Bread for the City

>Today’s guest post is from Dr. Hope Ferdowsian, who has helped to launch and run our new Human Rights Clinic. The Clinic is designed specially for refugees seeking asylum in America, which can require lengthy and sensitive medical examinations. Many thanks to Dr. Ferdowsian for all of her work and support.

The plight of refugees has been a concern of mine since I was a child. My dad is from Iran, and he and my mom, who is from the US, helped my father’s extended family seek refuge in the United States when their religious group (the Baha’i Faith) came under persecution. As I grew up, I sustained an interest in human rights violations such as torture and genocide, and continued to learn about populations around the world that were targeted for their ethnic, political, or religious affiliations, or for other reasons.

I’ve been evaluating survivors of torture for about 6 years now, first under the auspices of Doctors of the World (now HealthRight International) and working with independent attorneys, and more recently with Physicians for Human Rights.

Before we moved this clinic to Bread for the City, it was held at George Washington University. We could generally only see patients there on a one-time basis, and since many of them didn’t have health insurance, we weren’t able to connect them with the care that they often needed. Here at Bread for the City, we can ensure that they receive long-term care as well as other services like legal counsel or public assistance. That network is here for them.

This is also a good space for health care providers, because we can support each other. Even when physicians have gone through the necessary training, we sometimes struggle to do this work alone. It’s emotionally tolling. People have very sad stories, and it can be difficult to process that on your own.

All of us who do this work are asked to see more people than we can possibly accommodate. I’m proud to see Bread for the City once again responding to a great need. Our community needs this kind of leadership.

Hope Ferdowsian, MD, MPH, is director of research policy for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and associate director of clinical research for the PCRM subsidiary Washington Center for Clinical Research.

>Thank you! (We really can’t say it enough.) Thank you to each and every donor who made our new truck a reality. A special “thank you” to Poor Roberts Charities,the District of Columbia Primary Care Association (DCPCA), WilmerHale, Rachel Levinson & Ariel Waldman, and Vaughn & Marion Simmons who gave above and beyond to bring this truck to us.

As George said in his remarks this morning, we truly have reached a significant “mile”-stone with the purchase of this new delivery truck. This truck will transport more than 1,000 articles of clothing, and over 10 tons of food each week. We estimate that in the coming years, it will deliver to our pantry enough food for more than 5 million meals for the hungry.

Thanks to the donors, volunteers, staff, and clients who came out this morning for our celebratory coffee and breakfast (catered by the always excellent Azi of Azi’s Cafe!).

Pictured from left to right are: George, Larry, Ted, Damon, and Jenette representing Bread for the City; Karen Szulgit and Eric Vicks from DCPCA; and Cheryl Shigo and Richard Palmer on behalf of WilmerHale.

>Hey readers: you know how great it would be to intern here, right? Please help us spread the word.

Description:
Bread for the City provides comprehensive assistance to Washington DC’s poorest residents – including food, medical care, legal counsel and social services. Through our blog and other social media, we communicate about our work – about the problems of poverty, and its potential solutions – on a daily basis. We are looking for a sharp young consumer/producer of new media for an exciting internship. This is a great opportunity to learn about non-profit communications, new media, social justice advocacy, and a wide range of urban policy matters.
Internships should average 10 hours a week for at least four months.

Responsibilities:

• Daily analysis of major and local newspapers, blogs, and select magazines.
• Work with BFC staff and volunteers to identify clients and community members with compelling stories to tell. Conduct interviews of BFC staff, clients and community members in an atmosphere of dignity and respect. Transcribe interviews and compose for publication.
• Write posts for Bread for the City’s “Beyond Bread” blog. Outreach to local blogs.
• Ditto Twitter.
• Engage with nascent Bread for the City network on Facebook.
• Other tasks as assigned by development staff.

Characteristics and skills:
Must possess strong interpersonal skills and an ability to communicate and work with a wide variety of people. Working knowledge of media – both mainstream and social. Plusses include: experience with photography, video, and/or journalism, HTML-literacy, proficiency in Spanish, an ear for stories. The position requires excellent communication skills; willingness to take direction and also to work independently; confidence, flexibility, and, above all, a commitment to social justice.

Credit: We will support your initiative to receive college credit for this internship.

Please send cover letter, resume, and two examples of recent work to: Greg Bloom, gbloom / AT breadforthecity / dot org.

>I got an email this afternoon from one of our attorneys. She has a client with a young son who does not have a bed. Do you have a twin mattress and box spring you can donate? Could you throw in some new sheets and a pillow?

If you can make this special request a reality, please call or e-mail me. Don’t worry, we can coordinate a convenient pick-up.

202.386.7613
KValentine@BreadfortheCity.org

Thanks!

>Our friends at Street Sense have a great new website! The site was produced by Community IT Innovators (CITI). They’ve also recently launched a channel on a neat user-generated aggregation service called MIXX that culls homelessness news from all over the country. (You can find it through the “Homelessness Headlines” section towards the bottom of the front page.)

These are good steps forward. Street Sense’s street-vendor model is an innovative and popular way to engage homeless people in production and vending of their own publication, and each issue contains voices that rarely get heard even on the internet. Street Sense can now share its messages, beyond the street, as part of a broader dialogue.

For instance, we found out about this interesting program in an article called “Crossing the Digital Divide” by Laura Dean:

Helping homeless people become technologically savvy is the cornerstone of Lou August’s business partnership between his technology company, Wilderness Technology Alliance, and D.C.’s largest shelter, the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV).

The idea behind the business model is to build a self-sustaining, technology company that is managed and operated by the homeless, while providing an outlet for D.C. businesses to take advantage of high-quality training programs and refurbished computer systems offered by WildTech-CCNV staff members.

The technology center located at the shelter provides training classes, job search skills, software training classes and Internet access to the nearly 1,000 residents of the shelter. The benefits of the technology classes offered at CCNV reach far beyond the people that reside at the shelter. A $99 computer class is offered every other Saturday to low income residents of Washington, D.C. WildTech-CCNV endeavors to give each participant who completes the class a free, refurbished Pentium-4 computer.

Sounds like a promising attempts to address the Digital Divide problem we discussed here last week. If you’ve had experience with this program, or are aware of similar programs that we should check out, let us know!

>As you may have read, seen, or heard already, the new Bread for the City truck is finally here!

You’re invited to come join us in celebrating the new addition to our team. Our truck’s ribbon cutting ceremony is this week:

Thursday, August 27
8:30am
1525 Seventh Street, NW

Free breakfast and coffee! Please RSVP by August 26th to events@breadforthecity.org.

> (Click to read my first and second debriefs of Netroots Nation.)

As the newspaper continues its steady decline, we’re losing what little local news coverage we had. Given that local government plays such an active role in shaping the day-to-day lives of its citizens, this is a serious problem.

But already, we can see the shape of what can fill the gap as newspapers recede.

We’ve written here before about DC’s local blogosphere, which is pretty large and lively. Most local DC blogs are written from the perspective of residents who want the best for their neighborhood.

Netroots Nation’s “Local Blogs” panel offered up a group of folks who take that to a higher level: they blog with an agenda. (We’ve got one or two of those here in DC, too.)

On the panel were Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of Philadelphia’s Young Philly Blog, Paul Hogarth of the San Fransisco blog BeyondChron, Eli Ackerman of the New Orleans’ Save Charity Hospital, and Josh Kalven who blogs about Chicago on Progress Illinois.

The panel was moderated by Evan Coren, who blogs in our neighboring Howard County.* Evan started blogging to shed light on a specific story: there were plans underway for a major real estate development that he believed “would destroy existing gathering places…and would not be socio-economically mixed.”

“I realized there wasn’t good way to get info out to the community,” Evan said at the panel. “The local newspaper wasn’t providing coverage.”

So Evan started the Howard County Blog, recruited more writers, and soon this blog became a viable force in the local scene.

“It’s not enough to tell people they should be outraged,” said Evan about his mission. “By regularly writing about it, you can explain what would otherwise be a very opaque issue.”

He explained that by identifying and occupying a specific niche, a blogger can add value to the discussion. “If you don’t do it, no one else will.”

Josh Kalven noted that bloggers can correct a deep flaw in the newspaper model: “When good muckraking uncovers small but important issues, we can keep them from falling down the memory hole.”

The audience for these issues, of course, will rarely if ever compare to the reach of a major newspaper.

“But it’s not about the number of readers,” said Evan. “It’s about who is reading.”

The panelists reported that their readers include local politicians and staff, aspiring candidates, community leaders and especially local reporters from the flailing mainstream media. As a result, their coverage can have a clear influence on the public discourse.

But the capacity to write a deeply-informed, regularly updated blog — usually without any form of compensation — is fairly rare. Dan reports that finding and keeping contributors is a constant problem at Young Philly (“I would go to parties and actually harass people to write”) and that a major blogger signing off can be a blow felt throughout an entire local blogosphere.

But the capacity to write a deeply-informed, regularly updated blog — usually without any form of compensation — is fairly rare. Dan reports that finding and keeping contributors is a constant problem at Young Philly (“I would go to parties and actually harass people to write”) and that a major blogger signing off can be a blow felt throughout an entire local blogosphere.

Institutional support can help fill this gap: Josh Kalven’s work at ProgressIllinois is sponsored by the state SEIU. Meanwhile, Beyond Chron is a project of Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which offers civil legal services to low income San Franciscans. (It’s a model similar to Bread for the City and Beyond Bread.)

Already, Beyond Chron’s record suggests that small amounts of dedicated resources can fill the gap left by the passing of much larger news operations. When Mayor Gavin Newsom held an orchestrated press conference to announce his budget proposal, Beyond Chron’s lawyer/writer/editor Paul Hogarth actually read the plan — a step farther than most local reporters bothered to go. He discovered that Newsom’s public announcement contained some significant deceptions that had serious implications for the health of the city’s hospitals, mental health support systems, and other safety net programs.

Though we do need some sort of professional newsmaking capacity to survive even as newspapers fail, when it comes to exposing deception and bad governance, Hogarth says “it doesn’t take a lot.”

This was a repeated refrain: that small efforts to apply local pressure can have large impacts. “There’s more energy around city-blogging than state blogging,” suggested Josh Calven. “The issues are more immediate, and the characters are more familiar.”

That said, each city struggles with similar problems — and one of the most interesting suggestions from the panel was that of a future in which these networks link together such that local advocates can learn from what’s happening in other cities. Like a League of Beleaguered Cities, suggested Eli Ackerman — who blogs from post-Katrina New Orleans with a mission that recalls our own SaveOurSafetyNet campaign, with even more urgency.

* NB: Evan’s blogging helped him acquire deep knowledge of the issues and the city, and also gave him a potent base when he decided to run for City Council. He opposed a candidate who was not likely to play an active role in pushing for smarter development plans. Evan’s campaign — which was waged both online and door-to-door — doubled the turnout in the election; he won by 21 votes. Another indication that in local matters with large stakes, small organized efforts can have a big impact.

>Given my recent post on obesity, I thought that Science Daily’s recent article on the links between obesity and food stamp use was especially enlightening.

According to a recent nationwide study, people — especially women — who use food stamps also tend to have higher weight gain. The average food stamp user had a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 1.15 points higher than non-users, and women averaged 1.24 points higher.

A large part of the reason is that people receiving food stamps are also probably not purchasing healthy foods. When I brought the matter up, Bread for the City’s Intake Coordinator Sherita Evans made a good point about this: “There are a number of “Good quality” grocery stores in the area, but they do not advertise that EBT is accepted,” she said. “These establishments are known for having a better quality and selection of food, but individuals will not frequent these stores because they think they can’t shop there.”

For example: Harris Teeter, a fresh foods market, accepts EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) but it is not explicitly advertised in their store or on their website. Given the stigma that is already placed upon food stamps, many recipients shy away from these stores. If grocery stores were required to properly disclose that they accept food stamps, use of food stamps at stores with healthy foods would almost certainly increase.

But the more fundamental problem is cost. The average food stamp recipient receives $81 in food stamps per month. On $20 a week, fruits and vegetables — to say nothing of things like healthy grains — are way above these recipients’ price ranges. When a Giant Brown Rice Bag costs $2.00 but there’s a $0.85 Giant Macaroni and Cheese box sitting on the shelf next to it, the “healthy choice” is a truly difficult one.

It is worth noting, however, that several initiatives have been made to increase the flow of healthy food to low-income residents. Most notably, DC’s FreshFarms Markets has a new program that doubles the value of food stamps when used to purchase produce at their farmers’ markets. More promising still is the Food Stamp Expansion Act of 2009, which has significantly expanded the eligibility for and amount of food assistance in DC.

Though these intiatives have helped tremendously, they are just small steps in the right direction. As rates of obesity increase, we must consider that people’s inability to purchase nutritious foods leads to all kinds of even more costly problems. So where do we go from here?

>At Netroots Nation 2009, more than a hundred caucuses, panels, and workshops grappled with an overwhelmingly broad spectrum of issues: new media strategies, web organizing tactics, and all kinds of modern progressive thinking. But as I wrote on Monday, there wasn’t much being said about poverty and the empowerment of poor Americans.

The primary reason for this is very simple: poor people don’t attend these conferences, and they’re not participating in the netroots’ movement. That simple reason is symptomatic of a very complex problem.

To the conference’s credit, there was a lively panel about exactly that: “Who’s Left Out: Taking a Critical Look at Online Organizing” was organized by Campus Progress, moderated by Erica Williams, and tweeted about profusely by participants (via the #leftout hashtag).

The panelists started off by pointing out that people engage with the internet in patterns that reflect their stations in “real life.” As a result, the internet is stratified in ways that mirror real life — and the nature of your engagement is shaped by your class, race, sexuality and so on. The kicker is that even though most everything on the internet is only a couple clicks away, it’s even easier for users to lose sight of all the other different people out there in the world.

The danger to the many strands of social movement that coalesce every year around Netroots Nation is that they tend to talk to and agitate themselves, in virtual spaces where most Americans have never clicked a mouse. (For instance, panelist Matthew Hindman noted that porn sites get 100 times the traffic than the entire political blogosphere.)

From the perspective of campaigns that organize communities to move towards social change, this is a tactical problem with readily available solutions. “Left Out” panelists and participants pointed to a number of ways in which organizers can target their communications to reach people where they are: like text messaging campaigns, which can directly connect with huge numbers of people who don’t often or ever access the world wide web, but who will engage via mobile device.

And of course there’s the greatest example of internet-enabled social movement to date: the Obama campaign used the web to mobilize large numbers of people, who then went offline to organize much, much larger numbers of people, the largest numbers in recent American history. Many of those Obama supporters never visited a political website — but they nevertheless showed up to help elect a liberal, wonky, African-American President.

Speaking from the crowd, Alan Rosenblatt of the Center For American Progress suggested that the real question we need to ask “is not ‘who is being left out of online organizing?’ but ‘who is being left out of democracy?’”

You can find the answer to that here at Bread for the City. What’s more, I think organizations like ours could play a key role in a solution to the problem. The question, though, is much trickier for us than it is for a campaign manager. Our mission is to help people. As we help meet their immediate needs, we also want to help empower them. But when the full extent of our resources are hardly enough to meet the those immediate needs, how can we help our clients actually engage in the virtual channels through which power increasingly travels?

The “Left Out” panel underscored how difficult this is. It’s not just a matter of giving our clients access to extremely cheap desktop computers – we currently offer that opportunity through partnership with First Time Computers, but it’s rarely used. (Few of our clients could even afford a monthly bill for dial-up, let alone know how to install and operate the machine.) Meanwhile, readers of this blog know that public libraries are embattled and endangered sites. It’s not even a matter of just building more computer-capacity into our own facilities, since our clients often lack the skills that make computers effective tools.

We started this blog with the idea of creating a virtual space in which we could foster discussion about the realities of our clients’ lives — discussion that isn’t happening in the media or elsewhere online. But the value of this space is limited by the fact that our clients themselves by and large won’t access it. Where to begin solving this problem?

We don’t have good answers to this question–yet. We’re ready to start figuring it out.

>This weekend I attended the fourth annual Netroots Nation, a gathering of progressive bloggers, internet organizers, and sundry web-savvy advocates working towards change in America.

When they all get together in one place, things quickly get over-stimulating. Over three days, for at least four shifts a day, ten rooms hosted panels and workshops about foreign policy, the media, climate change, gender and sexuality, elections, science, the Supreme Court, and this year, would you believe it, lots of Twitter.

And yet, as Change.org’s Leigh Graham observed remotely, there is lots of talk about “economics” but relatively few mentions of “poverty.” There’s a lot of focus on labor and health care, both of critical importance to the endangered middle- and working-classes. There’s also always at least one panel about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and this time there was a well-received panel on Hip Hop and social change. But by and large the “other America” seems to be almost as obscure at Netroots Nation as it is in the mainstream media.

All this is not meant to shame Netroots Nation, its attendees or organizers (who do really great work – see Director Nolan Treadway’s response in the comments below). The netroots’ agenda should be shaped by the interests of its participants. When it comes to poverty, the problem is not that the netroots don’t care; the problem is that poor folk aren’t there.

It’s not just a matter of attendance, though it can be prohibitively expensive to attend a conference like this (Democracy for America hosts a great scholarship program). There are other major events like the US Social Forum that focus more explicitly on efforts to end poverty. But I think a Venn diagram of the two circuits would reveal very little overlap.

This is symptomatic of a deeper problem: people who struggle to put food on the table are missing out on the great advances in power dynamics – both personal and collective – made possible by the Internet. There is a lot of them, more every day, and they’re getting left behind.

All that said, this year’s Netroots Nation did offer some glimmers of hope for a more diverse netroots future. There was lots of talk of the potential for the Obama Administration’s broadband stimulus plan (albeit less clarity on what it will actually look like on the ground) and organizations like Free Press were present, spreading awareness of the digital divide and pointing towards opportunities to bridge it.

And there was even a panel on this very issue – entitled “Who’s Left Out? A Critical Look at Online Organizing” – one of the better attended, focused, and engaged panels that I attended.

But I also attended a panel on best blogging practices – and with those in mind, I’ll have to cut this post off here like so: more on this tomorrow.