New YHHAP Board!

Simon and I are excited to announce that we have reviewed applications and interviewed applicants, and have chosen a new YHHAP Executive Board as well as added many new general board members to the YHHAP team!

The Outgoing YHHAP Board of 2009:
Co-coordinators: Efan Wu & Simon Goldstein
Public Relations Coordinator: Joseph Breen
Treasurer: Natalia Emanuel
Fast Coordinator: Brittany Concannon
Historian: Rasesh Mohan
Director of Service: Alexandra Brodsky
Interfaith Liaison/General Board: Joan Gass
Public Health Coalition Liaison/General Board: Matthew Meizlish
General Board Members: Jacqueline Erickson, Jessica Cole

The Incoming YHHAP Board for 2010:
Co-Coordinators: Gabriel Zucker & Joe Breen
Public Relations Coordinators: Amalia Skilton & Emily Foxhall
Treasurer: Natalia Emanuel
Fast Coordinators: Jess Cole & Andrea White
Historian: Rasesh Mohan
Director of Service: Alexandra Brodsky
External Relations Coordinator: Chelsea Androezzi
Education Directors: Danielle Guillen & Glen Meyerowitz
Fundraising Directors: Matt Bedrick & Nate Zelinsky
Food Recycling Director: Lexie Berwick
General Board Members: Jackie Erickson, Joan Gass, Matt Meizlish
Alon Harish, Audrey Ballard, Brian Han Jang, David Tidmarsh, Dennis Mou, Jennifer Friedmann, Jennifer Qiao, Kyle Cooper, Marissa Caan, Smith Shah, Yifan Chen

Congratulations to everyone, and we’re really excited to see all of the great ideas that you all are going to be working on!

 

YHHAP Week: Oct. 23-Oct. 31

We are in the midst of midterms right now, but YHHAP has kicked off an exciting week of events all centered around raising funds and awareness for hunger and homelessness.

Last Friday, Oct. 23, we were visited by Jane and Paul from Emmaus Cambridge, which is part of the Emmaus International organization. Emmaus Cambridge is a community of ‘Companions,’ people who are formerly homeless, and is the first one to be started in the UK. Companions commit to working 40 hours a week and signing off of state benefits. Every one lives by the principle of helping others to live, grow and find dignity through sharing, work and self respect. YHHAP student leaders got a chance to hear about how Emmaus is changing lives, one community at a time by helping people become self-sufficient and reintegrated into society. Jane and Paul are touring the US to spread the word about Emmaus and to hopefully get an American community to take the initiative to start an Emmaus community in their own town.

We had a jam-packed night of events during the 2nd Annual YHHAP Shelter Now Sleep Out on Old Campus on Saturday, Oct. 24. Despite the pouring rain, many groups of students and their friends came out with their blankets to share in entertainment by Something Extra, Proof of the Pudding, and Living Water, a community sing, hot coffee donated by Blue State Coffee, (microwaved) s’mores [because fires and rain don't pair well], t-shirt tie-dying, a rousing round of Taboo!, and a heart-warming revisiting of Disney’s ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ a story of hunger, homelessness, and love.

Which brings me to this exciting announcement: YHHAP t-shirts are here now, and are available for $10. They are white, with navy-blue lettering to better facilitate tie-dying. You know you want one. We’ll be selling them again on the day of the YHHAP Fast, with DIY tie-dye.

Tuesday, Oct. 27 is the panel: Stories of the Homeless, featuring speakers who are homeless or formerly-homeless. This is an opportunity for students to truly and substantively engage with the stories and issues behind hunger and homelessness in their communities, and hopefully will be a way to dispel many myths that people hold about who becomes homeless, and how and why people find themselves in these types of difficult situations.
8pm in the Branford Common Room

Wednesday, Oct. 28 is YHHAP Toad’s Night
You know you want to go to the Wednesday Night Dance Party at Toad’s. $1 from each ticket sold will be donated to YHHAP-Shelter Now. Who knew that gyrating those hips could generate food and shelter for the homeless? Dance Party at Toad’s. Be there. Enough said.
11pm to closing

Thursday, Oct. 29 we’ll be screening ‘The Soloist’ starring Jaime Fox and Robert Downey, Jr.
Schizophrenic Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a homeless musician of Los Angeles’s Skid Row dreams of playing at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. By chance he meets newspaper journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) who tries to help this man get back on his feet to make his dreams come true. Based on the book by the real Lopez, which was an account of his relationship with the real Ayers. Inspired by his story, Lopez writes an acclaimed series of articles about Ayers and attempts to do more to help both him and the rest of the underclass of LA have a better life. However, Lopez’s good intentions run headlong in the hard realities of the strength of Ayers’ personal demons and the larger social injustices facing the homeless. Regardless, Lopez and Ayers must find a way to conquer their deepest anxieties and frustrations to hope for a brighter future for both of them.
Silliflicks, 8pm

Friday, Oct. 30 – YHHAP Fast, FOODSTOCK, FRIGHT NIGHT
Sign up for the YHHAP Fast – it’s quick and easy. Every semester, YHHAP runs a “fast” whereby students can donate your meal swipes for one day. The money from uneaten food will support the Cedar Street Overflow Shelter, which houses up to 125 homeless men throughout the winter, and is currently lacking the funding to stay open through the winter. $20, or about 2 student sign-ups, provides a meal and a bed for one person. To sign up, visit www.yale.edu/sis

Foodstock: Dwight Hall – 7pm-9pm
Food, music, good times.
Jamestown, The First Town in America
Laura Zax
Suitcase of Keys

Fright Night:  SAE House  -  11pm-1am
Costumes, friends, mayhem.

Saturday, Oct. 31 – Halloween: Trick-or-Eat
Put on your costume and come join YHHAP and Hunger Heroes for Trick-or-Eat.
Only on one night a year do households expect their dinners to be interrupted in order to distribute free and edible items to all who ask. Trick Or Eat puts a new spin on Halloween – dressed in our Halloween costumes, we will be canvassing New Haven neighborhoods collecting cans of food for the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen.  At the same time, we will be raising awareness about local hunger issues and volunteer opportunities. Two hours and a costume is all you need to make a huge difference in the community!
Slifka Center, 80 Wall Street (for shuttle to East Rock)

 

The NYTimes highlights the plight of the homeless…

In 2 recent articles, the Times discussed specific aspects of hunger and homelessness.

Homeless Deaths Rise, and Anchorage Copes

Community Service Patrol officers in Anchorage picked up a man who had passed out.

The homeless population in Anchorage, Alaska has risen so much that the city has delegated a  Community Service Patrol specifically to work with the homeless.

Many of the people that the Patrol deals with are ‘regulars’ who are chronically homeless. The issue has become so hot that State Senator Johnny Ellis of Anchorage has managed to push through $1.2 million of funding for Clitheroe Center, a Salvation Army-run alcohol treatment and detoxification center. Police, a doctor or family members can ask a judge to commit an individual to the treatment center if that person’s abuse of alcohol has made them a threat to themselves and others.

Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways

Clinton Anchors, 18, in Medford, Ore., has been on his own, living in the streets and camping in the woods since he was 12.

Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.

Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974.

Many youth survive by sleeping in abandoned buildings, couch-surfing among friends and relatives or camping on riverbanks and in parks after fleeing or being kicked out by families in financial crisis.

 

A most curious encounter

On a side-note, to highlight the immediacy and relevance of the issues that we are dedicating this week to, a very curious occurence took place during the Sleep Out. Just as we were finishing up setting up the tents and putting everything in the chapel in order, there was a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous going on in the Dwight Hall Common Room. We ran upstairs to the YHHAP Room to get some supplies, and found a middle-aged, androgenous individual fast asleep and drooling on the purple YHHAP couch. We managed to rouse (what we later discovered to be) her, and she told us that she was in Dwight Hall for the AA meeting, but had wandered upstairs because it was warmer there.

We led her downstairs, and she asked what we were all making preparations for, and we told her that it was to raise money for the Overflow Shelter. She then told us that she had AIDS and pneumonia, and that she was homeless. I asked her if she knew about Liberty Community Services, and she proceeded to deliver a long and vehemous harangue about what she considered the abyssmal conditions that Liberty subjected its clients to. She became so empassioned that she began sobbing halfway through her speech, and verbally berated us as well.

Finally, she calmed down a bit, and asked if she could stay in Dwight Hall for the night, since it was pouring outside. We found her a secluded corner, set up a bed cushion, some pillows, and a blanket, she crawled inside, and was soon fast asleep. Jess managed to sooth her even more with the promise of freshly-made pancakes in the morning. I am not sure what happened the next morning, but I hear that she was very apologetic when she woke up, and tried her best to smooth things over with Jess.

When I got back to Dwight Hall the next afternoon to clean up the tents, she was gone, leaving behind only the imprint of her body in the cushion where she had spent the night, and a pile of rumpled blankets.

I didn’t even catch her name.

 

Events, random musings, and ideas

YHHAP Parent-Faculty Lunches (Past): During Saturday and Sunday of Family Weekend at Yale (Oct. 10-11), we invited six illustrious Yale professors to have intimate brunch conversations with parents and other family members. This was a great opportunity for people to get up close and personal with some of Yale’s most interesting and popular professors, including John Gaddis, Shelly Kagan, Jonathan Holloway, Thomas Pogge, and Paul Bloom. An enormous “Thank You” to these esteemed faculty who donated their time to help us with our efforts.

SHELTER: A Squatumentary
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 7:30pm at the Student Center at SCSU (Fitch & Crescent St)
Shelter: A Squatumentary is a documentary film that explores the squatting movement in the East Bay from 2004-2007. We follow three examples of the struggle for housing in an unaffordable marketplace such as the San Francisco Bay Area. Hellarity House, Banana House, and Power Machine are stories of squatters who have found one tentative solution to the ongoing housing crisis.
Please join YHHAP at this film screening. We will be taking the 6:55pm B1 bus from the Green to the Southern U campus.

YHHAP Fast Week: Oct. 23-31 (Subject to Change)
Friday – Oct. 23 – YHHAP hosts Emmaus Cambridge, a hunger and homelessness group from the UK
Saturday – Oct. 24 – YHHAP-Shelter Now Sleepout on Old Campus
The Sleepout will feature food & drink, community singing, speakers, tie-dye shirtmaking, and more!
Sunday – Oct. 25 – Moment of Service one-time service project: Cooking Indian food for the homeless with the Seikhs
Tuesday – Oct. 27 – Panel with homeless & formerly homeless speakers
Thursday- Oct. 28 – Filmscreening in Silliflicks
Friday – Oct. 30 – YHHAP Fast, Foodstock at Dwight Hall Chapel, & Fright Night at SAE
Saturday – Oct. 31 – Trick-or-Eat with Hunger Heroes

The Peanut Butter Plan: Like many of the best plans, it’s simple: Strangers get together, make peanut butter sandwiches and immediately pass them out to homeless people. No federal subsidy, no foundation, no vouchers. No official sanction from anybody. Just strangers, good will and peanut butter. An interesting concept. Similar to the summer lunches that students put together and pass out on the Green. Thanks, Jess, for sharing this. Read more here.

The New Haven Overflow Shelter: YHHAP-Shelter Now and a city-wide coalition are hard at work raising money to fund the overflow for this winter. If the funding emergency continues into future years, other ideas that have been floated are: converting one of the current wet shelters into a dry shelter, whereby that shelter could receive state funding; creating warming rooms that would be open throughout the night, where people could get out of the winter chill, but are not provided with a bed; opening up some of the local churches and providing a few beds.

 

YHHAP Identity

I was just talking to one of my friends whom I’ve known for 3 years now, and she offered to sell me New Haven Cares vouchers for the first time.
I had never known that she was involved in New Haven Cares, and she had no idea that I worked on YHHAP!
This reminds me of when I was helping another long-time friend read through her resume earlier this month, and saw Prison Education Project (PEP) tutor on it, also for the first time.
This so shocked me that two of my friends are (and have been) committed to and involved in YHHAP, but that I had no idea of it, that I needed to post on the blog about it. We were all mired in mutual oblivion and solitude.
This reinforces my resolution to work with the Board this semester to try to ameliorate this YHHAP disconnectedness this semester–both in terms of non-interaction between members of the same project and across different projects. After all, there are 7 projects, each with an average of about 20 volunteers, which adds up to almost 150 volunteers total. Wow!
One thing that we’ve been kicking around for a long time now, but just haven’t acted on, is making YHHAP t-shirts that volunteers can wear, identify with, and take pride in.
Another is having monthly fun meetings where people can get to know each other and possibly (though probably not) discuss their interest in helping with hunger and homelessness.
More on this soon, hopefully.

 

Briefly: The YHHAP Projects

Want to get involved in Hunger and Homelessness, but don’t know how or when?
Check out the following brief descriptions of the different projects that YOU can get involved in through YHHAP!

BRED (Bringing Relief Every Day) collects excess bread and baked desserts from residential college dining halls every night at 7pm and walks them over to two local halfway houses that help men reintegrate into the community. BRED’s volunteers help reduce food waste at Yale and help New Haven’s needy. Our volunteers make a difference with only a small time commitment – less than an hour each week. Contact: bing.han@yale.edu or alexander.chern@yale.edu.

Hunger Heroes is the undergraduate branch of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, a New Haven organization that serves meals to the hungry in New Haven six nights a week. Yale students manage the soup kitchen’s serving shifts on Friday and Sunday nights and a pantry shift on Sunday afternoons. The serving shift is approximately 1 hour long.  Contact: hans.anderson@yale.edu or bryan.kam@yale.edu.

No Closed Doors (NCD) is YHHAP’s newest project. Starting in Fall 2009, NCD will run an office where students can work one-on-one with homeless and low-income clients to identify and apply for employment opportunities, housing, and government benefits.  In addition, NCD will also include an outreach component, where some volunteers will work with clients directly on-site at places such as the Department of Social Services in New Haven.  This is a great opportunity for students to be involved in social services provision and case management, as well as to understand the resources available in New Haven and to have a hand in shaping a new project. Contact: chaoran.chen@yale.edu, yang.tang@yale.edu or matthew.meizlish@yale.edu.

New Haven Cares works to publicize and sell vouchers to other students, so that these vouchers can be distributed to panhandlers on the street. They cost 50 cents each, and can be redeemed at Shaw’s, local pharmacies, bus stations, homeless shelters, and elsewhere. However, because they cannot be used to purchase drugs or alcohol, they ensure that donated money is put to good use and facilitate healthy giving. Purchase some vouchers to keep in your own wallet, or get involved as a seller and educate your peers. Contact: simon.goldstein@yale.edu or stanley.seiden@yale.edu.

PEP-SLAM (Prison Education Project—Student Legal Action Movement) Students serve as tutors in local prisons in Connecticut, preparing inmates to get their GEDs (General Equivalency Diploma) or exploring extracurricular interests, like Art Appreciation and Creative Writing. The tutoring commitment is about three hours per week. Students also pursue activism and advocacy in order to reform the criminal justice system and eliminate injustice at all levels. Contact: conrad.lee@yale.edu, julian.malinak@yale.edu or joshua.menke@yale.edu.

Shelter Now is a branch of YHHAP that aims to alleviate and ultimately end chronic homelessness, primarily in New Haven but also in the great Connecticut area, through political action and organization. Shelter Now will work with public and private institutions—government, homeless shelters, non-profits, etc. Contact: gabriel.zucker@yale.edu or chelsea.andreozzi@yale.edu.
Unity House is a weekly drop-in center for homeless individuals that provides a unique opportunity to get to know the people you may see on the street, in a casual and safe environment, and provides homeless individuals with an important inside space to relax and socialize. Stop by for an hour or two on Sunday afternoon to drink coffee, play cards, or chat with visitors, and take a step back from Yale-centered life.  We meet in the basement of Trinity Lutheran Church, corner of Orange and Wall (enter through the double doors, go down to the basement). Contact: alyssa.cheung@yale.edu or julia.buzan@yale.edu.

 

Brief Fall Semester Updates

Sorry for the lack of posts recently.

School has started in full swing, and we’ve already got lots of things on our plates.

First and foremost, the new NCD Leadership Team has gotten started on getting everything ready for our anticipated (re)launch date of October 5, 2009.  I also announced this at the first Hunger Heroes Friday soup kitchen a couple of days ago, and many people were very excited about it.

The rest of the YHHAP Board and Shelter Now are focusing on the YHHAP Fast Week planning process. We want the entire week to be focused on Hunger and Homelessness, with a Sleepout to kick off the week on Sat, Oct. 24, and perhaps a culminating event with Trick-or-Eat on Halloween. We are also busy planning Faculty Lunches during Parents’ Weekend.

All of the projects are now well underway, after a great recruitment process these past few weeks.

 

Why taking disability into account is so important in reducing poverty

An interesting report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) titled “Half in Ten – Why Taking Disability into Account is Essential to Reducing Income Poverty and Expanding Economic Inclusion“

Very true, from my own experiences in New Haven.

poverty-disability-2009-09

 

Af-Am Cultural House Summer Service Trip

Yesterday, I traveled to beautiful Marina del Rey to participate in the week-long Summer Service Trip sponsored by the Af-Am Cultural House at Yale.
Fourteen of us are staying in a 3-floor rented house, and we will be learning about the foster care system and children’s services in Los Angeles. Later in the week, we’ll hold workshops with groups of foster youth, ages 13-21, to share our own experiences with them and to encourage them to think about going to college.
Today, we visited the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), a community empowerment center and Children’s Bureau called Magnolia Place, and a resource center for homeless youth called My Friend’s Place.
We were met at the house by Otho and Robbie, two guys who have worked at DCFS for over 20 years each. We took the half-hour drive from our house in three separate cars (it took that many to fit all 14 of us) to the DCFS offices in downtown Los Angeles, and got an overview of the services and interventions that DCFS provides. We then walked over to another branch of DCFS where the hotlines are manned 24/7/365, and where social workers monitor and follow up on reported child abuse and neglect cases.
Although we learned a great deal about the noble and important work that the social workers at DCFS do, we also left with an overwhelming sense of the enormity of the task of child protection. A feeling of dedication and urgency pervaded the office buildings, but it was accompanied by a weighty sense of responsibility in a Sisyphean feat.
After a great boxed lunch provided by Jay’s catering, eaten on the go in the car, we visited Magnolia Place. (From their website): “Made possible by the generosity of more than 500 individual, foundation and corporate supporters, Magnolia Place Family Center will serve as a community hub for at-risk families and provide comprehensive programs and services in four areas which experts agree are key to strengthening families: nurturing parenting, economic stability, good health and school readiness. Children’s Bureau and our in-house community partners (St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, County of Los Angeles/LA County Helps, Public Counsel, and Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment), offer families: access to quality medical and dental care; a comprehensive child development center; classes on parenting, child care, and family economics; mental health services; legal assistance; foster care and adoption; and Los Angeles County services. We are also a gathering place for the community to meet, share and socialize with their families and neighbors.”
Located in a formerly abandoned but now renovated warehouse, the whole place was filled with light, hope, and a buoyancy that did not exist at the DCFS offices. A green, leafy, springtime theme decorated the building, which contained a large community activity space, individual conference and family rooms, a series of pre-K learning classrooms, as well as offices with medical, dental, and legal service providers. The CEO of Magnolia Place talked to us about the “resilience theory” of community strength and empowerment, and I think we all left there inspired by the model that Magnolia Place represents.
Finally, we drove over to My Friend’s Place, a resource center for homeless youth. We were greeted by a couple of small dogs, one of whom felt the need to assert itself through incessant barking. (But they were cute) “The mission of My Friend’s Place is to assist and inspire homeless youth to build self-sufficient lives.” They provide a whole array of services, from satisfying basic necessities like food and clothing to more comprehensive case-management, including employment and housing assistance and substance abuse counseling. They also partner with many other organizations that offer medical and support services for homeless youth. Over the past few months, due the impact of the financial crisis, My Friend’s Place has had to cut about 60% of their staff, which has put a strain on the services that they are able to offer. Nevertheless, I think the general sentiment towards the place was very positive. My Friend’s Place seems very similar to what we are hoping to bring back to New Haven with No Closed Doors, except more specifically targeted towards homeless youth.
After that, we were all so exhausted that we decided not to go to our fourth and final stop of the day, which was rescheduled for tomorrow, after we finish with our workshop design day at DCFS.