Susan Madden Lankford
A tragic accident 20 years ago brought about a surprising revelation for Susan Madden Lankford, inspiring her to get more involved with what was happening in her community. Four local teenage boys got high and were involved a terrible car accident right outside her family’s property in San Diego. All of the boys were students at her daughters’ high school. One of the boys died in the accident.
“It was a harsh reality as a young mother with three girls. This was their high school,” Lankford said. “It took me into very sharp focus internally.”
Read More »
Dr. O'Connell with a patient.
The delicate dance between housing and health continues to fascinate and bewilder us. The frequent utilization of emergency rooms and hospitals by urban “rough sleepers” has challenged us to understand the obstacles and barriers to health faced by those struggling to survive each day on the streets of our cities.
Information about this elusive sub-population of homeless persons has been sparse, and this past December we completed a 10-year prospective study of a fixed cohort of 119 individuals living chronically on Boston’s streets. The deplorable results are a clarion call to all of us working in public hospitals and academic medical centers: despite an average age of 46 at the onset of this study, over 40% have died and another 10% are now permanently in nursing homes. The causes of death were primarily medical, with cancer and end-stage liver disease most common.
Read More »
A warehouse full of tiny storage units is a sign of society’s indulgent excess.
Back in the 1970’s when the economy was roaring its monetary might; a company called Public Storage was created to store the excess collectibles from this country’s populace. Small rooms, the size of bedrooms, were rented to store old family photos, 8-track music tape collections, and treasured furniture that just don’t fit into their homes. Last year, Public Storage was a $1.6 billion dollar company.
Read More »
Editor’s note: On Tuesday, August 24th, Andy Bales, the CEO of Union Rescue Mission (URM) in Los Angeles, CA wrote a piece describing the rationale behind URM’s decision to charge some shelter residents a fee. In this post he describes the implementation of URM’s new policy.
When I wrote about the idea of charging some Union Rescue Mission (URM) guests a fee for their shelter stay on our blog, we received fantastic feedback. We also met with local community activists who formerly experienced homelessness, and gained valuable insight from them.
From these discussions we developed a pilot program, now called the Gateway program, of twenty-five beds that would consist of a covenant relationship with some benefits in return for participation.
Read More »
Vanada Lewis is grateful that her dog, Milo, can stay at Petco Place while she receives housing at PATH Hollywood.
In July, People Assisting The Homeless (PATH) won funding through the Pepsi Refresh Project, a monthly contest in which voters decide which 32 projects, out of 1,000, will receive grants. PATH received the second-highest number of votes in its category, and on August 22nd Pepsi awarded the organization $5,000 to help support Petco Place, an innovative project providing shelter to the pets of people experiencing homelessness.
Approximately 10% of homeless people have pets, but very few shelters allow animals. Petco Place, a unique “shelter within a shelter” located in PATH’s Hollywood Center, is one of only two programs in the U.S. that offer housing to both homeless individuals and their companion animals. Read More »
Editor’s note: On Monday, August 23 we ran a piece about homeless shelters charging their guests fees to stay in their shelters. Andy Bales, the CEO of Union Rescue Mission (URM) in Los Angeles, CA recently announced URM would charge some shelter residents a fee. Andy has written a two-part series for Poverty Insights explaining URM’s reasons for moving to a fee-based model for some guests.
I first became aware of the idea to allow guests to participate in their eventual transition out of homelessness by paying a proportion of the cost of their program when I walked into the Door of Faith mission in Des Moines, Iowa, over twenty-four years ago.
The Door of Faith was an interesting place, because it had been established by a man, George Holloway, who had himself experienced homelessness for thirty-seven years. George did not like what he had experienced, so he established a mission that welcomed men, fed them extremely well, helped them avoid addictions, expected and enforced sobriety, allowed them to stay in all day or rest on their bunks when they were not working, and required them to either work or utilize their income to pay a portion of their own way.
Read More »
In this tough economy, consumers are getting hit hard. If you are lucky enough to dine out to eat, you don’t get free water unless you ask. Sit on an airplane seat, and you will be charged for checking in baggage, eating a meal, or using one of their blankets. Soon, pay toilets may be installed on planes.
The world of homelessness is no different. Consumers of homeless services just got hit over the head with a fee that some critics think could be a significant barrier toward getting off the streets; a fee for a bed.
Read More »
Working on poverty is like being in politics, everyone has an opinion on the subject. While I welcome multiple view points on an issue, having an opinion does not necessarily mean having something worth saying.
My professional work with my company, Idealistics, is based in U.S. poverty, as is the focus of this site. However, I try to stay current on developing world poverty and its consequences, such as the recent floods in Pakistan that have affected an estimated 20 million people.
I, like most people who work on domestic poverty issues, have a global appreciation for the depth of developing world poverty. It seems to make sense that if one cares about improving the lives of hurting people, political borders do not restrict one’s compassion.
Read More »
We live in an insurance-crazed society. Our obsession with insurance must reflect our obsessive culture that encourages people to worry about everything. We insure our cars in case we dent our fender in the supermarket parking lot, or our homes for theft loss or catastrophe. For some people, mortgages are insured, healthcare is covered, and insurance is purchased for survivors when we die.
For those with money to burn, there is even excessive insurance offered for anything you can imagine. The media has reported that Mariah Carey insured her legs for one billion dollars.
So why not poverty insurance?
Actually, our country has offered poverty insurance for the last seventy-five years, it is called Social Security. Social Security is a very simple yet powerful idea—take a little bit out of everyone’s paycheck in order to protect us all from financial disaster when we are old.
Read More »
The Great Recession, as the recent economic downturn has been called, has had tremendous consequences for the country. National unemployment remains high (9.5%) and the average number of weeks of unemployment for unemployed persons is 24 weeks, the highest average number of weeks of unemployment since the Great Depression.
Amidst all this bad economic news, there is a small silver lining for low-income families lucky enough to have jobs – zero inflation. A recent article in the New York Times explains that “inflation has fallen to zero, which helps the purchasing power of everyone fortunate enough to have a job.”
Read More »
