A Sad Day in America

Homeless people in Ohio care about voting rights and the Voting Rights Act.  In Cleveland, around 78% of the homeless population are African American, and there are similar numbers in most of the large American cities.  The VRA is important because homeless people do vote, and NEOCH has always made voting a priority issue.   We have been engaged in a lawsuit with the State of Ohio over identification issues since 2006, and we are working to extend that lawsuit for the next few years to protect access to voting in person on Election Day for those without identification in the statewide election of 2014 and the national 2016 Presidential Election. 

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NEOCH Releases Voting Report and Press Release

The Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless spent a great deal of time in 2012 assisting homeless people to vote. We worked on our identification lawsuit to assure that a homeless person who shows up to vote in person on Election Day without identification, they should have the opportunity to vote.  We also drove hundreds over to the Board of Elections early to vote.  State Rep Nickie Antonio and State Senator Nina Turner monitor Board of Elections on Saturday November 3, 2012 We registered thousands within the shelters between the shelter staff and NEOCH staff.  We also physically took over 200 people to vote and registered over 300.

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NCH Hires a New Executive Director

The Board of Directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless, of which I am a member, announced this week the appointment of Jerry Jones as its new Executive Director. Jones follows the successful work of Neil Donovan, who stepped down from this role in May.

Board President John Parvensky announced the new hire: "Homelessness in America is a national tragedy that has been tolerated for far too long. We can no longer stand quietly while budgets are cut and our political leaders try to manage the problem rather than solve it.

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Check Out our Facebook Page

Kim, our volunteer who created the Facebook page, has been out sick for the past month, but we have kept the page updated in her absence (Search Clevelandhomeless).  We have some nice photo albums including five photos from Cynthia Miller one of the original Grapevine photography projects.   There are also photos of our vendors in their uniforms and photos from the pancake breakfast.  We also post events that about homelessness and housing in Ohio on the Facebook page.

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Dan Kerr Does Community Organizing in DC Now

Dan Kerr, a founder of Food Not Bombs in Cleveland and writer of Derelict Paradise is now teaching at American University in Washington DC and working on a history project of the Center for Creative Non-Violence Shelter.  Here are where the actual oral histories are kept about homelessness in DC.  Professor Kerr cut his teeth in Cleveland where he would interview people after the meal downtown about homelessness.

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Toledo Providers Object to Central Intake

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is pushing an untested strategy of centralizing the intake on homeless people.  They are urging cities to undertake this system where everyone goes to the same place to be screened for the best path off the streets. Cleveland moved to a Central Intake model in 2008 for men, and in 2012 for families.  The shelters that receive public money must participate in the Central Intake.  The benefits are that shelters cannot screen people out who are hard to serve as they had done in the past.  The problem in Cleveland is that the Central Intake are in shelters which draws more people to shelter.   


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HUD to Close on Friday Because of Sequestration

On Friday June 14, you will not be able to call the Department of Housing and Urban Development to get a copy of a housing list because of Sequestration.  You will not be able to talk to a human being if you want to find out the procedure for filing a fair housing complaint.  You will not be able to figure out who to talk to find out if a landlord receives federal dollars to house low income or homeless people because the HUD offices will be closed.  This furlough day is to satisfy Congressional demands to reduce the federal budget.

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Anna Louise Inn Sold in Cincy

I was reading the Streetvibes (Cincinnati's Street newspaper) from Cincinnati and they detailed the sale of the Anna Louise Inn to developers.   We covered this last year with a call for boycotting Western and Southern over their bullying of this shelter and permanent supportive housing.   The folks at Streetvibes and the staff of the Cincinnati Coalition are not too happy about the deal.  The shelter operator decided that the long drawn out court case was not worth it anymore.  Developers had paid enough so that the shelter could relocate to a new facility and serve the same number of women.

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County Responds to Family Homelessness

Each summer as school ends and warmer weather (usually) begins, more and more families find themselves without shelter and a place to sleep. Family homelessness itself can be caused by many reasons: poverty, unemployment, difficulty accessible affordable housing, addiction, domestic violence, etc. But around every April, Cuyahoga County slowly sees a rise in the number of families in need of shelter. Why the rise now?

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Emergency Shelter Grant Takes Major Hit in Cleveland

The City of Cleveland received some unexpected news about a large decrease in funds for the Emergency Solutions Grant which supports the emergency shelters and the housing rental assistance programs in Cleveland.  City and County staff have not developed a plan yet for how these reduced funds will be distributed locally.  It was reported by HUD that Cleveland would receive a 22% decrease in funds while Akron received a 25% decrease.

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Religious Support to Reduce Family Homelessness

On May 28^th, a group of representatives from Mental Health Services, Inc., Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, local churches and community activists met to address the rising problem of family homelessness in Cleveland.   Family homelessness is a distinctly different problem in that it dramatically increases during the summer months when school ends and kids are not in school and may make it difficult for grandmothers or friends to maintain their house.

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New Street Chronicle Available in Cleveland

The new issue of the Street Chronicle is available and on the streets of Cleveland.  Make sure you pick one up from your favorite local vendor.  They are available on the streets of Cleveland and always at the West Side Market.  There are some fantastic photos from the rally down in Columbus asking for Medicaid expansion, the pancake breakfast, and the new vendor uniforms.   There are stories from each of the vendors of the paper.  There are news stories about the Homeless Congress and the new Cleveland Foodbank program.  We have a couple of poems including one by our departed friend Daniel Thompson. 

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Secretary of State Issues Fraud Press Release

The Ohio Secretary of State issued a press release about referrals of fraud to the Ohio Attorney.  This was a bizarre release about the lack of voter suppression in the last election, which was strange since we witnessed offensive billboards put up in the inner City of Cleveland.   The release claims that there was not an "epidemic," but there were some irregularities in the last election.  Out of 5.7 million voters, there were only 135 suspicious ballots which is the farthest away from an epidemic that you could ever get.  There was no discussion of the long lines that are a form of voter suppression.  There was no discussion of not allowing weekend voting another voter suppression activity.

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Memorial Day: Remember those Veterans Who are Homeless

Today is Memorial Day in the United States.  A time when we remember those serving the United States who gave the ultimate sacrifice.  It is great that there are hundreds of volunteers cleaning up cemeteries, and attending memorials or parades.   But what if we remembered those veterans who are largely forgotten by our society but not dead?  There are large numbers of veterans who are homeless and living in isolation from our society including a large number of vets still from the Viet Nam era. 

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Mental Health System Full of Holes in Ohio

The Dispatch estimated that taxpayers pick up $1.3 million from the Franklin County jail because of untreated mental health care. This does not include the billions of unreimbursed care at the emergency rooms throughout Ohio that taxpayers pick up.   The Dispatch mentioned the significant cuts to the Mental Health system since 2007.  One of the surprising advocates has been Governor John Kasich. The Dispatch mentioned that Kasich's brother is mentally ill.   He approved a budget that cut mental health agencies in 2011, and most agencies were happy that they did not receive a bigger cut.   The Governor's rhetoric has been very good, but the actions have not followed suit.

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Cleveland Endorses National Housing Trust

At the May 13, Cleveland City Council meeting the members passed a resolution in support of HR 1213, the Common Sense Housing Investment Act of 2013.  The goal is to get all of our local Congressional members to endorse this campaign.  The United for Homes campaign under the direction of the National Low Income Housing Coalition worked over the last few years to develop a strategy to fund the National Housing Trust.  Congress created the trust, but the funding source collapsed as the 2008 housing bubble burst. 

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Family Homelessness Almanac Published

We received a beautiful and comprehensive American Almanac of Family Homelessness published by the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness.
 
This is a huge book in the style of a coffee table book from the 1970s.  Every page has some wonderful charts or graphs. For policy wonks this book is not to miss.  There is a page dedicated to each state with statistics on the major cities within those states.  These stats are based on flawed Annual counts, which dramatically undercounts families.

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Missing Persons Website a Needed Improvement

Back in 2009, NEOCH wrote about the gruesome discovery of 11 women in the home of a serial killer.  These women were in effect homeless women who made the fateful decision to reject shelter and instead found a home with a predator.  Then in 2011, a report was issued by the City of Cleveland in response to the perception that the City dropped the ball on preventing the deaths of 11 women on Imperial Ave.  The missing persons report (click on the pdf in the middle of the page) provided a series of recommendations for improving missing persons searches.

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Local Reports from DC National Meetings

One of the best part of the meeting of the National Coalition for the Homeless meeting is hearing the local updates from around the United States.  It is good to hear that the struggles in Cleveland are nothing compared to some of the other areas of the country.   Every once in a while there are victories that we could all learn to replicate locally.
South Dakota
Has decided not to expand Medicaid.  Worked to establish a state Housing Trust Fund in March 2013, and part of the fund goes to economic development.

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Pancake Breakfast Successful

The National Honor Society Members of St. Josephs Academy organized a Pancake Breakfast last Saturday to raise money for NEOCH.  These future leaders of Cleveland took a Saturday to help out homeless families in Cleveland.   They found donations of food and coffee for the breakfast.  They raised $1,250 to help us publish the Family Street Card, and continue to organize around the effort to meet the overflow demand of Moms and Kids that we know will show up at the shelters this summer.  These funds will help us staff the partnership to bring religious organizations to the table to assist MHS keep families together this summer. 

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