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WCH Receives Grants for Remodeling
WCH has been notified by Union Pacific Foundation, the Daniels Fund, and Cheyenne Housing
and Community Development (CDBG) that grants for remodeling have been okayed. This means that soon the remodeling
in the building at 907 Logan Avenue (the main building) will begin. A shower and laundry will be added as well as a barber shop.
The remodeling at the Richards Center, 4700 Ocean Loop, will include the remodel needed for the day care center, and moving of some
walls and doors as well as an additional storage shed and some "redoing" of the wiring and telephone lines, purchase
of new computers and upgrading to DSL from modem.
Now it may sound as though we no longer need cash donations from the community, but this is not so.
We have more expenses with the upkeep of two buildings, and the need to provide services and items needed by clients
continues and these are NOT covered in the grants.
Click here for donation form, print it up and send it in with your check.
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Workshop: Working with the Mentally Ill
On March 14, 2006 from 1:00 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. at the Richars Center, 4700 Ocean Loop, Peak Wellness Center will be
giving a workshop on Working With the Mentally Ill. This workshop is free and while primarily for those agencies working
with the homeless it is also open to others who want to learn more about working and/or living with mentally ill persons.
RSVP to Virginia at 634-8499.
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Fire Damages Homeless Outreach Center A fire early Tuesday (Feb 21, 2006) severely damaged the Grand Valley Catholic Outreach's Day Center, which provides services to the homeless.
It took firefighters about 15 minutes to control the fire after they were called about 1 a.m., Grand Junction Fire Department spokesman Mike Page said. He said there was fire damage to the kitchen and smoke damage elsewhere. The building was empty at the time.
Damage was estimated at $150,000. The fire was under investigation.
The Day Center provides phones, showers, laundry facilities and an address where the homeless can receive mail.
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Stove Going Cold at Stone Soup
By JOSIE HUANG
Portland Press Herald Writer
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
For the past eight years, lunchgoers could savor a cup of smoked sausage gumbo at Stone Soup and at the same time feel that they were giving a little something back to the community.
Soup sales funded a culinary arts program that has trained dozens of homeless and low-income individuals in Portland. Graduates credited the program with building their job skills, not to mention self-esteem and confidence.
Fans of Stone Soup, though, will have to eat elsewhere after this week. The store's operator, Preble Street, said Stone Soup no longer meets its mission and will close its stand in the Portland Public Market on Saturday.
When initial plans to turn the stand into an on-the-job training site fell through because quarters were too tight, the stand's sole purpose was to support the culinary arts program. The business doubled its sales from 2003 to 2005 after Preble Street brought on board former G.H. Bass & Co. chief executive officer Dan Reardon, but in the past year or so, sales have lagged.
"There's something wrong if the revenue source ceases to be a revenue source," said Mark Swann, executive director of Preble Street, which serves homeless teens and adults. "We couldn't make it work anymore."
Stone Soup's closure comes just weeks after the Libra Foundation revealed plans to sell its Portland real estate holdings, including the Public Market. But Swann said Preble Street's decision was made before the announcement, around New Year's Day.
Though the business is closing, Preble Street administrators say the job-training program will continue, much to the relief of Dillion Bray, one of its graduates.
After a decade of alcohol and drug abuse and living on the streets, Bray, 29, said he decided to turn his life around in 2003 by joining the 12-week program. Instructors taught him how to cook chicken, mince and dice vegetables and prepare desserts.
"It helped my self-esteem a lot and got me into socializing a little better with people," Bray said. "If I hadn't been there, I probably would have been walking around town, probably drinking."
Although he is not working in food services now, Bray said the skills he learned are giving him the confidence to pursue a General Educational Development diploma so he can go to college and become a case manager for troubled teens.
The training program will look very different from the one Bray experienced, however. Reardon, who started out as a volunteer and now serves as Preble Street's employee coordinator, said the focus will continue to shift away from culinary arts.
Starting 1 1/2 years ago, instructors cut cooking instruction to 25 percent of the time, making it possible to concentrate on "life skills" such as shopping economically and anger management.
"What was separating our clients from work was simply not culinary art skills," Reardon said.
The program has been on a hiatus for about six months, but Reardon said he hopes to see it running again by April, with the help of new partners: the Training Resource Center and Portland Public Schools' Adult Education.
While the training program experiences a rebirth, soup lovers will be mourning Stone Soup's departure. Business was brisk around noon Thursday as dozens of people stopped by to order paninis or pick from one of five soups of the day, including hot-and-sour cabbage and a ham and clam chowder.
Paul Lorenz, who works across the street at an insurance and investment office, has eaten at Stone Soup one to three times a week for the past eight years. He appreciated the fact that his money went toward a good cause, but mostly he just thought the soup was good.
"I'm going to have to really think about what I'm going to do now," Lorenz said.Staff Writer Josie Huang can be contacted at 791-6364 or at:jhuang@pressherald.com
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Jubilee Cafe Brings a Face to Lawrence Homeless
Carolyn Tharp, Kansan
They start lining up in the hallway around 6:30 a.m. Sleepy-eyed but ready for breakfast, some make small talk while others sit quietly waiting for the doors to open and veteran volunteer Clark Keffer to call, ”Good morning and welcome to the Jubilee Café.”
At 7, the crowd shuffles into the church’s dining hall. The aroma of bacon and coffee floats through the air as people find their way to tables. Regulars take their usual seats, and new guests fill the others. They come from all over the country, from Tennessee to Washington. At table 14, Louis quietly sips on his coffee and looks over the newspaper. You can’t understand Howard’s muffled slur because he’s lost most of his teeth in his old age, but it doesn’t really matter because he can’t hear you very well anyway. Bill keeps mostly to himself, but smiles at people as they pass.
Volunteers walk around with menus to take the guests’ breakfast orders. Ten minutes later the kitchen echoes with shouts of servers’ names as orders slide across the counter, ready to go to their tables. Guests munch on biscuits and gravy and apple cinnamon pancakes, and the café comes to life. A dull roar rises as hellos are shouted and the latest news is exchanged. Jay’s laugh echoes through the dining hall as he talks with his buddies about last night’s rerun of In Living Color.
These people eat together, sleep together and live together. Some aren’t very clean. Some aren’t very sane. They come from the Deep South and western Kansas, from small towns and inner cities, from broken homes and loving families. But they have one thing in common: they are homeless.
Homeless people are often invisible, says Keffer, Lawrence resident and one of the founders of the Jubilee Café, 946 Vermont St. They’re given a number and food is slopped onto their plates at a soup kitchen. They sleep on a thin mat on the floor of a gymnasium with the lights partly dimmed. They wander around town with nowhere to go and nothing to do, because there’s not anything or anyone out there for them, Keffer says. Although they live in the same city as students, faculty and people who work downtown, life on the street is a far cry from the suburbia that so many KU students know.
For those living on the street, the life seen on TV is like make-believe, Keffer says. “It seems so superficial. It’s normal life to a lot of people, but it’s still fantasy to homeless people. It’s so out there for them.”
More common than you think.
Nationally, there are approximately 3.5 million people who end up homeless at some point each year. Children make up 1.35 million of them, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, a national network of people committed to ending homelessness.
There are two kinds of homeless people: the chronically homeless and the transient homeless. It’s a fluid community, which makes it difficult to track how many homeless individuals there are in Lawrence. The City of Lawrence Practitioner’s Panel counted 211 homeless people in June 2003, a 63 percent increase from 134 in December 2001. In 2005, the Lawrence Community Shelter, 214 W. 10th St., which also offers its services to impoverished people with homes, served 424 separate individuals between July and December.
The majority of Lawrence homeless are male. A 2001 survey of 134 homeless individuals showed that 71 percent were men, according to the panel.
Raleigh Worthington, Lawrence resident, has been homeless for a little more than a year. He remembers the exact day he became homeless: Oct.. 4, 2004. After losing his job and using up his unemployment benefits from the government, Worthington found himself on the street. He now spends his days doing laundry, reading at the public library, looking for work and “dumpster-diving.” He goes around town picking up aluminum cans and other metals to recycle. Behind fraternity houses is a good place to look, he says. Worthington takes his cans to the 12th and Haskell Bargain Center, 1146 Haskell Ave., where they pay 41 cents per pound.
Worthington sleeps mostly at the Salvation Army, 946 New Hampshire St., but he also spends time “couch surfing” at friends’ homes. Every once in awhile he sleeps outside, but only by choice, he says. Sleeping outside gives him a liberating feeling and more independence than having to be inside a shelter by closing time and getting up the next morning when the staff wakes him up, Worthington says. He says that being homeless makes him feel run-down and uncomfortable.
“I feel alone a lot,” he says. “You’re surrounded by a lot of people all the time, so you’re not really lonely, but you still feel alone. You develop distrust of people and put this wall up around you.”
Winding up on the street
More than 1 percent of the U.S. population is homeless, according to the Urban Institute, an independent nonpartisan center that analyzes urban problems.
Worthington’s situation is common among the homeless population. People often become homeless after losing a job or because they’ve been unemployed for a while.
Loring Henderson, executive director of LCS, says case managers at the shelter work with homeless people to sort out their personal problems about finding a job. They work on overcoming thoughts like “my boss doesn’t like me” or “my coworkers are in a different clique that I can’t join.”
“Who knows what is going through someone’s mind who has been unemployed for a long while and is insecure about working again?” Henderson asks.
Besides unemployment, many people are homeless because of mental illness. Back at Jubilee, a man clad in protective earmuffs is talking to himself and eating breakfast. A man in a dirty, down-filled coat and silent headphones stares blankly into space. Another man tells a volunteer his newest conspiracy theory about why the governor needs to be impeached.
Approximately 23 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.
A huge percentage of the chronically homeless is mentally ill, which can make it hard to have and maintain a job, Henderson says.
Alcohol and drug addiction are also huge factors behind homelessness. Keffer, one of the founders of Jubilee Café, was homeless from 1976 to 1980. The only thing he brought back from the Vietnam War, he says, was his alcoholism.
He couldn’t hold a job and never had any money because he’d “drink it all up,” he recalls. In his drinking days, he would leave Lawrence when his relatives were in town. It was easier to be homeless some place else. He didn’t want to embarrass his family with his alcoholism, he says.
He hitchhiked from town to town, never staying anywhere more than a few days, sleeping on highway on-ramps and camping outside city limits. The longest time he ever spent in one place was a couple of weeks — maybe.
Keffler will never forget Dec. 18, 1978, he says, because it’s the day that changed his life. While driving 50 miles per hour, he slammed his motorcycle into a passing car. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. And he had been drinking.
“Everything I knew my whole life was gone — like that,” Keffer says, snapping his fingers.
He lived through the accident but no longer can use his left arm, which he now tightly straps in a sling across his chest. After 20 years of atrophy, the injured arm is significantly smaller than his right one.
After his accident, Keffer decided to get sober. The mental, physical and spiritual bankruptcy of drinking led him to recover, he says. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober since Feb. 17, 1983.
Some of the guests Keffer serves at Jubilee are sober. Others aren’t. You can smell the alcohol as they enter the dining hall, still drunk from the day before. They stumble to their chairs and drink cup after cup of coffee in a vain attempt to get sober.
Of the two shelters in Lawrence, LCS classifies as a “wet shelter,” meaning that people don’t have to be sober to sleep there. LCS provides 21 sleeping spaces, but it’s working to add 10 more, says Henderson, LCS director.
At the Salvation Army, however, the staff performs Breathalyzer tests at the door after 8 p.m. It’s not a zero-tolerance shelter though, says Mathew Faulk, case manager at the Salvation Army.
The shelter has a limit of .04 percent, which is equivalent to a few beers, Faulk says. The Salvation Army has a capacity of 85, and it usually holds about 50 people a night.
Trying to get off the street
The most difficult thing about being homeless is getting a job, says Leighton Watts, Lawrence resident. Watts, a 23-year-old Kansas City, Kan. native, spent six months at the Salvation Army while searching for a job and a home. Most job applications require an address. Homeless people don’t have one. Watts would put his Kansas City, Kan., address on job applications, and, if confronted about it, he would say he was new to town and not settled yet. Most employers want people to already be self-sufficient, Keffer says. Seeing a question for a driver’s license or telephone number may not seem like a big deal, but, to homeless people, it can be discouraging. They don’t have anything to fill in the blank.
Worthington has worked construction, at the K-Mart distribution center and other odd jobs, but none of them were permanent. In fact, he has shuffled through so many jobs that he talks about losing work like it’s a regular event. He casually describes his last job, where he poured cement. He thought it was stable. “But then,” he adds, “I guess it wasn’t.”
“After a while, you come to learn that nothing is permanent,” Worthington says. “But if you have a job, you can at least look down the tunnel and see the light. You may not be able to get down there yet, but you know you can continue to work and sustain yourself.”
Most jobs available to homeless people are short-term, pick-up jobs, Henderson says. Employers call LCS for day-job arrangements, which are mostly manual labor tasks like raking leaves, cleaning out old homes or moving and lifting.
The National Coalition for the Homeless calls these types of arrangements “non-standard work.” Approximately 30 percent of workers in 1997 had non-standard jobs, which typically offer low wages and few benefits, NCH says. For people like Worthington, there aren’t many other options.
Watts says he had an advantage when looking for a job because people often didn’t realize he was homeless because of the way he dressed. He carries a toothbrush in his pocket, keeps himself clean and doesn’t wear the same clothes two days in a row. He has worked as a line server in Oliver Hall, a telemarketer, a waiter and he now washes dishes at the Eldridge Hotel.
But getting a job doesn’t guarantee a place to live, Watts says. In August 2004, he got an apartment with a roommate but found himself back at the Salvation Army after he and his roommate lost their jobs.
He now has an apartment of his own and has sustained himself for about seven months, but he talks about being homeless as if it’s still a possibility. He says he bought a cell phone to keep in contact with friends and family, especially in case he winds up homeless again.
Don’t break the chain
Keffer believes in a strong sense of community. In 1994, he helped found the Jubilee Café as a way to give back, and he’s been helping ever since.
“We’re like a chain. You’re only as strong as your weakest link. Our society is only as strong as our poorest member.”
As breakfast winds down at Jubilee, Michael finishes his meal and sits behind the piano. He plays everything from Mozart’s “Sonata in A Major” to Schroeder’s Charlie Brown piano solo. As the music sounds, Louis peers into the kitchen to see if there’s any bacon left, the crispy kind that he loves.
It’s 8 a.m., only an hour after everyone rolled into the dining hall, and they start packing up their stuff — for many, pretty much everything they own. Some grab a to-go box of food to take to a friend who was too sick to come this morning or just to have something to eat later in the day.
Bill talks with a student volunteer about Costa Rica and traveling. Jay sips on yet another cup of orange juice, at home, at least for a little while, at a table with his buddies.
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Effort Aims at Reopening Cafe That Aided Homeless
By Sharon Pian Chan
Seattle Times staff reporter
When the Boomtown Cafe in downtown Seattle shut down last year, the homeless lost more than a hot meal. They lost a moment in their day when they felt normal.
They got to choose what they wanted to eat. They were served at a table. People looked them in the eye.
After going bust last year for the second time, Boomtown Cafe is again struggling to open its doors. The cafe was an institution among the homeless and low-income population.
"People got together there to get through their day," said Doug McKeehen, who credits a plate of Boomtown pancakes with giving him the push to get off the streets. He said the closure was "devastating" to the homeless community.
Daniel Lieberman, interim executive director for the cafe, said he hopes to raise enough money in the next two to three months to start up again.
The cafe served more than food, he says. It served dignity.
Everyone paid, whether by pulling out cash or wiping up tables. In exchange, they were treated like customers at a normal restaurant.
"The cafe was as dignified, and people were treated with as much dignity as we could afford," Lieberman said.
When the cafe opened in 1999, the founders thought it would be a place where customers would pay what they could — those who could afford to would pay and donate money beyond the cost of the $1 to $2 meals; those who couldn't would work in the cafe for meal credits.
But the demand from homeless and low-income diners crowded out customers who could pay, Lieberman said. The cafe could not cover its costs.
According to Lieberman, the name came from The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's book about the Great Depression, and the tech boom that fueled Seattle's economy at the end of the last century.
The cafe shut down the first time in 2000. A few months later it reopened but continued to face the same problems: It was giving away more than it could afford. By last year, Boomtown was serving as many as 800 meals a day, 80 to 90 percent for bartered labor.
Lieberman came on the job in January last year and knew the cafe, at 513 Third Ave., was in trouble. In July, Boomtown served its last meal.
The board of directors was tired, said Craig Darling, executive director of Companis, a nonprofit that provides professional services to nonprofit agencies such as Boomtown.
"Boomtown needed new, fresh blood on the board and new management," Darling said. "They also needed to be seriously called to raise money from the community."
Since last year, most of the board members have been replaced. Lieberman has also revitalized fundraising, organizing two dinners a month that feature guest chefs. Last week, John Platt from St. Clouds restaurant hosted a meal there.
Lieberman and the board have raised $100,000, two-thirds of their goal. The board is still weighing how to keep the cafe afloat over the long term. Ongoing fundraisers and limiting the number of meals the cafe serves are a couple of possibilities.
"We can be open almost right now, but we want to guarantee that we have sustainability," said Ron Johnson, who has served on the board for two years. "I don't want to be a part of reopening [only] to close again."
Johnson first discovered Boomtown when he was homeless. Sitting in the cafe, he looked around, listened to a guy on the piano and saw people "halfway feeling kind of normal."
"While you're sitting there, you're not just getting warm food in your belly, your mind is somewhat kind of relaxed," he said.
Johnson went back to school and is now working at a software company on the Eastside.
Every time he goes downtown, he says, people ask him when Boomtown is going to open.
"This has to be done right," Johnson said. "It's too important of a mission to not do it right."
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Homeless Coalition Calls for Boycott of Date Movie
BY JENNIFER LEBOVICH
Miami Herald
Homeless coalition calls for boycott of Date Movie over ''bum fight'' scene
Nearly two dozen people gathered at a Hollywood theater this afternoon to protest the recently released flick Date Movie.
The National Coalition for the Homeless is calling for a boycott of the film because of a scene where a girl yells ''Bum fight'' and her and her boyfriend proceed to beat a homeless man, according to protest organizers.
The scene reminded some of the recent beatings of three Broward County homeless men in the early morning hours of Jan. 12.
''We were concerned,'' said Sean Cononie, director of South Florida Coalition for the Homeless. ``Usually people in Hollywood are quite compassionate. ... So we thought that maybe since these homeless people being beaten to death was on the national level, we hoped these producers would not have put it in the movie.''
The placard-carrying protesters gathered near the Regal Oakwood 18.
Three teens -- William Ammons and Brian Hooks, both 18, and Tom Daugherty, 17 -- have been arrested and charged in the beatings of the homeless men.
Norris Gaynor, 45, was beaten to death on a Fort Lauderdale park bench.
Jacques Pierre, 58, and Raymond Perez, 49, who were also beaten that night, survived the attacks.
The homeless advocates want that part of the movie to be pulled or for a public service announcement to appear at the beginning of the movie so people understand ''they shouldn't go picking on homeless people,'' Cononie said.
Officials from 20th Century Fox could not be reached for comment.
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Wyoming Winds is published by the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless
907 Logan Avenue
Cheyenne, WY 82001-5247
phone: 307-634-8499
fax: 307-634-9089
email: wch@vcn.com
Views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless, its staff or board.
Editor for this issue: Virginia Sellner.
Copyrights revert back to the author upon publication.
WCH is a 501(c)(3) all volunteer non-profit agency depending upon the community for funding.
© 2005.
Articles from other papers are published with permission of the paper listed with the article.
**In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.**
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