Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force – SRRT/ALA

According to CNN.com, many middle-class families in California are being forced to live in their cars:

There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers.

The lots open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. and are run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, a homeless outreach organization.

It is illegal for people in California to sleep in their cars on streets. New Beginnings worked with the city to allow the parking lots as a safe place for the homeless to sleep in their vehicles without being harassed by people on the streets or ticketed by police …

Linn Labou, 54, lives in her car with four cats. She used to be in the National Guard and is on a waiting list for government housing, but the wait is a year long.

“I went looking for family, but I couldn’t get them to help me,” she said.

One view of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program and its changing fortunes:

There has been far more outrage online over the news that the OLPC may switch to Windows from its version of the free Linux operating system than over the discovery that hardly any of the laptops, originally to be deployed in no quantities smaller than 1m a country, will ever reach the poorest children.

The collapse of the scheme illuminates the utter falsity of the hope that technology alone can lift people out of poverty. Knowledge may, but the technology that spreads knowledge best is literacy, not laptops.

Library user advocates successfully challenged San Francisco’s Public Library Link+ automated interlibrary loan system’s large fee for lost books.

SFPL patrons can now negotiate lost book replacement fees.

As more and more people fall victim to the sub-prime mortgage mess more and more people are finding themselves without a home, living in tent cities.

Springtime is one of the neediest months for families of the working poor in Minnesota (and elsewhere).

What do these families need? More food at food pantries (80% of the contributions to Minnesota’s food shelves come from individuals). Food pantries keep food that often needs to be cooked, which what working poor families can use. Those people who are homeless are often directed to homeless shelters, not food pantries.

To find a food shelf or make a contribution to one in Minnesota call 651-721-8687 ext. 331 or go to Minnesota Food Share’s website.

The Shriver Center has just released the 2007 Poverty Scorecard: Rating Members of Congress. The collected stats are interesting.

Members of Congress from states with high rates of poverty are less likely to support anti-poverty measures than other members of Congress …

[The scorecard] assigns letter grades to each member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives according to their voting records on the most important poverty-related issues that came to a vote in 2007, including legislation on affordable housing, health care, education, labor, tax policy and immigrants’ rights …

In general, states whose Congressional delegations generally opposed anti-poverty measures are clustered in the south and western parts of the country. States whose delegations had the worst voting records and highest poverty rates were South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona.

The University of South Carolina School of Medicine will receive a $1.2 million grant from the City of Columbia in order to implement Housing First, a program that will place 25 homeless people into apartments and homes in the city of Columbia beginning in April.

Columbia is the first Housing First program to have a medical school coordinate services for the clients.

To find out more about the project, contact David Parker, director of Supportive Housing Services at the university’s medical school rdavidp@gw.mp.sc.edu.

Carol Pogash of the New York Times reports that many students are avoiding free lunches rather than look “uncool”:

Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the public schools in Berkeley, Calif., said that attention to school cafeterias had traditionally focused on nutrition, but that the separation of students who pay and those who receive free meals was an important “social justice issue.”

“Fewer people know about it,” said Ms. Cooper, whose lunch program offers the same food to students who pay and those who have subsidized meals.

Many districts have a dual system … one line, in the cafeteria, for government-subsidized meals (also available to students who pay) and another line for mostly snacks and fast-food for students with cash, in another room, down the hall and around the corner. Most of the separation came into being in response to a federal requirement that food of minimal nutritional value not be sold in the same place as subsidized meals—which have to meet certain nutritional standards …

Mary Hill, president of the School Nutrition Association, a national group of school food providers, said students who receive free meals were “very sensitive” about being singled out.

Emilio Estevez will explore the issue of homeless people and public libraries in his next movie, The Public.

The story is based on librarian Chip Ward’s Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that discussed how libraries become de facto shelters for homeless and mentally ill people in times of budget cuts.

According to the article, Libraries balance patrons, homeless, Metro Detroit libraries have tightened security and hygiene policies in order to serve patrons. The libraries serve homeless people by making data available on shelters, mental health services and job-training programs.