Dear Activist,
Celebrate 14 years of community-building, quality alternative journalism, and effective grassroots organizing with the irrepressible Sherman Alexie and 500-1,000 of our best friends.
This has been a year of courageous risk-taking and relentless organizing. Help us be strong.
What: Real Change 14th Anniversary Breakfast
When: Wednesday November 12, 7:30-9am
Where: University of Washington, Husky Union Ballroom
Tickets are $50 each, $500 per table.
Guests have the following payment options:
1. A check made payable to Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle, WA 98121. Mail previous to event (preferred) or give it to us at the breakfast.
2. Call Kathy at 206-441-3247 x201 to process a credit card payment over the phone.
3. Tickets are available online
Driving directions
Public transportation
- Destination is University of Washington HUB
Sponsored by PCC, University of Washington Honors Department, Catering by FareStart
Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Mercer Island, Washington, is home to tent camp
An encampment for the homeless is set up on church property after a legal battle with local residents.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Camp4Unity: The Video
Great video of Real Change Organizing Project campaign against police sweeps in Seattle, Wa.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
NO more jails; NO more lies; NO more deaths
May 23, 2008
Dear Activist,
Save the date: Camp4Unity, Sunday, June 8th
The Mayor's protocols outlining how the city will conduct encampment clearances were released last month, and there is no substantial improvement. During a City Council committee meeting in early May, councilmembers in attendance listened intently while a dozen homeless advocates from the Real Change Organizing Project spoke from the heart on matters of loopholes, lack of oversight, criminalization of the poor, and many other concerns with on-going homeless sweeps. No changes are expected.
While the new protocols slightly improve provisions for notification, outreach, and storage of possessions, new loopholes were introduced that undermine the protections offered by severely limiting their application.
- Protections are denied to those who are not camped in groups
- Entire areas will soon be defined as permanent no-trespass zones where, again, the protocols will not apply.
- There are no external oversight and accountability measures.
Don't believe the City spin. These protocols are unacceptable and illegitimate. Resist the criminalization of survival in a time of growing homelessness and inadequate resources. Join the Real Change Organizing Project to Camp4Unity! No more sweeps. No more jails. No more lies. No more deaths.
Help us show the Mayor that we want all Seattle citizens to be safe - especially the most vulnerable. We demand a stop to the sweeps until the protocols have been rewritten to remove the loopholes, ensure access to services for anyone who needs them, and provide real oversight. Join us.
Camp4Unity
Sunday, June 8th - Monday, June 9th
Come for part of the event or for all of it!
Sunday, June 8th:
6 pm - 7 pm
Refreshments and setup
7 pm - 10 pm
Among friends and allies: A time for talk.
Monday, June 9th:
8 am - 9 am
Breakfast and visibility
9 am - 10 am
Memorial service for those who have died while surviving outside
For more information or to register contact Natalie
natalien@realchangenews.org
206.441.3247 X 206
Dear Activist,
Save the date: Camp4Unity, Sunday, June 8th
The Mayor's protocols outlining how the city will conduct encampment clearances were released last month, and there is no substantial improvement. During a City Council committee meeting in early May, councilmembers in attendance listened intently while a dozen homeless advocates from the Real Change Organizing Project spoke from the heart on matters of loopholes, lack of oversight, criminalization of the poor, and many other concerns with on-going homeless sweeps. No changes are expected.
While the new protocols slightly improve provisions for notification, outreach, and storage of possessions, new loopholes were introduced that undermine the protections offered by severely limiting their application.
- Protections are denied to those who are not camped in groups
- Entire areas will soon be defined as permanent no-trespass zones where, again, the protocols will not apply.
- There are no external oversight and accountability measures.
Don't believe the City spin. These protocols are unacceptable and illegitimate. Resist the criminalization of survival in a time of growing homelessness and inadequate resources. Join the Real Change Organizing Project to Camp4Unity! No more sweeps. No more jails. No more lies. No more deaths.
Help us show the Mayor that we want all Seattle citizens to be safe - especially the most vulnerable. We demand a stop to the sweeps until the protocols have been rewritten to remove the loopholes, ensure access to services for anyone who needs them, and provide real oversight. Join us.
Camp4Unity
Sunday, June 8th - Monday, June 9th
Come for part of the event or for all of it!
Sunday, June 8th:
6 pm - 7 pm
Refreshments and setup
7 pm - 10 pm
Among friends and allies: A time for talk.
Monday, June 9th:
8 am - 9 am
Breakfast and visibility
9 am - 10 am
Memorial service for those who have died while surviving outside
For more information or to register contact Natalie
natalien@realchangenews.org
206.441.3247 X 206
Monday, March 31, 2008
Oregon County to address inequality & social injustice
King county is taking steps to live up to its "namesake", Martin Luther King, Jr! (Full Article)
March 25, 2008
You've probably heard that King County is launching an attack on unfairness. by J. Large (Full Article) March 17, 2008
Good health is not just about good health care. by J. Large (Full Article) March 31, 2008
March 25, 2008
You've probably heard that King County is launching an attack on unfairness. by J. Large (Full Article) March 17, 2008
Good health is not just about good health care. by J. Large (Full Article) March 31, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Just how do officials count?!?
Two articles about the same event one (Full Article) from our "media friends" and the other
(Full Article) by advocate.
Monday, March 3, 2008
A Reveailing Truth
Sisters of the Road Advocate Patrick Nolan enlightens media on the true strife of homelessness!
(Full Article)
Photo at above: Patrick & "Matt" sleep out
Photo by Chris Ryan of The Portland Mercury
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Seattle groups team up to change policy
SHARE/WHEEL & Church of Mary Magdalene are trying to get city to change it's homeless encampment policy! (Full Article)
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Seattle's Secret Anti-Homeless Campaign
Since last May, the Seattle Mayor's office has coordinated what appears to be a zero-tolerance policy on homeless encampments. As Real Change and others have organized to expose this illegal and immoral policy, the Mayor's office has gone on the offensive with media smear tactics aimed at homeless people and a public disinformation campaign that hides behind the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness while making life as miserable as possible for those who do not fit within the overcrowded and inadequate shelter system. Above, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness ED Alison Eisinger delivers a kick-ass speech at the rally that launched Real Change's overnight encampment at Seattle City Hall on December 19.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Program save city millions
Seattle homeless program is saving jail, hospital and service space. (Full Article)
Thursday, December 20, 2007
S.H.S.D, City Councilman Speakout For Sweeps
Seattle City Councilman and Human Services Department Director speak against policies that police and city park agents have been using to dismantle homeless encampments.(Full Article)
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
A Seattle Manifesto
Manifesto: Italian, from Latin manifestus, clear, evident. See manifest.
A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature.
This editorial runs in this weeks Real Change, and is intended as a challenge for all of us to reconsider our approach to homelessness and poverty. Our systematic failure as homeless advocates and service providers to recognize that radical inequality and increased poverty and homelessness are linked have placed us in the position of now being part of the problem.
Call it a sign of the times. Cities throughout the Northwest and beyond are getting tough on visible poverty. Tacoma and Portland have enacted some of the most stringent “time, place, and manner” restrictions on panhandling anywhere, and Seattle has quietly adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy on homeless encampments of any size. San Francisco is an anti-homeless war zone, with homeless sweeps becoming both more frequent and brutalizing.
Even here, in liberal Seattle, the diamond-hard edge of our times is beginning to be felt.
The Downtown Seattle Association says there are more human feces on the street now than before public toilets were installed. They want this basic public amenity removed.
They say panhandling is up by thirty-eight percent this year alone, despite their new “Have a Heart” campaign to discourage direct giving. They say that outdoor meals programs, which serve some of the toughest cases, attract litter, dysfunction, and blight.
Yet, few others seem to have noticed. Business is booming. The convention center and facilities at other hotels and conference centers are fully booked. Downtown living is more popular than ever, and concerted efforts to effectively address homelessness are underway.
So why the meanness? Why here? Why now?
The answer has to do with the future of our downtown, and the hardening soul of Seattle. As those who have the means increasingly opt for in-city living, Seattle is becoming an island of affluence in a sea of growing economic and racial disparity.
One barrier to downtown living is the perception that it might not be safe. With big money committed to downtown development that is designed to attract the wealthiest one percent, the DSA's preoccupation with squelching visible poverty makes a lot more sense.
While everyone knows that the downtown has been rezoned for “tall and skinny” condo development, the upper-end of this market is the proverbial tail that wags the dog.
There’s the Escala at 4th and Virginia, slated to open in 2009. "Anticipate perfection. Embrace elegance. Experience grandeur," says their website. This 30-story glass tower at 4th and Virginia has 275 new condos going for a million dollars or more each. Nearby, at the Fifteen Twenty One Second Avenue Building ("designed exclusively for the confident few"), 143 units sell for an average of $1.8 million each. The move-in date here is December 2008.
The Four Seasons, going in at 1st and Union and scheduled to open in summer 2008, bills itself as "Seattle's Signature Address," and will feature 36 private residences above a luxury hotel. Condos are priced from $2.5 million to more than $10 million.
With all this wealth comes a vision for a downtown that is safe, secure, and sanitized, where the über-rich and the merely affluent can buy groceries at the public market and uphold high cultural standards at the SAM without ever having to confront the ugly side of inequality.
It'll be sort of like New York. But without the diversity or the people.
There is a strategy in play, and it involves both carrots and sticks. The priority for "ending homelessness," led by federal funding opportunities and eagerly adopted by government, philanthropy, and large human services institutions who stand to benefit, focuses on that ten percent or so of homeless people who constitute the visible urban poor, otherwise known as the "chronic homeless."
No matter what the issue — homelessness, education, the environment, whatever — federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation at minimal price. Homelessness goes for around $1.6 billion right now. Cheap.
The stick is the increased policing of the urban poor, and new legal tools designed to drive poverty from the center to the periphery.
If there is a central fact of life in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is this: What we don’t see doesn’t bother us.
As the Downtown Seattle Association beats their steady media drumbeat of faux-compassion and tough love for the poor, we can expect them to move from rhetoric to more explicit forms of action. We need to prepare for when this happens
Approaches to homelessness that stigmatize and criminalize poverty must be resisted. Rhetoric that legitimates fear and hatred of the poor under a threadbare cover of compassion needs to be questioned. Policies that undermine equality and democracy need to be identified and opposed.
For too long, the strategy to end homelessness has focused on charity, while questions of economic justice have received little more than useless lip service. Meanwhile, a one-sided class war has raged on right under our noses.
Don’t you think it’s time to take sides?
A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature.
This editorial runs in this weeks Real Change, and is intended as a challenge for all of us to reconsider our approach to homelessness and poverty. Our systematic failure as homeless advocates and service providers to recognize that radical inequality and increased poverty and homelessness are linked have placed us in the position of now being part of the problem.
Call it a sign of the times. Cities throughout the Northwest and beyond are getting tough on visible poverty. Tacoma and Portland have enacted some of the most stringent “time, place, and manner” restrictions on panhandling anywhere, and Seattle has quietly adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy on homeless encampments of any size. San Francisco is an anti-homeless war zone, with homeless sweeps becoming both more frequent and brutalizing.Even here, in liberal Seattle, the diamond-hard edge of our times is beginning to be felt.
The Downtown Seattle Association says there are more human feces on the street now than before public toilets were installed. They want this basic public amenity removed.
They say panhandling is up by thirty-eight percent this year alone, despite their new “Have a Heart” campaign to discourage direct giving. They say that outdoor meals programs, which serve some of the toughest cases, attract litter, dysfunction, and blight.
Yet, few others seem to have noticed. Business is booming. The convention center and facilities at other hotels and conference centers are fully booked. Downtown living is more popular than ever, and concerted efforts to effectively address homelessness are underway.
So why the meanness? Why here? Why now?
The answer has to do with the future of our downtown, and the hardening soul of Seattle. As those who have the means increasingly opt for in-city living, Seattle is becoming an island of affluence in a sea of growing economic and racial disparity.
One barrier to downtown living is the perception that it might not be safe. With big money committed to downtown development that is designed to attract the wealthiest one percent, the DSA's preoccupation with squelching visible poverty makes a lot more sense.
While everyone knows that the downtown has been rezoned for “tall and skinny” condo development, the upper-end of this market is the proverbial tail that wags the dog.
There’s the Escala at 4th and Virginia, slated to open in 2009. "Anticipate perfection. Embrace elegance. Experience grandeur," says their website. This 30-story glass tower at 4th and Virginia has 275 new condos going for a million dollars or more each. Nearby, at the Fifteen Twenty One Second Avenue Building ("designed exclusively for the confident few"), 143 units sell for an average of $1.8 million each. The move-in date here is December 2008.
The Four Seasons, going in at 1st and Union and scheduled to open in summer 2008, bills itself as "Seattle's Signature Address," and will feature 36 private residences above a luxury hotel. Condos are priced from $2.5 million to more than $10 million.
With all this wealth comes a vision for a downtown that is safe, secure, and sanitized, where the über-rich and the merely affluent can buy groceries at the public market and uphold high cultural standards at the SAM without ever having to confront the ugly side of inequality.
It'll be sort of like New York. But without the diversity or the people.
There is a strategy in play, and it involves both carrots and sticks. The priority for "ending homelessness," led by federal funding opportunities and eagerly adopted by government, philanthropy, and large human services institutions who stand to benefit, focuses on that ten percent or so of homeless people who constitute the visible urban poor, otherwise known as the "chronic homeless."
No matter what the issue — homelessness, education, the environment, whatever — federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation at minimal price. Homelessness goes for around $1.6 billion right now. Cheap.
The stick is the increased policing of the urban poor, and new legal tools designed to drive poverty from the center to the periphery.
If there is a central fact of life in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is this: What we don’t see doesn’t bother us.
As the Downtown Seattle Association beats their steady media drumbeat of faux-compassion and tough love for the poor, we can expect them to move from rhetoric to more explicit forms of action. We need to prepare for when this happens
Approaches to homelessness that stigmatize and criminalize poverty must be resisted. Rhetoric that legitimates fear and hatred of the poor under a threadbare cover of compassion needs to be questioned. Policies that undermine equality and democracy need to be identified and opposed.
For too long, the strategy to end homelessness has focused on charity, while questions of economic justice have received little more than useless lip service. Meanwhile, a one-sided class war has raged on right under our noses.
Don’t you think it’s time to take sides?
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