Category Archives: Community

10 Year Plan to End Homelessness in Winston-Salem

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After posting this piece about the homeless and email I found out about an initiative in Winston-Salem called the "10 Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness."  The executive summary has some interesting information:

  • "Approximately 1,800 people experience homelessness in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County each year. Twenty percent are families; around 200 are children."
  • "The Ten Year Plan calls for a “housing first” approach that emphasizes placing individuals and families who are homeless in safe and affordable housing as an immediate response to their crisis and then ensuring that the necessary supports are in place to sustain that housing. The Plan recognizes that access to housing is a basic human need that should not be conditioned on external measures of client readiness, such as employment, sobriety, or willingness to accept treatment. Housing First is premised on the belief that the underlying causes of homelessness can be more effectively addressed once a person is housed. And, in fact, research shows that people are most successful at addressing issues that often contribute to homelessness such as unemployment, serious mental illness, and addiction when their housing is stabilized first and supportive services are then offered to promote housing stability."
  • "For a system to fully and effectively address homelessness it must include a range of housing and service strategies that are tailored to meet the diverse needs experienced by individuals and families who become homeless—strategies that are firmly grounded in an understanding
    of how those needs vary according to whether homelessness is transitional or chronic in nature. To succeed, the existing homeless service system must alter its approach from one that responds to all individuals experiencing homelessness in similar ways, to one that differentiates between services for persons with short-term needs and those requiring long-term support."

The full report can be found here and if you want more information the contact they provide is:
Tim West
Winston-Salem Housing/Neighborhood Development Department
(336) 727-8597 • timw@cityofws.org

In Winston It’s “Where’s Your Church?”

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One of the most aggravating things about going to parties and such in Northern Virginia was that the first question anyone asked you was "So what do you do?" and then you could see them compartmentalize you after you answered (if they listened at all). With a lot of them if you were perceived to be below their status or of little future use then they tried to move on to someone else.

Brad Feld has a great answer for that most annoying of questions, and it got me to thinking about one of the first things I noticed when we moved to Winston-Salem two years ago.  Instead of asking you what you do most people here ask you "Where’s your church?"  I think they also compartmentalize you based on your answer, but I honestly think the motivation is to see if you have a church and if you don’t to invite you to theirs. 

The result is that I don’t know what half the people here do for a living but I do know there’s a bunch of Methodists and Baptists running around.  Kind of nice.

Government Sanctioned Nosy Neighbors

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The East Orange (NJ) Police Department is recruiting citizens to monitor video feeds and report suspicious activities.  There are plenty of annoying, nosy people in every community so I can see this really taking off, not just in East Orange but all over the country.  I’d be tempted to go out and do something that looks suspicious just to see what happened.

Hell Freezes Over Again: Bank Standing Up for the Little Guy

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Today BB&T, a bank based in Winston-Salem, said it will not loan money to developers for projects on land obtained via eminent domain. (Article here.)

The bank’s representative said himself that taking this stand will show a minimal impact on the bank’s bottom line, but hey, this is still news.  A major financial institution has gone on record to say that they disagree with something that private enterprise is doing.  Most financial institutions are loathe to say anything negative about customers or potential customers.

I really don’t care what their motivation was, it was the right thing to do.  And yes, it’s good PR.

It’s Not Race, It’s Economics

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This post was prompted by the discussion over in Greensboro about neighborhood schools vs. the forced integration of schools. The reality is that we, society, cannot force people to like each
other, want to live with each other, etc.  Human nature is such that we
want to be around people like us.  Unfortunately due to the history of
race relations in this country we tend to equate "people like us" with
race.  That’s simply not the case for many people.  "People like us"
has a heck of a lot more to do with economics than race.

Before we moved to Winston-Salem in 04 we lived in a very
economically homogenous neighborhood in Northern Virginia.  While there
was a fairly diverse population in terms of race you could safely
assume that the vast majority of the folks in our neighborhood fell
into the same tax bracket.  And since the population was racially
diverse there was never a discussion of the need to bus kids for some
sort of racial quota.

Another interesting stat about Northern Virginia: over 70% of
working adults have a bachelors degree, one of the highest rates in the
country.  Cost of living there is very expensive, so if you want to
live within 30 miles of Washington, DC you need to be able to afford a
$300,000+ house.  The farther you get away from the city the lower the
average household income and the lower the percentage of folks with a
college degree, and voila, the more kids on free lunch programs, etc.
And the closer you get to the city the more you see an urban atmosphere
with impoverished communities juxtaposed with affluent communities, and
not a lot in between.

Long story short, we moved from an area where people still paid
attention to race, but really the number one factor was money and
everyone knew it.  To put it bluntly, no one worried too much if a
black or Mexican or whatever-race family moved in, but they’d have a
conniption if a bunch of day-laborers moved into a house on the street.

When we moved here we spent the majority of our energy finding a
neighborhood in the school districts that were ranked well in terms of
test scores (as much as I hate standardized tests, that’s really the
only barometer you have when you’re from out of town).  Honestly the
pickings were fairly slim so it was easy to narrow our search to a
couple of neighborhoods.  Guess what?  Most of the neighborhoods we
looked at were economically homogenous and to a large extent were
racially homogenous as well.  Did we choose to exclude ourselves from a
racially diverse neighborhood?  Nope.  We picked the place that worked
best for us in terms of getting our kids into good schools. (We see most of our neighbors so infrequently I couldn’t tell you if I
had martians living down the street.)

But my sense is that around here it is still a big deal if a family of another race moves in next door.  That’s too bad because the reality is that a middle class white family is likely to have more in common with a middle class black family than a rich or poor white family.  We don’t like to talk about it, but we all know that there’s a certain level of stress when a "have" is talking to a "have not" or in the case of the rich a "have" is talking to a "has more." 

When we’re around people that lead the same kind of lives we lead it’s easier to know what to talk about.  If you’re middle class it might be the costs of car repairs, having to dip into savings to buy the new washer/dryer, the kids’ moronic baseball coaches, etc.  If you’re rich that’s a different conversation (comparing your new cars that you get every year or two, comparing housekeepers, etc.) and if you’re poor you might be lucky to have to the time to have a conversation at all.

I’m not denying that there are different experiences for folks based on race; I’ve seen black friends treated differently than me in stores, have a hard time getting a cab, etc., but the reality is that as people of the younger generations, those born after legal racial segragation, get older the import of race will begin to dwindle and the import of economics will be recognized for what it is.  When that happens I think we’ll face some very serious issues dealing with the poor (the truly disenfrachised) in this country.

School Selection is Always an Issue

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There’s a raging debate over in Guilford County (home to the city/towns of Greensboro and High Point) about school districting.  From what I can tell they’ve been experimenting with various school districting schemes and nothing has worked, and now parents are pushing for neighborhood-based schools.  A couple of good opinion posts about it can be found on Dave Hoggard’s and Sue Polinsky’s blogs.

Sue uses a great analogy to frame the debate.  Basically she says that the forced segregation of schools is an effort to be a lamp to shine the way to a better society and not a mirror of the reality that we all live in.  She also points out the inherent problems with this situation.

From a personal standpoint I can tell you that growing up my schools had a very strong influence on my worldview.  The first 6 1/2 years of school I never had one non-white kid in my class, and then in November of my 7th grade year we moved to Arlington County, VA which is basically an urban environment.  Overnight I was a minority (there were more ‘other’ races than whites in the school).  Definitely opened my eyes. 

My friends came from all over the world: Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Texas.  This was during the after effects of the Vietnam war so we also had a lot of Cambodian kids who’d come over essentially as refugees.  It was interesting to me that many of my friends, who’s dads worked at their countries’ embassies or for multi-national companies, wanted nothing to do with the refugee kids or the children of the illegal immigrants. They viewed those kids as lower class and were actually rougher on them than the American kids, black or white, were.

By ninth grade most of the kids had divided into gangs, all of which were made up of different races.  One day the blacks would fight the whites, the next day the whites would fight the Vietnamese who would then fight the Mexicans, etc.  One thing all the gangs had in common: 99% of their members were either poor or came from "bad" families.  Middle class black kids and white kids didn’t belong to gangs.  Diplomats’ kids didn’t belong to gangs.  Most interesting: children of refugee parents who were doctors, lawyers, etc. in their home country didn’t belong to gangs.  They were dirt-poor but their parents worked multiple jobs and emphasized education above all else.  These kids didn’t play sports either.

The point is that without moving to Arlington I probably never would have seen the disparity within different races.  I realized at an early age that all races were different in things like dress and food, but remarkably similar in one very important way: they all had their own class structure.  That’s an important lesson I don’t think I would have gotten in my white-bread schools and I can’t think of another place after school that I would have gotten it either.  Well, maybe all those public basketball courts I played on growing up, but that’s a whole different world.

Here’s the difference between my experience and what is going on in Guilford County: we had all that diversity in Arlington within neighborhood schools.  School zones could be drawn up geographically and still have the diversity I mentioned.  That’s because it was a little melting pot.  I don’t know that the parents in Arlington would have been any different from the parents in Guilford if their kids would have been forced to go across town to go to school.  It just wasn’t an issue for them, but if you ask me I think Guilford parents have the right idea in asking for neighborhood schools.  If the neighborhoods aren’t diverse then so be it. 

I’ll end by saying that where I live now, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County has an interesting system for the schools: If you don’t like your "core" school you can pick from up to two other schools and get free busing.  My oldest son has a friend who buses from another school’s zone and it takes him quite a while to get to and from school, but it’s worth it to his family in order for him to go to a better school.  The price is that the school system has to work very hard to work out transportation logistics, but in my mind it’s worth it because it allows parents to choose the right situation for their kids.  Maybe it’s the neighborhood school, and maybe it’s not, but they get to choose.  Maybe Guilford should look at the Forsyth system.

From Boys to Men

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The Boys

Twenty years ago I was sitting on a bench in the quad at George Mason University trying to figure out if I was going to head to the library to study or head home for a nap.  I’d transferred to GMU after spending my freshman year at another school and I didn’t know anyone on campus, and quite honestly I was feeling a little down.  As fate would have it Kirt Bachman, an old high school friend and teammate on the basketball team walked by.  He stopped to talk and asked me if I’d be interested in helping him and a couple of other guys start a fraternity on campus.  That was one of the truly pivotal moments in my life.

That group of boys, or young men as we liked to think of ourselves, went on to become Alpha Sigma Chi, a local fraternity that was petitioning to become a chapter of the Sigma Chi international fraternity.  We spent four years working towards that goal and we managed to achieve it just a couple of weeks before I graduated. In the process that group of boys worked and partied hard together and grew to know each other in a unique way.

Looking back we were definitely boys.  We still thought of ourselves as bulletproof and while most of us took the fraternity’s doctrine of "brotherhood" to heart we were as interested in the social aspects of the fraternity as anything. Eventually we graduated, many of us got married, we started having kids and slowly and inexorably we became absorbed by our own lives and kept in touch mainly through the grapevine.

Then came word that one of our own had hit hard times and we would have the opportunity to reunite as men.

Woody

Steve "Woody" Carlson was always one of the most popular guys in our fraternity.  Witty, kind and supremely calm he never seemed to have a cross word for anyone.  He’s always been one of those guys that everyone likes the minute they meet him, one of those guys you could say, "He’s just a sweet guy" with a straight face and without an trace of embarassment.  That’s a rare commodity in the world of boys and young men.

A short while after graduating Woody was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic, degenerative and unpredictable disease that affects the central nervous system.  Two years ago Woody became wheelchair bound, and it has become increasingly difficult for him to do most day-to-day tasks. Continuing to work was not an option, no matter how much he wanted to, and doing even the most basic upkeep on his condo was next to impossible.  His sister and nephew moved in, but money was tight and times were difficult.

In other words Woody’s life had changed in ways that the boys from his fraternity could never have imagined, but true to his character he never complained.  Thus it was a rude awakening when word began to spread about his situation.

The Men

In the rush of our own lives the boys that knew each other so well twenty years ago had slowly drifted apart.  Some small groups stayed in touch with each other through the years, attended each other’s weddings and sent each other occasional emails, but as a whole the group had not come together in significant numbers for over a decade.

A couple of years ago a few of the guys starting getting together for a monthly happy hour in Northern Virginia, and as was his practice during the early years of the fraternity Shane Womack took on a leadership role.  Over the course of time he built up a good-sized email list in order to coordinate the happy hours, so in September when he heard about Woody’s situation he sent out an email to find out what the group would like to do.

Shane was flooded with emails offering all forms of help and support.  He talked to Woody and determined that the most immediate need the group could address would be fixing up Woody’s condo.  Shane polled the group to determine the best day for everyone to get together, recruited some of the guys to go by Woody’s place to do an assessment, put together a punch list and generally transformed himself into a general contractor. An impressive feat for a man who makes Tim Allen look good.

Last Saturday, October 22 was determined to be the best day for most of us to get together, so we met at Woody’s condo at 8:00 a.m.  Some guys brought along brushes, edgers, etc. and others chipped in for paint and other materials.  Jeff Linden, who could give Bob Villa a run for his money, showed up with enough tarps to cover West Virginia and Rocky Benedetto and Hwan Kim came by earlier in the week to do patch and prep work so that eveyone else could hit the ground running on the big day.

WoodysfixupOver 17 guys showed up Saturday and we worked until about 7:00 that evening.  We painted, we did some minor renovations, hung some new bedroom doors and in general we brightened the place up.  We also talked, shared stories and got to know the men that all those boys had become.  It was great to see that the character we’d talked about so much as fraternity boys had manifested itself in the men that we had become.

Our next project is to get Woody a hospital bed and according to today’s email it is quickly becoming a reality.  After that we’ll see what needs to be done and do it.  Hopefully Woody knows that he can count on us anytime, and in any way.

One thing I know is that I’ve rediscovered how important those boys were to me twenty years ago, and how important it is that I stay in touch with all those men.  It’s the most impressive group of people I’ve ever met.

 

Bad Information + Nosey Neighbor = Trouble

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Here’s one of those stories that just freaks me out.  According to this article a man in Virginia is suing one of his neighbors and a company that provides access to a database of sex offenders for a fee.

To give you a synopsis of the story, this poor guy was never accused or convicted of a sex crime, but apparently he lived at a house that at one time had been the address of a man convicted of a sex crime.  The state of Virginia relies on the sex offenders to inform it when they change addresses (huh?) and obviously in this case the offender didn’t.  So the Florida-based company, National Alert Registry, Inc., had a classic database problem: garbage in/garbage out.

The company provides access to its database and an email alert service for a fee. A woman named Michelle Myers subscribed to the service and that’s how she came across this guy’s name.  So off she went and broadcast the information to people in the neighborhood, school officials and the homeowners association.

Of course this guy is suing the woman and the company for slander.  The woman’s attorney is using the old "free speech" and "it’s just her opinion" defense, but the man’s attorney rightly states that the courts have consistently found that slander does not constitute free speech.

Now I’m sure that this woman will argue that she was simply going on bad information, but she could have easily verified the information by looking at freely available court records.  This guy may have lived at the address of a registered sex offender, but his name wasn’t associated with it at all.  If you’re going to accuse someone of something this serious you damn well better have your facts checked.

As for the company, I’m sure they’ll argue that they are the victim of faulty state records, but again how hard would it be for them to verify a name against an address?  I have no problem with tracking registered sex offenders, but it is very important that the companies that engage in this activity get it right…or else.

Lastly, what about the state of Virginia?  What the heck are they thinking?  They rely on a convicted criminal to keep them informed of his whereabouts?  What could possibly go wrong?

The point here is that all of our lives have become an open book.  Without much effort we can find information about anyone we want, and vice versa.  For instance, I can tell you from a simple search on the InfoUSA.com
website that Ms Myers, who started this whole mess, lives on a road called Blacksmith Arch, which is
confirmed by the newspaper article, that her phone number is (757)
766-22** (I’m intentionally not using the last two digits), that the average yearly income in her neighborhood is
$61,000-$100,000 and that the average price of homes in her neighborhood is $200,000-$249,900.

For the most part I think that having information freely available and in the public is a good thing, but the trade-off is that we must be very careful in how we use that information.  As anyone who’s been on the wrong side of a rumor can tell you it is very hard to get the right version of the story out since most people only hear the first version.  It is imperative that when someone gets it wrong they pay a heavy price, which is why I hope the company and Ms. Myers get slapped silly.

Reading List September 18, 2005

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  • Sometimes You Are The Dog (Patrick Eakes) – Patrick had a bad round of golf during a tournament, thought about throwing in the towel, but to his credit he didn’t.
  • Hackoff.com – A Must Read (A VC) – This post points to a new blog-based book publishing adventure that the book author calls a "blook."  That’s the 2005 winner of the dumbest "coinage" to date.
  • Man on the Street Tests (The Post Money Value) – The author provides a series of questions you can ask to get a handle on how prevalent certain phenomena are in your community.  Tops on the list is to say to someone you’ve just met, "Hey I love the blog" to see how many are actually blogging.
  • The Triangle: Limits of Blog Power (Daou Report – Salon.com) – A very interesting look at the relationship between the "netroots", media and political power structure.  They are the three sides of a triangle that the author believes is the new political reality.

Newspaper is the Glue for the Community

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There’s been a lot of navel gazing by local newspapers over the last year as they’ve rightly wondered what their place in the media universe will be.  Well I think the Times-Picayune and it’s website NOLA.com have shown what that role is: community glue.

Rex Hammock, the owner of a custom-publishing company in Nashville and an influential blogger to boot, has called for the NOLA.com blog to be awarded a Pulitzer because of its role during the Katrina disaster and continuing in the aftermath.  (I agree.)  Today Rex linked to an article in Online Journalism Review (OJR) that includes an interview with Jon Donley, the editor for NOLA.com. Here’s an excerpt:

NOLA.com is known more for its MardiGras.com
site and its live webcam, but now has become Exhibit A in the
importance of the Internet for newspaper companies during a disaster.
When the newspaper couldn’t possibly be printed or distributed, the
NOLA.com news blog became the
source for news on hurricane damage and recovery efforts — including
updates from various reporters on the ground and even full columns and
news stories.

The blog actually became the paper, and it had
to, because the newspaper’s readership was in diaspora, spread around
the country in shelters and homes of families and friends. The
newspaper staff was transformed into citizen journalists, with arts
reviewers doing disaster coverage and personal stories running
alongside hard-hitting journalism. In a time of tragedy and loss, the
raw guts of a news organization were exposed for us to see.

And it wasn’t just about newsgathering. NOLA.com editor Jon Donley turned over his NOLA View blog
to his readers, who sent in dozens of calls for help. Those calls were
relayed onto the blog, which was monitored constantly by rescuers, who
then sent in teams to save them.

"The site has been fantastic — and quite a life saver — and I
truly mean a life saver," said Eliza Schneller via e-mail. "I listed a
friend’s mother, who needed rescuing, on the site and between me and
the numerous caring people who responded — she and her daughter where
picked up by the National Guard. Bless everyone that had a hand in
keeping that site up and running!"

According to Donley, the calls for help came via text messaging, since cellular voice services and landlines were down.

"It
was weird because we couldn’t figure out where these pleas were coming
from," Donley told me. "We’d get e-mails from Idaho, there’s a guy at
this address and he’s in the upstairs bedroom of his place in New
Orleans. And then we figured out that even in the poorest part of town,
people have a cell phone. And it’s a text-enabled cell phone. And they
were sending out text messages to friends or family, and they were
putting it in our forums or sending it in e-mails to us."

And later in the article:

"We’ve been checking the NOLA.com blog religiously," Lien told me via
e-mail. "We were checking it literally almost every hour. They had so
many small details and covered nooks and crannies of New Orleans that
an Associated Press or major network person would NEVER have known or
gotten right. (Emphasis mine)

Please read the whole story as it is a testament not only to the power and influence of a local newspaper within a community, but also to its absolute necessity for the well-being of the community.

Local newspapers are the only organizations that traditionally have the depth to do the kind of work that is vital to a community.  TV and radio outlets simply don’t have the staff or the medium required to cover the community in-depth.  Broadcasters are ephemeral compared to local newspapers that are the mortar for the community’s bricks.

What the NOLA story shows is that whether or not the information is printed on paper or screen, the "newspaper" and the people who produce it are vital to the community’s health.

Last point: how about the ingenuity these folks showed in utilizing all available technology to do their jobs?  Amazing.