I am on the board of an emerging nonprofit. We applied for a Pepsi grant, as did many other Gulf Coast Projects. (Pepsi set aside special money to help the Coast after the oil spill devastation.) Voting started August 2 and goes through August 31. The grant proposals with the most votes win the money.
Here we are:
http://gulf.refresheverything.com/helpjacksoncountyhomeless
Please share this. You can vote every day. I know that this isn't a funny piece, and I'm sorry to just outright ask.
The page details how we will operate. Homeless families who must have children under 18 are able to stay in churches overnight while receiving social services during the day. The idea is to put existing buildings to use as shelters, staffed mostly by volunteers. There are over 150 models of this program nationwide. The first one opened in 1986. Families are never required to attend religious services, but using existing buildings saves money.
This program that we are affiliated with--Family Promise--has the highest rating at Charity Navigator, which is 4 stars. They are very efficient.
I can't tell you how the writers of OpenSalon have helped me with everything that has gone on in my life in recent years. I have written before about becoming a volunteer leader of a homeless ministry, when just a few years ago I never thought I'd lead anything.
http://open.salon.com/blog/deliablack/2009/08/08/ive_come_to_a_clearing
Thanks for any support you can give.
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Brassawe
Catherine Forsythe
fernsy
Peter Breschard
Just Thinking...
Delia Yeager
Salon.com
Comments
Rated.
I'll do what I can. Good luck. You are doing good things.
You got my vote.
I so identify w/the homeless, mainly b/c I was 1 step from being so--and at the hands of a man I loved. He was a mean drunk who would throw me out of "his house" for whatever came into his drunken, demented mind at that moment.
I had gotten into the habit of sleeping w/my car keys beneath my pillow and stashing a housedress and purse nearby the door, in case I had to leave in a hurry--and many times I did. That was before I bought the junker car, when he'd toss me out onto the street, no matter the time or weather.
I had no family to speak of that I could go to for help. I had tried that, but the only advice I got was to move back home to Mom's--but only if I got rid of my cats first (I had 3 then). Which wasn't a genuine offer.
It took 16 yrs, losing a career opportunity and the potential of a man who's still the best man I've ever known, had I just been free to pursue that...but I finally left. First I would finally have him arrested and jailed for domestic violence. It took 6 mos later before I finally had the resources and a place to go. Now my home is everything to me, and the next time I leave I'll be in a box.
I totally relate: there really is no place like home.
Hate to disagree, but i have the right as a former homeless bum.
These homeless people?
Last damn thing they need is pepsi, for crying out loud....
especially diet pepsi...
i don't understand your reasoning here, alas.
We need more sophorifics, like tylenol pm,
for them.
(i used to smuggled them into the shelter in my sock)
the homeless must learn that we are a health conscious
benificent Motherland, not
a buncha non-denomenational ditzes.
Make em go to church!
tylenol pm for communion, i say.
and maybe green tea for the, um, blood part of all that rig=
amoromole. Or better yet:
one of my handpicked disciples for the new religion
i am starting tomorrow:
the church of the resurrected body....
i am trolling os for disciples, cuz i have become
very lazy now i got a teeny tiny rooming house abode
with wifi.
seriously:
the work, alas, can NEVER be serious
or it will sink like the rock of gibraltar
to the depths of the apathetic atlantic, alas.