………

Once In a Lifetime

We’re All Superfluous: We Take Great Pride in Our Personal Matters  Representing a Make Believe World

More than Impermanence, more than fragile nature of human behavior our lives are staked to a myth of vital importance. We see through kaleidoscopic glasses, preening our feathers, believing the air that we exhale is of utmost importance. In fact, the opposite of this is evident. We serve this world. We are  of modest significance no matter what we have agreed to do and how we live our lavish existence. We are here a brief, fragile moment.  We have no more importance than a flea riding in the great forest of the night on the back of a mongrel. We’re fortunate that we have this moment to itch rising to the make our rounds.

What drives this fuse, this stem, this implant on our skin and on peripheries of  this world?  This is not our beautiful life.  This is not our beautiful car.  This is not our beautiful family, this is not our beautiful life……………..

“Once In a Lifetime”  - Talking Heads

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful
wife
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money‘s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…

Water dissolving…and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Carry the water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?…Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
MY GOD!…WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…”

“ONCE IN A LIFETIME,”  we are thrust into this and we have to make the best of wherever we land.  It is our fault that we don’t have this or that………………

It is superfluous to claim any adulation or finite responsibility  …………….. we serve in this altogether, at once, forever more.

Homeless camping to resume at Boulder’s Har Hashem – Boulder Daily Camera

http://www.dailycamera.com

Boulder officials and Congregation Har Hashem have reached an agreement that will allow some homeless people to continue camping at the synagogue at 3950 Baseline Road.

 

 yes, but faith groups have this potential by right! In this city for example if all religious based programs housed up to 8 they could do this permanently everywhere. It is a separation of church and state and it is silly that religious orders do not take full advantage of their ability to provide refuge and sanctuary everywhere THERE would certainly never ever again be a homeless child, family, veteran and we would not even need a VI study!

We cannot escape the reality that our lives mean nothing more than a flicker of a candle, blown out in a gasp, an uttered draft of air escaping.

A candle goes out, a siren mourns a loss, a bird swiftly glides through the early morning fog, a person stretches in bed, a fantasy emerges that we are all coming here from a place of special prominence when we arrive our cry awakens deaf ears

turning taciturn forbidding stare we are thrust into this world without a thought; with this objective force we depart. Our breath gone out. Our bodies whittled bones. Our remnant nothing more than fungi poking through the membrane into this air.

“What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.

Lord, we don’t need another mountain,
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb,
There are oceans and rivers enough to cross,
Enough to last ’til the end of time.

What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.

Lord, we don’t need another meadow,
There are cornfields and wheatfields enough to grow,
There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine,
Oh listen Lord, if you want to know…oh…

What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some oh but just for every, every, everyone.

What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love.
What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love.
What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love.“

What the world needs now, is love, sweet love, is love sweet love,  the world needs now not just for some but for everyone  is not a little but a lot of love somehow.  What the world needs now is a lot of love right now.

Comfrey Garden Delight

 

 

 

Time to harvest, break up and re-distribute comfrey roots far and wide throughout our forest garden and everywhere else we’re trying to get plantings and abundance started! 

Comfrey is one of our main weapons of mass (soil) production in the forest garden, drawing up minerals from deep down and creating humus wherever it goes. Also has many medicinal uses, can be made into a nutrient-rich tea for plants, and great chicken food in small amounts. Huzzah for Comfrey!

…edible forest gardening is about creating resilient, year-round food supply by gardening like a forest – every niche stacked with useful plants, from sub-soil to canopy.By focusing on perennial edibles, rather than plants that just last one season, a forest garden can build up a huge stock of different food plants that are much more resilient in bad years, and ensure that there’s always something fruiting, flowering and seeding through all seasons…Articles and resources on edible forest gardens:http://bit.ly/LWm9JN

 

Housing Is Health Care When Covering the Seasons of a Person or Family’s Lifetime

 

Western Regional Advocacy Project

McKinney-Vento Turns 25 and Homelessness Continues to Grow!

Passed in 1987, McKenny-Vento was intended to address the emergency needs of homeless people while the federal government worked to restore the funding which had been cut from HUD‘s affordable housing programs.

But it didn’t work that way. McKinney-Vento has spawned an endless array of continuum-of-care plans, 5-year plans, 10-year plans — an endless system of writing, planning, and researching which “best practices” should be used to end homelessness. At the same time, the federal government has continued to defund, dismantle, and sell-off affordable housing units, thus ensuring that more and more people become homeless. 360,000 Section 8 and 210,000 Public Housing units lost since 1995.

It is a shameful trade that robs Peter to pay Paul.

McKinney-Vento homeless assistance programs have increasingly become a catch-all system for people who were once permanently housed by mainstream federal programs such as HUD and USDA. Yet even as affordable housing has been decimated (over 800,000 units lost in 25 years), eligibility criteria for McKinney-Vento homeless assistance have been tightened.

And to add insult to injury, we are seeing a massive PR campaign by federal agencies such as HUD and the Interagency Council on Homelessness to convince everyone — or perhaps to convince themselves — that with just the right coordination, facilitation, and cooperation, they will actually end homelessness. This is self-deception. Anyone who has done the math would know. The ongoing new guidelines, new initiatives, and newly named target populations suggest that people overseeing this system clearly know it is not working.

To provide a context: in the 25 years since McKinney-Vento passed in July 1987, two major events severely impacted the numbers of poor people finding themselves homeless.

The first was the 1998 Contract with America during the Clinton Administration when the Housing Act of 1937 was changed from “remedy…acute shortage of decent, safe and sanitary dwellings” to declaring that “the federal government cannot … provide housing of every American, or even the majority of its citizens.”

The second was in 2009, the last time McKinney-Vento was reauthorized in Congress. Renamed the HEARTH Act, it instructed HUD to create a new bureaucratic definition of who is homeless. By implicitly admitting defeat that the McKinney-Vento model has any chance of stopping the growing wave of homeless people, the HEARTH act instead redefined “homelessness” out of existence for thousands of families and people without homes. A 105-page HUD memorandum describes who is homeless and establishes welfare-oriented criteria that determine who will qualify. It is particularly hard on families who live doubled up, tripled up, or in SROs.

Advocacy organizations — be they local, statewide or national — that continue to focus on McKinney-Vento will never be catalysts of the change we need. Their funding is too contingent upon being seen as legitimate by whatever administration is in power, a dependence that moves those in power even further away from the actual lives and experiences of poor and homeless people.

Consulting and research firms have probably benefited the most from McKinney-Vento funding because HUD bureaucrats like justifying their proposals by paying researchers. We need no further consulting or research to understand the direct and obvious correlation between massive affordable housing cuts since 1978, the opening of emergency shelters in the early ’80s, and the continued and growing existence of homelessness today.

In 2006 and updated in 2010, WRAP issued a carefully researched analysis on the systemic causes of homelessness called Without Housing. Other studies and research done on homelessness must have been able to gather the same information. Had they looked closely at the underlying cause-and-effect issues connected with massive numbers of people without housing, they should have been able to connect the dots. But they seem not to have looked. It’s not a difficult correlation, but the dots have been left unconnected.

We need to be honest: too many organizations and departments, in and out of government, turn away from the simple connection between the absence of affordable housing (cause) and the increasing numbers of homeless people (effect). No amount of coordination or redefinition is going to end homelessness. McKinney-Vento was created to address the effects of homelessness and it is time for HUD and USDA to step up and address the cause of homelessness.

If the past 25 years have taught us anything at all, it is that nothing ends homelessness like a home.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-boden/mckinneyvento-turns-25-an_b_1696426.html

 

 

 

Healthy Living Contributes to the Quality of Our Lives

We can share the world or destroy everything and thus become extinct.

We have shared the earth with the rest of the forms of life with great malevolence. Our single purpose has been greed.  We repeatedly destroyed the bio-diversity of all species and in many cases subjugated every being that we encountered with savage abuse.  We created monsters that have been steeping in the cauldron of our lives since the first steps we took three million years ago. It is time that we learned conservation and restored  and returned to a balance on earth and all the relationships of the elements of nature.  It is time for us to live simply and share.

We have the knowledge in this era to compost everything. And we will have to in order to salvage the mess we have made of the earth.

At the apex of all pollinating of flowers is the Italian Honey Bee.  Through generations of antibiotics, viruses and mites have decimated the bees around the world.  Pollination occurs  by way of other beneficial insects but none of the way we live is possible without the bee.  It is startling that the most significant organism on earth are fungi.  The hardest working insects are the bees and worms that create the capillary system of the soil and the compost.  When we have undisturbed beds the insects create a network, like a sponge or reef through which all life emerges.  

What is it that draws us toward the fillers, the empty calories, the release of hundreds of chemicals in our diets, the lack of balanced nutrition, sensible amounts, gorging and gluttony?  What are we fleeing in our appetite for junk food and in particular the ravages  of hundreds of chemicals in soda, sugars, fat, and again in the chemical composition of tobacco products?  There is a twisted  connection between our way of life and the drive that we have for perfection, for pleasing the eye and the senses.  We have lost our footing on firm ground. We need to reclaim our purpose and stop exploiting our bodies let alone the rest of the earth.

What are the alternatives between this way of life of fast foods and taking time in everything that we do?

We stand on the brink of our destruction through monopolies and megalopolis of industrial giants gleaning everything from our spirits and leaving us devoid of any sense of natural flavor, beauty and grace for thanksgiving and the harvest.  We all need to turn the soil and smell the rain percolating in our taste for simple touch.

What do we think we are getting away with by destroying the basic quality of the pyramid of relationships of food?  We have to be able to see that profits and easy ways of cutting profit margins are not a way to secure a future for our children.  We have to be able to fathom how much we are ravaging the earth and turning it into a wasteland.  We must see just as with the 1,000′s of other schemes there are for cutting corners.  We must come to our senses and persuade the leaders to protect the environment and the heavens and all there is within.

 

Many tinctures, like Osha Root and teas like sassafras come from the bark or inner bark of White Oak for an astringents and anti-inflammatory medicine.  There are many wild edibles that we have like lemon sorrel and rose hips that provide medicinal value.  Acorns were used to make a flour.  poke weed in early Spring provided an asparagus like filament before tannin acid over took the plants. Always wild mushrooms have been on the diet of foraging naturalists but there are many like Purslane that are right next door in abandoned lots.  If we study their natures  plants sustain, augment and fortify our diets providing essential minerals..

 

Growing food is both physically and spiritually nourishing.

We are all like asparagus.  We grow from fertile earth, a spring from the ground with tenderness like poke weed in the Spring.  Like the dandelions and plantain we have a moment when we are blessed with the freshness and opportunity to flourish.  All are sacred beings thrust in to the presence of life for a moment.  Let us cherish the gifts which we are bestowed and dedicate our lives to understanding living compassion and kindness.

Carrots of every color of the rainbow.  How can we be blind to the beauty and grace of nature, that all food must be raised with passion and tenderness for our spirits to soar?

From the earth we all emanate and to the earth we will all rejoin our ancestors.  The spirit transcends life but our bodies are a living organism for the fungi and for the compost worms to feast. It is a blessing to be born and die and to know that your life is returned to the source of everything, the living waters from which we emerged.

Let us rejoice in the fact that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Let us rise, let us rise together and walk out across the land sowing seeds and cultivating trust while inspiring the creative spirit of the earth. Let us rise and hold one another as we strive to include and share everything in the world.

Vulnerability Index: What is It?

People who are at risk who may die if they are untreated, and do not come inside, or stay in a safe place, where they can be stabilized.

Questions:    Each county can decide what target population they wish to address.  We ask questions about Adverse Childhood Experiences. There is a scale of tri-morbidity, that recognizes factors that can be critical to whether a person is at risk of dying.

The data received is kept by the local organization with the idea of identifying resources to house the people and provide resources locally for the care and effectively protect the individuals and families who are at risk of dying.

 

What the person who is answering the questions receives is a chance to talk about matters that are of utmost importance to their lives.  In some cases they are trained to administer the survey and are paid for their expertise.

The Metro Denver Region will conduct the survey along the Front Range.

We are interested in being a part of a process state wide to raise awareness and bring resources to places where they have no services for people living on the fringes of the community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neither Our Heritage, Nor the Privilege and Right to Possess Anything in the Universe Is Possible Anymore

 

Where do we fit in the scheme of the natural world?  What is our promise?  We are the benefactors of all that dwells within the reach of our consciousness. We are seekers of faith and beauty not permitted to dominate the landscape let alone own anything.  We have a tiny fractile of influence on the grand scheme of the creation of the world and everything that transpires.

Indeed we have no role to play other than be reverent to the creative spirit and power that we all witness. We are a “poor player who struts and frets her hour and then is heard no more.”  In this paradox even more startling and profound is the immense power that we wield in controlling and destroying everything around us.  We have immense hubris in our understanding and efforts to deaden everything we touch.

What we are required to do is stop being full of tremendous power and wealth and live in villages of community.  We must have a covenant resisting the inclination to travel across the globe, using all of the earth’s resources. It is time we considered    inevitable concerns of over population, birth control, conservation and recycling of everything, using simpler means of moving, of living together, life sharing, building structures that share resources and basic necessities.  Housing must accommodate not single persons or even families, but the universe.

 

There must be a time where we do without and live as caretakers and stewards of the earth and the surrounding universe. No more will people be permitted to make war, nor destroy the environment. No longer will we be permitted to poison the seas and foul the air.  We will not be able to travel extravagantly using fossil fuels.  Our places of work and home will be self-contained, self-sufficient and supported by simple living arrangements.  We will be responsible for everything we touch that life in all its forms be preserved.  Our religious principles must all encompass a prayer, a blessing that all has a place here.

 

We’re living as primitively and wastefully as we did during the Industrial Revolution.  What we have accomplished up to now has been driven by an economic mean of dominance and control.  The emerging economies of nations will disappear in an amalgamation with all people on earth. We will all have a responsibility to share what we have and live with sense of preserving life.

 

 

This means that no one will be alone to die on the street. No one will be at risk of dying without sanctuary.  Design and development of infra-structure of communities will principally be for the purpose of changing the way we live together.  The thought process will require us to think intimately and inclusively.

 

No one will benefit from our current model of capitalism that favors individual power and control without benefit for the commonweal.  The economy must be to scale, that creates self-sufficiency in community.  These changes will require that there is no one in jail, in parking lots that live without sanitary basic hygiene, who lives doubled up without adequate means of permanent care from neighbors, where there is no where to turn when one is ill,  disabled, in final stages of life, who is is infirm or in jeopardy.

 

Babies will be ushered into a world of safety and in which creative learning is preeminent.  Children will be raised in a spirit of citizenship and responsibility, caring for the universe in which we’re blessed to share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Need People to Stand and Deliver: Last of the 50 States in Services for People with Mental Illness \ Addictions \ Limited Housing Options 5% Rental Vacancy Rate

What is the point of a Colorado Census without options?  Who is benefiting from the survey? The VI (Vulnerability Index) is a listening and interpersonal instrument, and completely different from the scope of a survey like Point in Time. The distinction is found in the way in which the two are administered and both who and how one asks the questions

VI study (Vulnerability Index)  where constructs for care and achieving concrete solutions have not been addressed throughout Colorado’s history.

I.  Housing:   (There is none for any population, a 5% vacancy rate with few organizations  building low-income subsidized housing)

II. We’re last in the nation in the vital services of addiction and
mental health and there are no resources being targeted for this
population who are right dying on the streets.

 
III. We have plenty of data everywhere throughout the region on who we
are identifying because we already have done this study before
as part of the Housing First Collaborative straight up to the current time.
Contact Jennifer Perlman:  Jperlman@coloradocoalition.org if you’d
like more details. Her work is seminal on this subject.

 
IV.  Confidentiality has always been an issue far beyond HIPPA
regulations:  We’re always asking for answers to intrusive questions.  This survey is being characterized as”Colorado Counts,” suggesting that it is a census.  The studies that have been done have always been snap shots of deep-seeded poverty.

 Out reach workers know who are likely to die in Denver and vicinity.   Some locations have combined this with the Point in Time.  The two surveys are completely distinct because the Vulnerability study takes a long time of personal insight and conversation to administer.  It is intrusive and answers do not determine who will likely die as much whether the subject shares evidence that is counted accurately.  Over and over, the benefits analysis determination of trauma in early childhood is a painstaking and difficult assessment to administer by most people.

The second time that we went out to specifically target homeless people on the 16th Street Mall the data was used to harm people by determining numbers of homeless people from the County of Denver and the sheer numbers of people who were present.  The decision supporting the ordinance banning camping on the streets of Denver City and County and subsequently driving these people away succeeded.  There were no concrete proposals made as to what to do about these people because there is no revenue for increased care of any of the people who we surveyed.

V.  who will own this data?  will it be used by the State of Colorado,
or does local control of the information protect privacy while providing
accountability for any other organization or government entity to decry the abundance of people who are not legally residents or members of the local community?

VI.  The local Continuum of Care is going to use a selective approach to administering the Vulnerability Index. Contact Rebecca.mayer@unitedwaydenver.org for  more details.  We have new staff and limited time and ability to organize and focus on this process.  Collaborating with other entities like the Volunteers of America will be essential to making it possible to achieve success in the acquisition of data and what is done to process the information. There is also the real challenge as to who can administer the survey, recruit and train volunteers and ensure that the coordinating of the process be systematically followed in the entire region.  Certain counties may in fact, want to focus on different strategies for ending or reducing untimely deaths of vulnerable citizens.

VII.  What do homeless people gain from this except more
denials of services that are vital to their survival?  This
vulnerability study is concerned in part  with tri-morbidity?  ”When a cadaver is found and the picture is matched with the body one can then assert that the person certainly was at risk of dying.”  We have many people on the streets who understand the issues intimately with being at risk.  The nuances of their conditions and circumstances are clearly lethal.

All of the power points and analysis of people who are living with trauma will not solve their crises without concrete support.