July 2012
42 posts
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WatchThis is what gave me hope this week. A documentary about making life better for those who are often marginalized. And best part is, is that it is about a local Saskatoon care home, Sherbrooke.
But excuse me, someone seems to be cutting onions near me.
How America Became a Country That Lets Little Kids... →
An interesting fact about family homelessness: before the early-1980s, it did not exist in America, at least not as an endemic, multi-generational problem afflicting millions of poverty-stricken adults and kids. Back then, the typical homeless family was a middle-aged woman with teenagers who wound up in a shelter following some sort of catastrophic bad luck like a house fire. They stayed a...
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“While there are times when loving enemies means offering hospitality, there are...”
– -Hilary Scarsella from Conspire Magazine
Man, my heart is breaking from the violence infecting our world like a plague. All the folks killed in Colorado this morning in the shooting with weapons that should not even exist (these are not hunting rifles). Then I saw the cover story of Time magazine...
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LINKS I LIKED
Blog post from Alison Fine regarding nonprofit boards and the failure of the board at Penn State:
The Ongoing, Sorry State of NonProfit Governance
A great free toolkit for “Place-Based Creative Problem Solving and the Power of the Everyday”, which I found out about through Daren McLean, who does awesome things in Saskatoon:
The Enabling City
A great success story from the At...
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“One sex worker in Washington, DC, said, ‘Police always ask “why do you have so...”
– US: Police Practices Fuel HIV Epidemic from Human Rights Watch
(via npr)
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“The best way to dehumanize someone while claiming you’re not is to believe you...”
– The danger of worldviews (Speaking when the world sleeps)
“Most people on food stamps work full time. They work full time but they don’t...”
– Sister Simone Campbell [x]
I like how she articulates the simple financial impossibility of religious organizations being able to replace government aid. I’d like to add that, of course, there are so many people who have trouble receiving aid from religious institutions because they’re LGBT and/or...
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Over the Line
Last week was a bit crazy around the Lighthouse, as the letters we had sent out the previous week encouraging our tenants who were late with the rent to come talk to the managers made some clients very angry.
Many people came and paid this months rent plus what they owed in back payment (some people just need a friendly reminder). Another gentleman told us he needed to pay his cable bill so...
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UrbanRelations.Info: Can #Suburbia Serve the... →
urbanrelationsinfo:
An editorial in The New York Times looks at the dramatic growth of poverty in America’s suburbs over the last decade, and asks if the government safety net is up to the challenge.
Focusing on the problems that deepening suburban poverty is creating for government agencies in Suffolk and Nassau Counties on Long Island, and reflecting a national trend as “the number of people...
“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they...”
– Helen Keller (via azspot)
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Watchnprradiopictures:
If it was just me, I would have [given] up a long time ago. - Tracy Boggs, single mother of two in Reading, Pa.
Tens of millions of Americans are still struggling, despite the slow economic recovery. NPR’s Pam Fessler begins a four-part series on All Things Considered looking at poverty in the US and how some organizations are helping families stay afloat.
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On Being Sane in Insane Places →
”But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the cat. “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Minty Fresh 2.0: Seattle Starts A Public Transit... →
openbookstore:
Transportation Choices of Seattle, WA has started a program called Books On The Bus where riders of public transportation are encouraged to read the same book so that they have something to talk about. A sort of niche One Book, One Chicago.
“He makes these ridiculous statements, these empty promises, these vacuous policy...”
– Adam Vaughan, doing what he does best.
Rob Ford’s allies not sold on his tax freeze proposal - thestar.com
Lillian Moves Out →
A little while ago I wrote about my difficulty in having one of my elderly clients be approved for admission onto the care home wait list (you can read about this ordeal here). I am happy to report after an appeal process she was approved and moved into Sunnyside Adventist Care Home and Wednesday of this week.
When a client is told a room has opened up for them when they are on the wait list,...
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The Time I was Accused of Molesting Someone
One of the biggest areas of ignorance my first year at the Lighthouse has exposed is in mental health and the mental health care system.
I never knew that people could be arrested under a mental health warrant, if they were deemed to be a threat to themselves or to others and needed psychiatric care forced upon them. I’ve seen these ‘arrests’ lead to treatment and medication...
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When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind →
… Chief among those laws were strict new standards: only people who posed an imminent danger to themselves or someone else could be committed to a psychiatric hospital or treated against their will. By treating the rest in the least-restrictive settings possible, the thinking went, we would protect the civil liberties of the mentally ill and hasten their recoveries. Surely...
“The dividing line between books I liked, books I thought I would like, books I...”
– Julian Barnes: My Life as a Bibliophile 