So, many people are missing the point of the Occupy tent city and what it provides to the homeless. Not sure how this is going to work but it doesn’t do anything for the women staying there, or the family. Or couples. And, it ignores the fact that people still need a place to put their stuff when they go to work, and they get a little privacy at the camp. And that they have built a supportive community and family. And, that there is no wet shelter. And, and, and, and . . .
Does this mean that for the month of May, all the single men won’t accumulate days on their shelter limit? So they can stay in shelter 90 days this year if they stay in May? (Ohmigod! Did Soglin approve this! Magnet! Magnet!) Will Salvation Army do the same for women and children?
Please see below. Please make sure if you can that the Homeless Consortium is provided this information and it can be distributed to whoever else you feel should know. We also will be letting our shelter guests know as well.
In light of the upcoming need of those currently staying at the Occupy Madison site on East Washington Avenue, Porchlight will open its winter overflow shelter at First United Methodist Church for the month of May. This will mean that all homeless men may use the Drop-In Shelter (entry at Grace Episcopal Church beginning at 7:30 pm to 10:30 pm) for the month of May. The 60-day limit ordinarily imposed by the Drop-In Shelter will be lifted during the month of May. This will begin Sunday April 29th and extend through Thursday, May 31. Porchlight is grateful to First United Methodist for allowing the use of its facility beyond the normal November through March time.
Porchlight recognizes that this is not a long-term or permanent solution to the complex issues surrounding the Occupy site. This is merely the attempt to temporarily alleviate the consequences of the end of this site. Porchlight and Tellurian will continue to provide outreach to the persons staying at Occupy site for the purpose of connecting them to community resources and housing.
All other rules for the Drop-In Shelter, such as the requirement that the guests not be intoxicated will continue to be enforced. Those otherwise banned from the Shelter will still not be allowed to use the Drop-In Shelter during this time, in other words, existing bans (apart from the 60-day limit) will continue to be enforced.
I’m going to ask again, where does Porchlight come up with the magic money that they can suddenly provide more services (last time it was staffing the day shelter) – and if they can provide more services, why don’t they just do it on a regular basis?
And shouldn’t the women has some sort of discrimination complaint based on public accommodations and gender discrimination?
It seems to me like the Occupy site has created an illusion of a pseudo-solution in a lot of peoples’ minds and now that the bubble is bursting a deficit type of thinking has gained traction. It seems odd to me that a group has stepped up to provide services beyond what it normally feels it can commit to, for a sector of the population, in order to transistion away from this Occupy camp and here I see accusations of gender discrimination and why can’t you give this every day? if you give a 10 dollar bill to a charity on Monday and maybe you are on a tight budget yourself but did without something that day, how would you feel if people ragged at you because you don’t give 10 dollars every day all year? since you could do it Monday, they you must be selfish and holding back? It’s good that there are strrong advocates but your arguments seem to be weirding out too not just Soglin’s. Yes he said some stuff that seemed to make no sense in that meeting, but so have you here. The “passion” of the strong advocates seem to be morphing into a dicey area of pointing fingers of rage at people saying they’re not doing enough. None of us can come up with anything better, you’re not. You can’t take care of all these people’s needs, neither can I. To really do that would require a total re-structuring of the entire fabric of our culture, and even then we’d still struggle with horrible choices made by addicted and mentally ill people. My point is that there’s a strong accusation now that people (like Soglin and Porchlight et al) are “withholding”. Like they COULD, but they WON’T. This doesn’t fit very well with what we all know about the beauties of the new austerity. Okay so Soglin gets bitchy under pressure, he’s obviously sick of having his 1969 activism thrown into his face in a manipulative manner like that Allen or whoever it was did. Bad move, huh. but at some point maybe people can admit he doesn’t have the answrs to this, just let’s imagine all the things the city does not have the money for these days. Must be a really long list and a lot of it is required by law and contract, and there’s not enough money to fulfill those obligations at all. Maybe it’s not so much Soglin, maybe it’s more like the uber-powerful guys who are working day and night to bring forth heightened social Darwinism. People waiting for communities to default so services can be privatized and local governments dissolved. At some point we will be stepping over diseased emaciated bodies in the streets, like they do in India, or maybe we will be those bodies ourselves. It’s all horrible but I expect it to all get worse. The part that confuses me is you seem mad at the wrong people. Possibly because those are the ones you all have access to, rather than say The Kochs and those types, who probably are a lot more responsible for suffering than Porchlight. Also apart from any blame you can lay on the 1%, the human problem of mental illness and addictions will be working over time to thwart any and all attempts at solution. Every single person in the US could bleed a river over that and it would never be enough. Some human problems are like black holes in space, no matter how fair your society could be, there will never be enough.
Anyways, your last paragraph has an attitude that seems pretty skewed to me. Or maybe I’m just a jackass.
Or, maybe you missed my point? The discrimination is from the government, providing services for men and not women and children, who seem to have been completely forgotten by the Mayor. There are other providers besides Porchlight who provide services to other populations, perhaps they should be talked to as well.
But how can Soglin and others continually make the “not enough resources” argument and then so strongly oppose something that provides SOME help to SOME people using LESS resources? (Not claiming Occupy was THE answer, but it did some good for the people who were there, at minimal cost to the city.) At Tuesday night’s meeting, the police chief said that there are 5,000 homeless people in the city, a number that I find staggering. So Porchlight breaks ground on a facility to house 50 people, and that’s great, and props to Porchlight for doing it, but can we all agree that it’s going to meet 1% of the need? What’s missing, I think, is the recognition that we’re NEVER going to have the resources to adequately assist 5,000 homeless people if we insist that we can only provide that assistance within a framework of grant-funded 501(c)-3’s.