Things I Learned While Knitting

This past Sunday I attended a Learn To Knit Party, benefiting the Women’s Daytime Drop In Center in Berkeley. A friend of a friend was putting it on to bring exposure to the center’s work with homeless women and children. This is the only daytime drop in center a homeless mother and her young children can go for safe refuge and support in the Bay Area (most homeless shelters are closed during the day, so if you are at one, you must pack up all of your possessions in the morning and return back at night).

I asked their volunteer coordinator what items they most needed at the center. Guess what? Toiletries (e.g., deodorant, toothpaste) and, drum roll….diapers! The only reason why they don’t need feminine hygiene products is because they recently received a gift in kind from a major manufacturer. When the center runs out of diapers they send the moms to Bananas, where they are allotted six diapers a day. Even if you have twins, you receive only six diapers. Six!

The volunteer coordinator also shared with us some interesting tidbits: The fastest growing homeless population is women and children. Their center is seeing a lot of moms who have been evicted from their homes due to foreclosure. These are single moms who were gainfully employed, paying the rent on time, but because their landlord didn’t keep up with the mortgage, the banks evicted them. What does one do when you have no monetary safety net or family support system? How can you simultaneously keep your full time job, look for a place to rent, pick your kid up from childcare/school, and get back to the homeless shelter every day in time to secure your spot for that night? Not to mention, standing in bureaucratic lines for hours with a screaming 3 year old?

It’s all about Health and Hygiene

I’ve decided to focus the donation drive on Health and Hygiene for Mamas and Babies. I don’t know about you but a few weeks ago I was spring cleaning and discovered a box of travel sized baby toiletries and hotel soaps I had been stockpiling for who knows how long. Same also for unused diapers that Baby G. has outgrown. If all of our friends with and without kids donated this kind of stuff, we could probably come up with a pretty large pile to donate to a few shelters in the San Francisco/East Bay and Sacramento areas.

Suppose, also, that a few of us committed to purchasing some feminine hygiene products and diapers to be donated?

A few days ago our monthly Amazon.com Subscribe and Save order of diapers was delivered. (Side note: Take it from a bargain hunter – Subscribe & Save totally rocks for non-perishable household goods, including cases of Seventh Generation diapers). It dawned on me that I had seen some Amazon.com wishlists that had been designated for non profits. I fired off an email to my contact atSt. John’s Shelter to see if they had a wishlist set up. Turns out, it wasn’t on their radar. Eh viola, You can find it here. My contact is also going to see if they can put a link to it on their website.

I’ve got an email into my contact at the Women’s Daytime Drop-in Center to see if they have a wishlist set up. Hopefully, I will hear back from her soon.

Feeling really energized about all of this. More to come later.

The Not So Fun Stuff To Donate

Ever since watching the Big O show, the tent city situation has been eating away at me everyday. I knew I wanted to do something about it but with two kids under the age of three, I’ve got my hands tied behind my back most days. I figured that among my circle of moms we had plenty of stuff that could be donated and put to good use. Why not have a donation drive for women and children’s clothing and baby care items?

Last week I emailed the volunteer coordinator at the St. John’s Shelter for Women and Children. This is one of the shelters that was featured in the tent city show. According to the volunteer coordinator, they are still turning away over 240 people every night. 240 women and children. Every night. They have been doing outreach to the tent city and you can read a note from their Executive Director here. St. John’s has a wishlist on their website, but since I knew that they had received a lot of media coverage due to the Big O, I wanted to get specifics on what items they most needed. As it turns out, since the show aired, they have received an abundance of donations, mostly clothing. Go figure.

Do you know what kind of stuff they are in need of? Feminine hygiene products. Apparently, nobody wants to donate sanitary napkins and tampons. Along the same lines: large diapers, baby wipes, heavy duty trash bags, and copy paper (paperwork!).

These everyday personal hygiene and baby care items are things that most of us take for granted. We just stop at the store on the way home to pick them up or order them online, delivered to our doorstep a few days later. We throw away or hoard hotel soaps and mini shampoos. If you are a parent, you know how much the expense of diapers can eat at your budget. Never again will I look at these items the same way.

Leave it to the Big O

I first heard about the tent cities from my friend, D. She is one of those folks who always has their hand on the pulse of social and cultural shifts. We were talking about the current state of affairs and what we would do if we ended up homeless. How much could we live on? Where could we go? I mentioned that my family would probably start camping out in the Sierra Nevada foothills if things got that bad. Then D. mentioned that there were already tent cities filled with people who had lost their homes due to job loss and foreclosure. At first, I did not believe her. What are these tent cities you speak of? They are all over the country? Apparently, it was the dirty little secret of the economic downturn. Total Grapes of Wrath and no one in the mainstream media seemed to be talking about it. Fast forward a few months: Leave it to the Big O for producing a show on the whole tent city phenomena.

What we don’t see

The other night I was helping a friend move out of the area. My friend is a journalist who previously worked for a national newspaper and we were talking about the recent media blitz that had descended upon Sacramento’s tent city. Since the Big O story broke, media outlets descended on the tent city. I can see why journalists flocked. People living this way, just outside the California capital, is a very compelling visual.

Now it has been reported that the tent city population is composed mostly of homeless people who were already homeless and not middle class folks who lost their homes as a result of the economic downturn. So does this mean that if we don’t see people sliding into poverty, that it does not exist?

In recent memory we’ve had several catastrophic events that, despite terrible personal losses, have brought us together to support one another (e.g., 9/11, the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina). I remember watching CNN a few days after Hurricane Katrina. The camera panned to a justifiably angry man who was holding a nearly catatonic baby in a soiled diaper up to the camera.

Each of these tragic events resulted in an amazing outpouring of support from the general public. Telethons were broadcast. Concerts were held to raise money for the victims and their families. After Hurricane Katrina, emergency shelters were created; hotel vouchers were given out and the general public pulled together to help the displaced. The current recession we are in isn’t the result of a natural disaster. We are not going to be seeing people lined up waiting to be aired lifted out of the disaster zone.

When I got home from helping my friend I had this Guardian article waiting for me. The journalist, Sasha Abramsky, is talking about poverty and hunger in the United States. He writes:

“Northeast of California, in the state of Idaho, I met families whose children stood in line every day throughout the long summer months for free meals given out in city parks by church groups. In some parks at dinnertime, dozens of old cars would drive up, the kids would be disgorged to pick up their food bags and then the parents would drive them home to eat. Some of the families had lost their homes to foreclosures. Others had gone horribly into debt – on credit cards, on high-interest payday loans – trying to hang onto their homes. As they fell further behind on their payments, they could afford less and less food. …..

….That kind of poverty is inherently less visually spectacular than a tent city. It’s less likely to get Oprah’s TV audience up in arms. But when the damage from the economic collapse is finally accounted, it is these millions of little stories that will likely leave the most enduring imprint on America’s social landscape.”

This problem isn’t going away anytime soon. As parents charged with the next generation; shouldn’t we come together to help struggling families? Even if they are not featured on the 10 O’clock news.