The Close the Gap Coalition is seeking volunteers to help eliminate unsheltered or “street” homelessness. The Coalition aims to boost the volunteer base for existing programs to an extent that opportunities for capacity growth open up.

“A shortage of volunteers is among the primary causes of the shelter gap – or the difference between the number of shelter beds and the number of people actually needing shelter,” explains Selena Kilmoyer, a homeless advocate and volunteer for Camp Quixote. “If we can recruit a greater number of volunteers, we should be able to create new shelter opportunities, new alternatives to street camping, and close the service gap that leaves people sleeping alone in the woods.”

Setting a target of eighty new regular volunteers, the Coalition seeks volunteers to staff Camp Quixote’s host tent, Interfaith Work’s emergency overflow shelter, and the Family Support Center’s homeless outreach and shelter referral programs. The Coalition will be conducting a high visibility volunteer recruitment drive from late September through mid-October.

According to a census taken of the homeless last January, 135 households went without shelter. This represents 34% of all households without housing (392 households). A shortage of shelter beds is the most common cause of people sleeping outdoors, according to Kilmoyer. Most of the unsheltered homeless make do by sleeping in cars or under tarps in the woods.

Downtown Olympia has taken the bulk of the public impacts of unsheltered homelessness, spurring the City Council to enact bans on sidewalk-sitting and overnight RV parking. The Close the Gap Coalition intends to reduce or eliminate unsheltered homelessness and its public impacts – thereby eliminating the need to pass similar laws in the future.

I'm starting a small business (consultation business to help non-profits recruit and manage volunteers), and need to build a website.

I'm pretty comfortable with Indesign CS2, and can lay out a very attractive newspaper, but I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to web design, or even how to use FrontPage.  If I could afford it, I'd hire someone to build the site for me.  The truth is, though, that I'm time-rich and cash-poor. 

Is there anyone here who could help me get started - maybe offer a decent tutorial or guide me through some of the first steps until I'm comfortable with the software?

If we think we've been grumpy on the blog lately, we've got nothing going on this guy.  Somebody must've slipped the angry pill in his coffee.

My favorite line is at the end: "That camera's not on, is it?  Cause if I find myself on..."  Oops.

As mentioned in a previous post, I'll be occasionally posting writings from Will's chapbook, "This is the Life", along with the letters that Rachel Corrie sent home from Rafah.  There has been a fair bit of discussion on Olyblog about Rachel, the ISM, and the Israel/Palestine conflict in the last couple years, and I've decided it is unproductive to discuss the ISM without directly posting the writings of ISM activists.

The wells that Will mentions in the second piece here are the same (at least I'm pretty sure) as those written about by Rachel. 

Will's writings carry a "copyleft", which gives explicit permission to reproduce providing that doing so is not to make a profit.  Much of this writing can be found on this blog, where I've been slowly posting it for Will.       -Phil

BRAZIL 

After refugees were displaced to Rafah in 1948, several foreign governments aided with the construction of housing for refugees. One neighborhood of Rafah is called Brazil because the Brazilian government helped to build it.

Monsoor carries the metal brazier upstairs, walking backwards, cigarette burning down to filter in his mouth. He takes two legs, I take one. Logs burn between us, spilling the occasional coal on the tile stairs.

“Monsoor, I’m impressed!” I say.

As a result of recent speculations on Olyblog about the work of Rachel and other ISMer's in Palestine, I've decided to post writings both from Rachel as well as from Will Hewitt, who was in Rafah at the same time. 

This first letter from Rachel mentions Israeli "towers", as well as bulldozed wells.  There were, at the time (I am uncertain as to whether the towers were removed during the "withdrawal" -which really only referred to the settlements- from Gaza), actual guard/sniper towers on the ends of most of the major streets in Rafah.  These towers were very dangerous as soldiers often shot randomly into the busy streets of Rafah, frequently killing or injuring pedestrians and school children. Tom Hurndall, a UK national and ISM activist, was killed by a bullet from one of these towers not long after Rachel's death.

As well, destruction of basic Palestinian infrastructure is a common tactic for the Israeli military, a tactic often used for collective punishment of Palestinians.  Wells are a common target, and Rachel and other ISMer's have spent a good deal of time camping at Palestinian wells to protect them from the IDF.

Rachel's letters from Palestine are available on the internet and are not copyrighted.  You may download them in booklet form here.

Hi friends and family, and others,

Senator Obama delivered the sermon today at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.  It is well worth watching (keep the kleenex close!).

Watch it here. 

Introduction

This is the beginning of a special series of posts, just for my friend Rob.  Rob and I lived and worked together for 3 years at Bread & Roses, and have shared enough drinks to blind a sailor.  It is, therefore, important to me that he get his very concerning questions answered about what I think is going to happen to him after he kicks the bucket.

This is also a good opportunity for general discussion on religion, as there is a tremendous amount of misinformation and misunderstanding around the issue.  So I am going to take the opportunity to post on a range of issues that seem to go to the root of the misunderstanding, including: afterlife, scriptural exegesis and interpretation, the meaning of faith, and the purpose of religion.  Some of what I will write in this series will be based on my understanding of current biblical scholarship, which is highly technical and actually quite scientific in its [the scholarship, not so much my understanding of it] approach.  And some of what I write will be my own opinions, which are relatively well educated but nonetheless quite subjective.  I am by no means in any way an expert.  Just a lively layperson.

Please feel free to jump in on the discussion, but let's try to avoid making assumptions and jumping to conclusions about the beliefs of others.  Let's try to keep it polite and civil as well (okay Mike, here you go: Let's try to be gentle with each other here.)

Afterlife 

"So, do you indeed believe in an eternal "punishment" for not believing in God and Jesus and following Christian dogma?"

You say that race doesn't matter.  You say that qualifications are all that counts in employment and education.  You say that money is all that matters in lending and other market exchanges.  You say that you're color-blind, and that it's time to overturn affirmative action programs.  In fact, you say that affirmative action is reverse-racism.

You adamantly insist that you are not a racist, either overtly or unconsciously.

Now's your chance to prove it.  Either you have no racist tendencies or preferences... or this is your "Come to Jesus" moment.

Take the test.

Post your results.  (Be brave!) 

Go here to take the test, then click on "Race IAT". 

This is from Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and shows the extraordinary affect that racial stereotypes and internalized oppression can have on test scores.

I'll first offer the snippet from the book, then offer a brief explaination of the word "priming", then I'll post Gladwell's sources at the end. [Emphasis added by myself.]

The psychologists Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half. As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think they are a reliable indicator of the test taker's ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she's truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of "smart"?...

..."I talked to the black students afterward, and I asked them, 'Did anything lower your performance?'" Aronson said. "I would ask, 'Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your race?' Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance. And they would always say no and something like 'You know, I just don't think I'm smart enough to be here.'"

There's been quite a bit of discussion on Olyblog lately about racism and white priviledge.  There are two things I'd like to point out here.

The first is that there has been a lack of concrete evidence describing the reality of insitutional racism in our discussions.  Educational inequality, environmental racism, white flight, etc have only been hinted at.  I'd like to strongly recommend the book Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to anyone who is interested in the issue, or who doubts that institutional racism is a reality.  The book describes the current state of segregation in the school system (schools are currently more divided along lines of race than they were before Brown v Board of Education), and provides a wealth of data, case studies, and anecdotal information showing that poor black students get a lot less funding for their education than middle class white students.

The story of East St. Louis (I'll abbreviate: "ESL") stands out the strongest in the book.  At the time that Savage Inequalities was written (I don't know if anything has changed or how), ESL was an extraordinarily poor, predominantly black neighborhood separated from the white middle class neighborhoods by a river.