New Orleans 5 Years After Katrina: Thousands Still Homeless

Post originally published on Change.org

New Orleans 5 Years After Katrina: Thousands Still Homeless

Sunday was the five-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It’s hard to believe so many years have gone by since that horrible storm rocked the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. What makes it most unbelievable to us is that five years later there are still thousands of people that lost their homes in the flooding who are still homeless.

Last year we attended a national conference on Social Work in New Orleans and spent a long weekend there. This was our first time visiting, and we fell in love with the city. In a blog post last year, Rich remarked how he “was struck by the similarities of New Orleans to New York in one aspect — survival and renewal. Katrina was their 9/11. The Ninth Ward is their Ground Zero.” Just as nearly nine years after 9/11 there is very little progress in rebuilding the World Trade Center, the poor in New Orleans similarly wait for a home. This is after a second devastating disaster, the BP oil spill.

President Obama visited New Orleans on Sunday and pledged the federal government’s commitment to rebuilding the city. We greatly appreciate the President visiting New Orleans and issuing this commitment. Yet this is just more rhetoric around big plans to revive the city. New Orleans needs more than words. New Orleans needs funding for affordable housing. Not in a few more months or years. Now! Join us in signing the petition to let President Obama know that it is time for action.

To read post on Change.org, click here.

New Orleans 5 Years After Katrina

Here’s an excerpt from our latest post for End Homelessness on Change.org:

New Orleans 5 Years After Katrina: Thousands Still Homeless

Sunday was the five-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It’s hard to believe so many years have gone by since that horrible storm rocked the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. What makes it most unbelievable to us is that five years later there are still thousands of people that lost their homes in the flooding who are still homeless.

Last year we attended a national conference on Social Work in New Orleans and spent a long weekend there. This was our first time visiting, and we fell in love with the city. In ablog post last year, Rich remarked how he “was struck by the similarities of New Orleans to New York in one aspect — survival and renewal. Katrina was their 9/11. The Ninth Ward is their Ground Zero.” Just as nearly nine years after 9/11 there is very little progress in rebuilding the World Trade Center, the poor in New Orleans similarly wait for a home. This is after a second devastating disaster, the BP oil spill.

To read the full article, click here.

You can also sign the petition to tell Obama to rebuild this beautiful city.

The Policy Police Name End Homelessness as a Top 50 Blog!

The Policy Police recently released who they feel are the top 50 blogs focusing on social issues. Included in this list is the End Homelessness Cause at Change.org! Rich and I are so proud to be writers for this amazing organization. We have known that great work is being done and that important information is being shared across the internet. Now it’s confirmed that others are seeing the value as well. It’s the power of social media! We believe that social media can affect social change. This is one more step in this process!

Check out the full list of Top 50 Blogs — click here.

Lessons on Ending Homelessness from the Netherlands

Post originally published on Change.org

Lessons on Ending Homelessness from the Netherlands

Social change through social media, an increasingly popular idea, is real. Here’s one way it works: a couple of months ago Rich was contacted through the networking site LinkedIn byAlexander Hogendoorn, a social worker and homeless advocate from The Netherlands. Alexander was on holiday in New York City for a couple of weeks, and he and Rich met for a few hours to share ideas and stories of their work on the front lines of the movement to end homelessness.

In the early 2000s, Alexander worked on creating supportive housing programs in Rotterdam, the second largest city in The Netherlands. According to Alexander, in 2002 the general sentiment in The Netherlands was that homeless people were a problem. Homelessness was their fault, they were drug addicts, and the country needed to get rid of them. Sounds familiar.

The government in The Netherlands is parliamentary, so they have a prime minister and they govern through coalitions. When Rich asked if this made it more difficult to advocate because you are dealing with multiple parties in power, Alexander said no, because the politicians in his country are very interested in compromising and coming to an agreement satisfactory to all. If only our polarized politicians were like this.

Some Netherlands legislators visited NYC in the early 2000s and learned about “zero tolerance” policies in the city designed to “motivate” the homeless and decided to implement them back home. As in America, they didn’t work. No surprise there.

 

 

Shortly thereafter many new government officials that came into power were of the “younger” generation and didn’t hold many of the same prejudices as their older predecessors. They were open to listening to homeless advocates who presented data about the high costs of housing persons in homeless shelters and giving them care in emergency rooms compared with the relatively low costs of a housing first model and supportive housing coupled with preventive medical care. Activists also brought politicians to the streets to meet homeless individuals and learn what challenges they’re facing.

Amazingly, the politicians listened. They proceeded to change the laws to state that the government should house the homeless and provide supportive services. They built thousands of units of housing with supportive services.

Initially, there was NIMBY, or “not in my backyard,” sentiment by many of the Dutch. But once a supportive housing residence was built and the people moved in, neighbors saw that the neighborhood would not become a disaster as they feared, and then they became vocal advocates for more supportive housing in other neighborhoods. Also, once the politicians listened, changed the laws and spoke of the benefits of working to end homelessness, public sentiment started to turn around as well.

What has been the result? Alexander says that in 2002 there were 3,000 homeless adults in Rotterdam. Now there are 500. That is an 83 percent decrease in a short period of time. The remaining 500 are the chronically homeless. As in America, this population is challenging to engage and keep engaged.

Next up: youth homelessness, since there are currently 1,500 homeless children and young people. Rich was curious why officials didn’t target the children first, as we would think this would be a population that could easily garner political and public support. Alexander said that politicians didn’t focus on them because they weren’t as much of a “problem” as adults and weren’t as visible. By “problem,” he meant that the adults were the ones who would approach people and ask for money, and be on the streets. The youth weren’t as vocal or conspicuous.

Rich’s time with Alexander was inspiring and insightful. The overriding theme is that homelessness is homelessness. It doesn’t matter where in the world it occurs … except when it comes to solving the problem. The Netherlands is way ahead of us on that one. We can learn so much by working together across nations. We will then see how similar we all are.

(Alexander also wrote a blog post about our meeting. You can read it here).

To read post on Change.org, click here.

The Mind-Body Connection: Essential to HIV Treatment

Post originally published on Change.org

The Mind-Body Connection: Essential to HIV Treatment

Here is one of my favorite words — psychoneuroimmunology. It’s a super long and fancy word that simply means the mind-body connection. When such phrases were uttered years ago, the speaker would receive strange looks and questions around recently inhaled substances. Not anymore. There has been a tremendous amount of research conducted in the field of psychoneuroimmunology that proves without a doubt that our minds and bodies are connected.

So what does this mean? Simply put, when a person is faced with a stressful situation (mind) there is a visceral bodily reaction (body). If you have a deadline at work, your shoulders may become tense (or maybe this is just me). We often feel stress at almost the same time that we conceive of it in our minds.  It’s the instinctual “fight or flight” response that has kept our species alive when we were out in the wild among the elements. It still serves us today. When driving, for example, a rude driver may cut you off and you react almost without thinking to avoid an accident. The after-effects of this situation can be felt as your heart rate escalates and your breathing is labored. This is the mind-body connection in survival mode.

The mind-body connection can also be used as a very effective tool in reducing stress. Just as your body reacts to stress, you can also use your body to reduce stress. Something as simple as taking a deep breath can help calm your system and slow down your mind to help ease the tension that stress can create. For the stressful driving scenario, taking a few deep, cleansing breaths can provide some relief. Your heart rate will slow, you provide much-needed oxygen to your organs, your muscles relax and your mind can clear and refocus on the task at hand.

As the name psychoneuroimmunology implies, the immune system plays a large role in all of this. Stress can have a negative effect on a person’s immune system.  Have you ever experienced a cold, or had a cold linger around during a stressful time in your life? There’s a reason for that. Stress can make your immune system less effective in fighting off disease.

For a person living with HIV, her immune system is already compromised. Stress can have an even more profound effect on her already vulnerable system. Of course, no one can completely avoid stress. The goal is to learn to better deal with the stress so the effects on the immune system are minimal.

Stress reduction needs to be a vital part of HIV treatment regimens. Think of stress reduction as a tool box with a variety of tools to cope with a variety of situations. Here’s a few key tools that you can add to your own tool box, whether or not you are HIV+: Deep breaths, meditation, listen to music, write down your thoughts, take a walk, look at nature, talk to a friend, join a support group, count to 10 before reacting, exercise, make some tea, read a book, rediscover a hobby, stretch your muscles, draw a picture, watch a funny movie, join a supportive chat room on-line, say the Serenity Prayer.

To quote a woman who was an avid believer of psychoneuroimmunology: “This is not something worth losing a T-Cell over.” T-Cells are the cells of our immune system.  For those living with HIV, the goal is to rebuild the immune system to increase T-Cells. When faced with stress, a person’s T-Cell count may dip down (this is true whether or not you are living with HIV, however for the HIV+ individual, this can be dangerous). For this woman, she would not allow stress to further compromise her immune system. She faced many stressful situations, yet she was able to effectively cope to minimize the negative effects. Next time you are faced with stress, I encourage you to ask the question she lived by: “Is this worth losing a T-Cell over?”

To read the post on Change.org, click here.

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