Organized homeless people have been talking to the Committee to End Homelessness since the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was in the planning stage.\u00a0 We have been telling them: they have to work for economic justice if they want to end homelessness, and in the meantime people need immediate shelter to stay alive tonight.\u00a0 Helping homeless people survive tonight is not a distraction from ending homelessness; it is essential to it.<\/p>\n
The Ten Year Plan began in 2005 with good intentions.\u00a0 It went in the direction that paths of good intentions tend to go when they don’t get reality checks.\u00a0 By 2012, there were more homeless people, and more homeless people outside without shelter, since the Ten Year Plan started, and\u00a0 over 300 homeless people had died outside or by violence in King County.<\/p>\n
We stopped talking to CEHKC.\u00a0 We began going to their Governing Board meetings with 150-200 people and demanding<\/em> <\/strong>that they get real.\u00a0 And we have had an effect.\u00a0 CEHKC changed its policies to recognize the need and value of emergency shelter as the entry point to the path out of homelessness, and at their November 20th meeting they will announce the intention of getting 1,000 people off the street by summer 2014.<\/p>\n To make this promise real, we must continue to give CEHKC reality checks, and insist they cash them.\u00a0 Tomorrow morning we will rally in Westlake Park at 7 am, with breakfast and coffee, then at 8 am we will march to occupy the CEHKC Governing Board meeting. Please join us.<\/strong> We all need to pull together to make the promise real.<\/p>\n I will be picking up sandwiches at the SHARE office at 6:15 am, as I do (almost) every Wednesday; this time the sandwiches will be distributed at Westlake Park instead of Steinbrueck Park.\u00a0 If I can get up that early, you can too!\u00a0 If you can’t join us at 7 am, march with us at 8.\u00a0 If you can’t march with us at 8, sit with us at 8:30, at the Governing Board meeting.<\/p>\n At noon, WHEEL\/Women in Black will stand vigil for five more homeless people who died outside or by violence.\u00a0 With these five deaths, we have reached a tragic milestone of\u00a0 500 people we have stood vigil for since we began in 2000.\u00a0 We will be asking the people of the Governing Board to stand with us.\u00a0 We hope they will take this<\/strong> reality check.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Organized homeless people have been talking to the Committee to End Homelessness since the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was in the planning stage.\u00a0 We have been telling them: they have to work for economic justice if they want to end homelessness, and in the meantime people need immediate shelter to stay alive tonight.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,44,32,102,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-economic-justice","category-homelessness-activism","category-ocehkc","category-women-in-black"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":971,"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions\/971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/anitra.net\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}