Not sure if you have seen it, but you ought to catch the book excerpt in this week’s Independent. It’s the second chapter of Dick Reavis’ book Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.
I haven’t read the book yet (But it is on my Amazon wish list - hint, hint), but the excerpt was [...]
Without a doubt, my most frequently asked question involves panhandling. What should I do? How should I do it? Are they going to use the money for something bad?
I submit that most of our questions along this line are not really about panhandlers, but about our need to hold onto our money and our service [...]
Imagine, for a moment, that you have a fairly normal life. You have a job, an apartment that is just a bit too expensive, you have some credit cards you really ought to pay off and a car payment, along with the insurance, tags and so on that come with it and, of course, no [...]
Rick and Karen* have been in town about two months. They came from New Jersey, drawn here by the promise of work that did not materialize after they put all their stuff in storage and rode the bus down. Six months ago, he was a hard working construction worker and she was a housewife. Now, [...]
The wind whipped through my sweater this morning on my scooter. Lately, I have been sleeping with the windows open. These are harbingers of Autumn, a time of beautiful leaves and crisp weather, of bobbing for apples, trick or treating and the anticipation of Thanksgiving break…
Unless you live outside. If you live outside, it means [...]
People who live outside or in their cars have trouble getting very basic hygiene items – things we take for granted like soap, toothpaste and shampoo. Love Wins Ministries provides travel size Freshpacs to the people we feed every weekend in the park.
What is a Freshpac?
A Freshpac is simply a quart sized sealable plastic bag [...]
Sometimes, the people I meet in my work here make an instant impression - and sadly, sometimes they all just run together. Martha fell into the latter category. I no longer remember when I first met her, or the circumstances.
She had sporadic bouts with homelessness. Sometimes she would go into longer-term programs and sometimes she [...]
The National Coalition for the Homeless recently released a 194 page (!) report on the trend among cities to criminalize homelessness.
Of the 25 cities surveyed by the US Conference of Mayors for its annual Hunger and Homelessness Report, 19 reported an increase in homelessness in 2008. On average, cities reported a 12 percent increase. The [...]
My friend Wayne Sutton went on a photo tour of NC State campus last weekend, and discovered someone’s bedding under a bridge. He shot some footage with his camera, posted below.
A small, birdlike woman in her late 40’s or early fifties, she is older than most of the folks out here. She walks with a limp and has what my grandmother would have called a lazy eye. Sometimes she sleeps in a shelter, sometimes she sleeps outside and sometimes she sleeps at a friend’s house. [...]
