A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
I press my hand on top of the pulse of this country
It pushes back
hard
I keep my balance while I watch it breathe
A heartless place I thought this was,
but here it is in all its raw. Still gasping
and boiling a bloody fever we’re still sweating to break
we wake with sand scratched throats and only cruel offerings
from the sink that drip with lead and oil and
this morning,
Trump isn’t the only surprise winner this election season. Here in San Francisco, homeless people had a major win, despite all the trump style shenanigans coming from our local policy makers. With San Franciscans top issue being homelessness, there was plenty of opportunity to determine the fate of our most destitute citizenry. The positive results may not be obvious on the surface, but let me explain.
Back in spring,
I am a famously heavy sleeper. I slept through the sounds of my four-year-old housemate running up and down the hall outside my room. I slept through traffic accidents right outside my window. I slept through countless storms, and my second Bay Area earthquake. I learned to sleep through noise and smells and unwanted touches, through cold and rain. I learned to wake up instantly, alert at the sound of my alarm – a mechanical noise.
In the column where Nevius announced his impending departure, he speculated on a celebratory dance performed by Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, which publishes Street Sheet. He also linked this musing to an open letter he published, lambasting the Coalition’s decades-long efforts to serve, empower and advocate for the homeless community that he concurrently maligned.
That he would imagine a happy dance in his honor should come as no surprise to longtime readers of his paper and ours.
Last week, San Francisco voted for Proposition Q, which would authorize a 24-hour notice period for the City’s removal of homeless camps. But in the meantime, police continue to enforce an already-existing law against outdoor sleeping, according to recently obtained data.
The City’s Police Department reported a total of 337 cases of illegal lodging—law enforcement’s term of art for sleeping outdoors—from January 2016 to September 2016.
The department released the figures and a map of frequently enforced areas in response to a public records request by Christopher Herring,
The night that Donald Trump was elected, about a hundred people marched through the streets of Oakland. By the next night, the crowd had swelled to thousands, many with different political views but all with a shared sense of outrage at the election of a fascist such as Donald Trump. Night after night the streets were taken, and day after day, Oakland high school students have walked out of their classrooms demonstrating their opposition to the newly elected regime.
The Coalition on Homelessness and the shelter client advocates, who advocate for shelter residents who have been evicted or denied a service, have begun to introduce restorative practices to the City-funded shelters. Restorative practices encompass restorative justice, which employs methods of community building and conflict resolution that have been successfully used in indigenous cultures all over the earth for thousands of years. Currently, the San Francisco and Oakland Unified School Districts as well as many other school districts across the country make use of restorative tools.
If you are reading this, it is most likely that you are concerned about human rights, you wanted to help someone who is struggling in the streets and needs some money, or you’re a media analyst reviewing the press before a major election. Election Day is to be a big thing and you, reader, have a great responsibility in many ways. There’s a lot at stake, from big nationwide politics to city propositions,
In the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible), in Isaiah chapter 65:22, we read, “They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.”
What is this verse saying to us? It is saying that in the righteous world to come and age,
Since its launch in 1961, the Grants for the Arts/ San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund (GFTA) has allocated over $145 million to local San Francisco non-profit art programs and cultural organizations. This revenue is made possible through a portion of the 14 percent room tax on hotel and motel bills throughout San Francisco.
The GFTA was originally set up to ensure that San Francisco residents had access to a diverse array of arts and culture experiences,
