Blog Action Day 2008 -- Poverty

Forty percent of the homeless population in the United States is made up of families -- parents and children -- who need all the same things the rest of us do -- food, shelter, clothing, and health care. Over the past several months, On Call, which is an online magazine published by the Boston Globe for allied health professionals, has been running a series of articles on agencies in Massachusetts that are working to address the health needs of the members of this underclass. They are well worth the look.

The current article by Susan Wessling describes the work being done by nurses who work with the Mercy Medical Center's Health Care for the Homeless program in Springfield, Massachusetts. The program provides "on-site care at 46 locations—shelters, soup kitchens, job placement sites, transitional programs—and on the street. Services—which include assessment, intervention, episodic care, referrals, follow-up appointments, and education—are delivered in three counties (Hampden, Franklin and Hampshire) across 1,800 square miles."

In an article that appeared in August, On Call writer Janet Cromer and photographer David Stone accompanied a woman who was an inpatient at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program's McInnis House as the facilities were moved to a new location.

And in an April article Janet Cromer wrote an interesting overview of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program's effort to ensure health care for families in the greater Boston area.

On Call's editor Joseph Saling says in an editor's note that the final article in the series will describe the efforts of a street team in Boston that goes out from shelters to find homeless individuals on the street who need care. All three of the above articles are worth viewing. And I'm looking forward to reading the final article in the series.

More Words I Like

My first nominee for words I like is "Kindness Bandit." You should drop by and check it out.

When S and I lived in Birmingham, we joined the only Unitarian Universalist church in town. It wasn't S's but it was my first time living in the south, and finding the UU community was like finding a safe place while learning a new culture. Now Birmingham is a good place to live. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is a marvelous tribute to the people who struggled and are still struggling for justice and for treating people the way they should be treated. You get a real sense of what happened there throughout the city's history, not just during the fifties and sixties. And there are fabulous (and some not so fabulous) galleries spread throughout the city and multiple arts festivals with some really great artists and juried shows throughout the year.

But there are things that aren't so great. The company that S was going to work for moved us, and the realtor was chosen by the relocation company. We only had a few days to be there and find a house and moving down from New Jersey we were impressed by two things. The first was the size house we could buy for the money we had, and the second was how integrated the neighborhoods are -- at least the neighborhoods in the price range we were exploring. So at lunch on the second day, I asked about how race relations had evolved, given Birminham's history. The realtor's response was there really is no problem and things were never the way they were portrayed by the media. She said things were good and there wasn't any tension now. Then she added, "There are issues. But I don't understand what they have to complain about. They own all of downtown." We let the remark go -- I know, we shouldn't have. We did, though, because we needed to find a house and didn't have time to find another realtor. But we moved off the subject of race. Then the realtor saw a friend whom she invited over to the table and introduced us to. The very first question he asked us was what church we belonged too. And the next thing he did was invite us to attend his church when we came back to town.

There are two questions you hear all the time in certain circles in places like Birmingham: "Who's your mother?" ("mama" actually) and "What church do you belong to?" Now that second question gets asked a lot of different ways, and sometimes kids who don't go to church get targeted by their classmates. It's almost like a contest to see which classmate can get the unchurched kid to join his or her church.

Which brings me to the second set of words I like. We joined the UU church and then were invited to a reception for new members hosted by the church board. At one point we were all out on the patio of a beautiful home of an artist who belonged to the congregation, and the president of the board suggested we take turns introducing ourselves and say something about how we came to be a UU. As we took turns, a board member gave her name and talked very briefly about her religious upbringing and her growing away from the church. Then she explained how she had had happened to join the Birmingham UU community:

"I became a UU," she said, "because I got tired of telling people I home churched my kids."