Archives for the 'poverty' Category
The loss of the dream
As unemployment rises across America, so do garage sales.
On Mission Ridge Drive and other avenues, lanes and ways in this formerly booming community, even birthday celebrations must go. “It was no money, no birthday,” said Ms. Duarte, who lost her job as a floral designer two months ago. The family commemorated Marita’s third birthday without presents last week, the occasion marked by a small cake with Cinderella on the vanilla frosting. They will move into a rental apartment next month.
An eternity ago, people in this city in northern San Joaquin County braved four-hour round-trip commutes to the San Francisco Bay Area for a toehold on the dream. Today, Manteca’s lawns and driveways are storefronts of the new garage-sale economy — the telltale yellow signs plastered in the rear windows of parked cars Friday through Sunday directing traffic to yet another sale, yet another family.
“You can get great deals,” said Sharrell Johnson, 32, who was scouting for toys in the Indian summer heat last Friday amid boxes of tools and DVDs and forests of little skirts and shirts dangling from plastic hangers on suspended rope. “Sad to say, you’re finding really good things. Because everybody’s losing their homes.”
It’s not isolated either.
This is McCain-Palin placard country, where signs for the anti-gay-marriage state ballot measure, “Yes on 8,” pepper the landscape and billboards advertising “Buy Now/Low Rates" seem like grim fossils of a bygone age. Manteca lies at an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis, with median home values having fallen by nearly half since 2006, from $440,000 to the current $225,000. In San Joaquin County, Moody’s has estimated that more than 1 in 10 houses with mortgages have a payment that is more than 30 days late. Unemployment rates have increased by a third, from 7.6 percent in September 2007 to 10.2 percent this fall, said Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Before the downturn, Manteca, population 67,700, and other towns in the northern San Joaquin Valley were on the leading edge of growth, with stucco subdivisions carved out of almond orchards. Today some 1,500 to 2,000 homes in Manteca, which is 32.7 percent Hispanic, are in various stages of foreclosure.
No one really cares that much…
Mike Todd is talking about the western church and the western world. He quotes Bono speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the $700 billion bailout.
"It is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion to save 25,000 children who die every day of preventable treatable disease and hunger. That’s mad, that is mad."
The polls show that the majority of westerners don’t care enough about those 25,000 kids to do much more than wear a white ribbon and watch a concert for a day. Despite what Make Poverty History says, I think it failed miserably and despite the e-mails and web banners, third world poverty or even poverty in Canada was not on the radar for the recent federal election and while Barack Obama has an innovative plan to deal with third world poverty, it isn’t really a big election issue with those of you south of the border (the word poverty was not mentioned during the Presidential debates) either.
I don’t think that is going to change. In 2005 a white bracelet was cool. There was a big concert and depending on where you were, pretty good bands (Canada’s was awful). Then it was done. People took off their wristbands and went back to their lives. I am sure they think about it every once in a while but not enough to show up on a poll as something we care about and definitely not something we care about more than our own interests.
History repeated itself in Canada as the environment was a huge topic. Then John Baird was named minister, came up with a pamphlet (I sent away for the plan and there was nothing to it) that passed the buck to another government long after he was retired and we all sighed and was relieved that we had done something about global warming. Stephane Dion looked at this and to his credit tried to do something about it.
This was the response in some parts of the country.
Now Dion’s Green Shift had problems but the attack that seemed to work on it was that this would mean higher taxes or lost jobs in industries that produce dirty energy and Canadians bought it. In other words we care about climate change as long as I don’t have to do anything to change.
When I was watching The War by Ken Burns. Somewhere leading up to the Battle of the Bulge he mentions that support for the war was losing support at home. That kind of shocked me. So much for a day that will live in Infamy. People believed in the war in 1941 but in 1944 they were tired of it. Tired of the rationing, tired of the letters, tired of the news. While we have seen this in many countries over many conflicts but there is a big difference between what people say they value and what they are willing to sacrifice to achieve it. For most of the western world, we aren’t willing to sacrifice very much.
If it is now unreasonable to pay $1000 down to get a car loan, or unreasonable to have capital to cover one’s losses, or even unreasonable to think that you would have to pay off a mortgage (why pay when you can refinance?), why should a government make any effort to look out for anything other than their own self interests either? The famous Irish based band U2 moved their incorporation to the Netherlands to avoid paying more taxes to Ireland (you know those things that go into government coffers so they can write checks to other countries). Good thing that their lead singer isn’t calling for governments to give more in foreign aid or this move may have been seen as hypocritical. Oh right, never mind then. My point is that if we are not willing to sacrifice, why should we expect others to for us?
I don’t know what changed. During the Armenian Genocide (there goes the Turkish readers of my blog) the western church chartered all sorts of ocean liners to pick up refugees and bring them to North America (for more read Samantha Power’s amazing book, A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide). Tales of large scale help after that are pretty hard to find even though the genocides and ethnic cleansing picked up the pace. Now instead of my responsibility, it is the government’s responsibility. I am not sure what changed. Some Canadian conservative columnists like to blame Pierre Trudeau and the idea of big government but I don’t buy that. It was probably a combination of a bunch of things; Urbanization broke down community ties, the decline of the church and the community around that, the economic boom of the 1950s created a new American dream that the western world embraced, and a more mobile culture. In some ways complaining about government is all we had in common. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone deals with the issue on a deeper level than I can here.
Whatever the reason, it is something that we have to face. I was going to say “face it together” but that isn’t true either. 25,000 kids dying each day doesn’t register on a lot of radar screens anymore. For those that do have it register, it is going to up to us to make a difference and it is going to have to cost us.
Growing up in the church, the only time I have ever been asked to sacrifice is when the church wanted something – a new building, more staff, or was in trouble financially. We can blog about “costly grace” but for most of it, it has been pretty cheap. I have quoted Ron Sider here a lot before but when the church is totally self interested, at least we blend in well.
If we are going to make a difference, it is going to cost us in real terms. Maybe giving up upgrading our MacBooks, passing on a smart phone and other gadgets, taking in less conferences, or maybe downscaling some other things in life to invest in something that resembles more Kingdom values. I guess the question is, are we willing to sacrifice for anyone else in this life other than for ourselves? If we aren’t willing, history has shown us that no one else is either.
Historia de un letrero
900,000 Children in Canada Live in Poverty
From the Toronto Star
Almost a decade after the deadline by which the House of Commons was unanimously resolved to eliminate child poverty, Statistics Canada says there are still almost 900,000 children living in the poorest of homes.
The latest census numbers released Thursday show that an estimated 879,955 Canadian children are living in low-income households, and that more than a third of these deprived children are in the care of single mothers.
That grim portrait of the country’s most vulnerable has changed little in a quarter of century.
In 1980, 20 per cent of pre-schoolers and 18.7 per cent of school-aged children lived in low-income families.
Twenty-five years later, those numbers barely improved to 19.3 per cent and 17 per cent respectively.
How to make a difference
AWARENESS interviews Sam Slovick on what is the best way to make a difference in our inner cities
AWEARNESS: You’ve mentioned the term "informed philanthropy" to describe the types of charitable organizations that are really making a difference on Skid Row. What should individuals look for before they make charitable contributions to an organization?
Sam: People on Skid Row don’t need food and clothes. The missions serve thousands of meals a day. They do a lot of fund raising and provide a lot of services. Informed philanthropy is investing in a consciousness that deals with underlying causes of a disenfranchised community that is at the bottom rung of our society. Two of my favorites are School on Wheels that tutors kids in their store front on San Pedro and 5th Street and United Coalition East Prevention that does a lot of outreach and address problems in the community directly. They also have an after-school program for kids. Both seems to have an understanding of the deeper systemic issues that need to be addressed.
He makes a really good point about investing in often forgotten organizations that deal with the underlying problems of extreme poverty. I think the most important thing is to find out what organizations are making a difference in the areas that you care about and then help out in the ways that you are best equipped to do.
Slovick is asked about if there is anything that will be done politically
AWEARNESS: Of the various Democrats and Republicans still in the Presidential race, which of them do you think has the type of "political will" to help solve the homelessness problem in America?
Sam: I don’t think any of them have the political will to do anything of consequence. It’s not that they’re uncaring, personally. It’s that they are part of a larger consciousness that has decided to accept that people at the bottom rung of society don’t matter. That agent orange veterans, severely mentally disabled people, addicts, victims of spousal abuse, children and others who have no resources should be allowed to suffer senselessly and needlessly in the richest country in the world, at the most abundant time in history, on the streets of Los Angeles.
The phrase “the larger consciousness” is what bothers me because that includes most of us and that is a far more complicated issue than Slovick lets on. For the most part we live in cities and we drive to work, the Mega-Lo-Mart, to the pub. There is very little neighborhood in many of our lives. When we are driving we are checking our e-mail, listening to music, having an emotional affair with the voice that powers our GPS, or chatting on our cell phones. We aren’t even paying attention to the road let alone the lives of those around us. We don’t walk, we don’t sit on verandas, we don’t enroll our kids in neighborhood sports leagues. Everything we do pulls us out of our communities (including the church) to other communities. It isn’t a larger consciousness, it is our larger unconsciousness that is the problems. We are not connected to our neighbors, our neighborhoods, or even our cities anymore so what difference do those people around us have on our lives. His point is correct but I think it is a natural off-shoot from bowling alone for all of these years and is a by-product of us all withdrawing into our lives.
Some more thoughts coming. I have blogged about Slovick before and his excellent five part series about life on Skid Row.
What to do?
Some of you have asked what I thought is the best way to deal with the issues of poverty, crime, drugs, and homelessness. I wish it could be tackled in a blog post. After thinking about it everyday for years now, I do have some ideas but I’ll start with a basic framework.
While many problems are intertwined, for the sake of sanity, you have to deal with one problem at a time and then work out from there. A version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs may be helpful.
As a housing first philosophy shows, getting a place to sleep that is safe and some food in the stomach are pretty big steps when you are homeless and provides a platform to deal with other issues as an individual and as a community. Of course when you have the bottom level of needs missing or messed up, everything else gets really complicated. Feel free to disagree with me but for most churches, they focus on the top three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy and they do some food security work. In Saskatchewan and Canada which is welfare state we expect that the government will take care of at least the bottom two levels of that list through either a social safety net or through laws, a robust economy, and the police. I think it is just assumed and expected by many that the bottom two are taken for granted.
Of course it doesn’t happen like that. Drugs, sexual molestation, illiteracy, natural disasters, mental illness, physical abuse, recessions, all take a toll on those bottom two sections of Maslow’s heirarchy and the system doesn’t always work and people pay the price.
Traditionally the idea has been to say that people need to deal with their drug addictions or behavioral problems first but housing is a basic human right, and so should not be denied to anyone, even if they are abusing alcohol or other substances. Studies have shown that crime, substance abuse, and other problems go down (but are not eliminated over time). The City of Toronto’s Street to Homes program has a lot more information on it. Toronto’s is interesting in that they offer long term follow up assistance for those that enter into their program. As Malcolm Gladwell’s famous article, Million Dollar Murray shows, it is actually cheaper to deal with homelessness this way than it is to deal with it on a day to day basis.
O’Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. "We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often," O’Bryan said. "We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he’d only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars—and that’s at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand."
The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.
"It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray," O’Bryan said.
Of course relatively few cities approach it this way, even then there are critics to the idea. Of course despite the lack of a housing first program in a city, it is a philosophy that isn’t hard to adopt, even if the government isn’t there but I’ll post more about that over the weekend.
60% Drop Out Rate
The problems are pretty complex at Jefferson High School
With a 58 percent dropout rate, Jefferson has the worst dropout record in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest.
“It’s horrendous,” said Debra Duardo, director of the dropout prevention and recovery program at the district, which averages 33.6 percent dropouts.
While half the students typically quit inner-city schools nationwide, Jefferson is at the lower end of the spectrum of so-called “dropout factories” because of a concentration of factors that are rarely all present at schools in other cities.
Located in South Los Angeles, where new immigrants mostly from Mexico and Central America settle, the area has a large minority population and high poverty.
Of its 1,977 students last school year, 45 percent qualified as English learners. More than 90 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.
The newcomer population means families shift quickly, following jobs or fleeing immigration raids. The school has a 57 percent transience rate, compared to a 38 percent average across district high schools.
They aren’t totally giving up though.
Last year, the district launched a $200,000 marketing campaign to convince kids school is worthwhile.
Promos on hip-hop radio, cell phone text messages, a MySpace Web site and You Tube videos hammered home that graduates earn an average of $175 more weekly than dropouts followed by the message: “Get your diploma.”
Administrators are evaluating if the ads were successful, but the campaign sparked interest across the country, inspiring a similar program in New York City public schools.
One of the most effective ways of keeping kids in school is simple - home visits, which the district has been doing for years. The visits are now conducted by “diploma project advisers,” guidance counselors who work with dropout-risk students.
“It gives a really powerful message that if you’re not in school, we’re going to your home,” Duardo said. “Most of the time, we find dropouts not working and not happy with life.”
The Cult of Cool
This was a part of a different post I decided to split out to it’s own idea. It’s going to offend some of you but that’s okay once in a while. If you are offended, I am sure you can figure out the comments.
Apple iPod 3G
I have been asked recently by some pastoral friends of mine if I have one of the new 3G iPhones that are now in Canada. The answer is no I don’t. I agree with Dion Oxford’s writing on the iPhone. I don’t even have a iPod Touch. I have purchased three of them and returned them before I had a chance to get them home. Without being able to articulate what I was thinking, I was reacting to the idea of how much money one of these cost and where I work. I am painfully aware that I go home at 4:30 p.m. to an amazing wife, sons, a great dog and a really stupid dog. All of this is in my own home which I pay a lower mortgage rate than what you can rent a one bedroom apartment for in this city. Walking in and out with a iPod Touch seemed to be sending the wrong message when that money could be used that much better.
I didn’t dismiss the idea of owning one lightly. The idea of having one even in the building where I work at to check e-mail, research online, and keep track of notes in meetings appeals to me. Considering our future integration with Google Apps, it would be a lot of help. Many of the people I work on projects with have job responsibilities all over the building and a iPod Touch would make life easier. It would also be easier to get e-mail wherever I am at home and at the lake because we all know how absolutely indispensable I am right?
A sober second thought reminded me that I am not indispensable, nor am I that important, and at the lake, my focus should be on the dogs, the boys, Wendy, or a good book to read. The last thing I need to be doing is walking to the lodge so I can get my e-mail when I could be sitting in front of a fire. (I also have a notebook computer that works really well if I need to work there).
I live a pretty good life already and the question is, will it remain a good life if I don’t have the latest gadget from Apple? My other question is why do so many pastors I know have this love affair with technology? I used to be like this and as far as I can tell, I liked it because it signified to others that my life was so important, I needed cutting edge gear to keep track of it. I am not trashing technology but how much more productive was I when I had church names in my Palm instead of right beside it in the church directory. Was my schedule so packed that I needed software to sync it in numerous places, plus make a backup to Yahoo! Calendar that a paper calendar wouldn’t do? Do I really need to be accessible to the people in the church 24/7 by phone and e-mail that I need a Blackberry or iPhone 3G? Is my parish so large that I need Google Maps and GPS software built into my phone so I can navigate to see them?
Of course not. So why was I fixated on it? It was one way I could keep up to other wealthier people in the church. They had nice cars, bigger houses, better vacations but I had a cool phone and that is what we can afford. Somehow I think we think that cool technology equates with cutting edge culture and this comes from a weird understanding of culture.
Culture and coolness is local. It’s all local. When I am in rural Saskatchewan, a leather John Deere ball cap is cool and a very important part of culture. Yet when I hear people in the church talk about culture, we talk about “emerging culture” (there is no such thing), or global culture (sorry, culture is awfully localized). The thinking is what is cool in San Francisco or New York is going to be cool in Saskatoon or Calgary is incorrect. I always cringe when I read my blog as being listed as an important blog to read for understanding culture. That is totally incorrect, you don’t understand culture by reading a blog about culture, you learn about culture by observing it or living in it. Now there are those that are completely oblivious to popular culture but they aren’t trying to be cool anyways.
We do come by this obsession with tech gadgets naturally, it comes along with being obsessed with the new and the next. I still am signed up for too many conference mailing lists. Too many of them are peddling the next idea in church that will change everything. We all know it won’t but too often we sign up anyways. I wonder if the current culture of non-stop conferences has made the church lazier and too dependent on experts. Instead of exploring solutions internally, we wait for the consultant or expert to lead us. The “consultant class” replaces the Bishops, Superintendents, and denominational officials.
So why don’t we ever give up the perks that come with the job and spend some more time doing what we are called to do? How come everytime a new iPod or a Zune (heh) comes out, we need to upgrade? How many times do we need to see the same talking heads say the same stuff they wrote in their last three books to get the message? How much of the stuff we carry is a financial or physical (time and energy) distaction from what I am called to do?
As Oxford painfully reminded us
After too much time online, I think I figured out the pricing. Rogers will be the sole provider in Canada (monopoly?). You can get the 8G iPhone for the low price of $199 or the 16G iPhone for just $299. Oh, did I mention you need to sign your life away for three years on top of that? No other options available.
Then there’s the monthly fees that you commit to paying for those next 3 years (with the occasional letter from Rogers telling you that they’ll be generously raising your prices so they can better serve you). $69 + applicable taxes and random arbitrary fees per month for voice services. Then $20 + applicable taxes and random arbitrary fees for data. so $89 + … per month; for THREE years. So this inexpensive toy will run each user in the course of three years over $4000.
What else might $4000 pay for?
- It would cover close to 2000 meals in the shelter I work at for folks who live on the street
- If you don’t believe that people locally need to be going hungry and don’t deserve your charity then
- It would allow you to sponsor 3 children per month for three years through World Vision
- It could purchase 50 school kits per month through the Mennonite Central Committee, each school kit helps one child in Bangladesh get through school for one year
- It could provide the necessary labour and materials needed to provide 10 families the clean drinking water they need for the rest of their lives, for THREE years totalling 360 familes.
Or, you could buy a toy that you will fill a void in you for a few weeks or months until you grow tired of it and feel empty again or until someone makes a better toy.
I think i’m feeling grumpy about this. Forgive me for sounding pious, but the world is falling apart and we need to stop being seduced by the man and start waking up to the needs of people who are dying all around us.
Amen
Poverty
“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.” — Mother Theresa
Needles
A couple of people have told me that a tremendous amount of needles given out do come back. I tend to see a lot of them because there is a pay phone and a couple of drug purchasing spots on the block. From what i was told by readers and a health district official yesterday, most come back but the problem is if you look at the map, even if 99% of needles come back, because of the incredible amount of them out there, some are going to end up in a parking lot which probably skews my perspective. As I have come to know a lot of guys who are HIV positive because of shared needles, I tend to forgot that the programs that stop that number from being far worse.
Of course my point about the needles got a little distracted by link to John Gormley’s article in the Star Phoenix, the issue for me isn’t the amount of needles being handed out, it is that those numbers demonstrate how serious the drug problem is in the Saskatchewan which of course each of them has a name, a story, and a family who probably didn’t envision it turning out this way.
Rehab
I remember reading an article years ago where former Secretary of State George Schultz among other elected officials were suggesting that the War on Drugs in the U.S. had failed and drugs should be legalized, regulated, and taxed. As a non-drug using kid, that sounded interesting. In Canada we had a similar discussion when the Rt. Hon. Jean Chretien de-criminalized pot and in the process offered up one of the greatest one liners in political history.
“Perhaps I will try it when it will no longer be criminal,” he said. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand.”
I have to admit, while I would never want my kids to smoke pot and I have never done it either, giving people criminal records for a small amount of it as opposed to a big fine, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either. As a former co-worker who served as an after hours worker at the Centre once remarked to me, “Abuse of alcohol causes an incredible amount of damage, violence, and shattered lives while I have never once had to deal with a domestic situation because of pot.” My remark back was, “If we legalized pot, there would have to be police in the chip and snack aisles of every 7-11 in the city.”
As odd as it is, pot isn’t what we struggle keeping out of the Centre. Because of it’s odor, it is easily detected and therefore we don’t see a lot of it. We see a lot harder drugs. Heroine, crack, and especially crystal meth which take a tremendous toll on the life of the user. On top of that using it is a quick way to getting evicted and also kicked out of the shelters in the city so many of the users are literally living on the river banks. Some get into rehab, others get tossed into jail, often for dealing or for theft.
Yesterday I had an ugly run in with a client who was high on crack and had to be removed from the facility. Later on his mother phoned and was quite supportive of our decision but was just broken hearted. She told me her story of how she had tried to help, was actually assaulted by her son, and in the end had to kick him out of her house to protect her other kids. He was a good kid until he started using the drugs. At the end of the conversation, I was deeply saddened. She seemed to be a loving mother but the drugs had in a lot of ways taken her kid away from her. Maybe there is more to it than that but over the last couple of years I have heard a lot of similar stories from kids and parents and I hate hearing it every time.
I don’t know what the answer is. We have two drug houses right behind us (1300 and 1400 blocks of Avenue E). The City of Saskatoon’s health region gave away 1,000,000 needles last year for a city of 200,000 people (Regina gave away 2,300,000 needles while the small city of Prince Albert gave away 600,000 - this is in a province of just one million people) I have heard stories of boxes of needles being delivered by street workers to some houses on a regular basis where they are preloaded with drugs for easy sale. Across the street from work, I have seen taxi after taxi pull up to a flop house, a package being tossed into a window and a package being lowered down. I watched a parking lot being cleaned before the snow melted this spring, the fire department filled two sharps containers with needles and there were still dozens left over when the rest of the ice left.
It’s easy to count to 3,900,000 needles and think of what that costs us as taxpayers, especially when you realize that many of those needles paid for by you and I are loaded up and sold to users by dealers but for me it has been an emotional reaction, each needle is taking a little more of a kid away from their loved ones, their potential, and often is leading them to a place where they are damaging more lives.
Update: Of course the goal of needle exchange is to prevent the spread of HIV among addicts. Some of the addicts I know are HIV positive and that adds to the misery and suffering they are going through in unspeakable ways.
Yesterday as I was leaving work, a guy stopped me that I have come to know quite well, he heard me being yelled at and said, “Guys like [him] will either end up dead or if he is lucky, do some federal time. In P.A., they’ll get him some help and rehab. I was like that and now look at me.” I asked him if he would have gotten help without going to prison and he said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. If I could have faced the addiction by myself, I would have.” [editor's note, I am IMing with Scott and he says he just quit so it does happen].
What’s ahead for angry violent drug addicted guys who doesn’t want rehab? I imagine jail but that seems to be a sad and costly way to get help. I am a firm believer in rock bottom but what is rock bottom to people who always resided an inch or two away from it at the best times of their life. What is the point of rehab when a life of poverty is all one is looking at because of what has happened in the past.
It makes that cliche, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” seem very western, very middle class, and almost cruel at times.
More funding for affordable housing
The Government of Saskatchewan made my work a lot easier with an announcement today that they were increasing certain aspects of Social Services funding, especially for emergency shelter rates and per room rates, both which have a huge impact on what we do around here. For us who are working extremely hard in getting an emergency shelter open for women and children, this is a wonderful step forward. I was at the announcement today at the Saskatoon Cabinet Office and around the table, several other agencies knew what this meant for us (and them) and many of us left with a bounce in our step. Tomorrow will be a long day finishing up a lot of projects but it will be a long day in the best possible way.
Here is the CBC’s coverage of the announcement. The Star Phoenix has more.
Workfare
On Friday I was with some co-workers as we viewed a four-plex on the west side of Saskatoon. It had tenants living in it and it was worse than I ever thought was possible. Human feces, needles, people drinking early in the morning and kids running around in that environment. There had been some water damage to the roof at some point and the mold was collapsing the ceiling. The house would need at least $100,000.00 in repairs which is kind of sad as it appeared that it has been recently renovated. Even worse it wasn’t the house I had originally asked our realtor about. He wouldn’t show us that house and said, “It’s way worse.”
I walked out wondering what can be done for a segment of society that is content to sleep in their own feces, endanger their kids, and themselves. I have been reading a lot about what the church can do with social justice but I wonder more and more if there is a better solution to how we approach social services in Canada.
A friend of mine is a strong proponent of her version of workfare. She feels that if you are on the “payroll” of the government out of choice, then there needs to be something given back. We aren’t talking Bowling for Columbine workfare but rather maybe four to six hours a week of parenting, budget, cooking, G.E.D., rehab, or life skill classes at a local church or school. Childcare and coffee would be provided and it would be good programming worth the time and effort. It would teach parents new skills, offer a social break, and provide a break from their kids as well. I like the New York city approach as well where there is cash incentives to get things like immunization shots, check ups, and for school attendance myself but the goal would be to help people out of the cycle of poverty and substance abuse, not as a punitive measure.
I believe strongly in a social safety net but there is something wrong when we are enabling people living in a flophouse high, drunk, and living in their own crap. I hate to see my tax dollars go to that but more importantly, I hate to see kids growing up in that thinking that is normal.
I have been reading a lot about churches and social justice lately and some of it is really good stuff but very little of it talks about how to reach the extreme poor in western culture and I am afraid that they are forgotten both by the government and the church, partly because the problems are so complex and the time and financial commitment would be so great to overcome it. Of course the other side of it is how much does it cost to have several generations of families being raised with the idea that Social Assistance will provide for them forever.
I don’t know if Workfare (or I guess it should be called Edufare or something like that) but what we are doing right now doesn’t seem to work. Of course another part of me wonders if every culture has a segment who refuses to take care of themselves and I saw some of it on Friday.
A quick poll
If your church had an opportunity to run an out of the cold shelter for one night a month and yet it put things like sound and media equipment at risk (or even worse, may interrupt the Sunday morning service a bit), would it do it? Let me know in the comments and feel free to explain your reasoning.
Fences to keep out the homeless
From the Salvation Army website
The city of Port Coquitlam, B.C. wants to fence off certain sheltered areas from the homeless. They say it is a public safety measure!
The fences would stop the homeless from finding refuge in picnic shelters and under bridges.
The homeless are just looking for a warm, sheltered place to sleep. If approved, the proposal will cost the city $135,000 and critics say it will only move the problem around.
There are 200 homeless people in Port Coquitlam and no homeless shelters. Some say these dollars could fund a 30-bed shelter for a year.
Well I don’t know if it would fund a 30 bed shelter for a year but there are better ways to deal with a housing problem than building fences to keep them out of parks and bridges.
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Messy Faith: Daring to Live by Grace by A. J. Gregory October 28, 2008
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
-
Search
Recent Photos
