I met a homeless man in uptown Yucaipa, back in November, and he told us a little bit about his story about how he became homeless and no longer had contact with his family. It was a really cold night, and I was wearing shorts by my own choice and therefore was cold, but he took his own jacket off of his back to make sure I was warm. I felt bad because it was my own fault I was cold, yet he didn’t even hesitate to make sure I was warm. We bought him some water and later went on our way. We would see him almost everyday sitting on the same bench, and I hadn’t lately. I was happy to see this outcome for someone in my hometown. This was a post on a Yucaipa facebook page.
“I met Kelly back in October and he was homeless and a drunk. He’d burned all the bridges he ever had with his wife, kids and friends in the community because of his drug and alcohol problems. You probably remember him as the guy who said “good morning or good afternoon or good evening” by the donut shop or liquor store off California and the Blvd.
In January I was able to get him into a rehab. He was ready but so scared. We took this picture on the street in front of the rehab facility. He had the option of 30, 60 or 90 day program and he chose the 90.
He did so good in the rehab house program that they asked him to be a patient/manager of the house.
Yesterday I received a phone call from Kelly asking if I was home and if I’d like a visitor. Uh. Duh!
He showed up with his wife and son and they were out house hunting because they are getting back together and the first thing he had to do after our gigantic hug was to show me his certificate of completion.
He has a new lease on life and he’s clean and sober and has his family back. It was a really good day. So exceedingly proud of Kelly!
To follow more of what I’m doing to help the homeless here in my city please join The Faces of Yucaipa on Facebook.
You can also see videos of Kelly in his transformation on my YouTube channel MARIVB14″

While my last post was on social media harming the homeless issue, this time people actually used social media for good news.

I had to complete a project where I volunteered and observed a social service agency that helps homeless and/or hungry, and I choose The Blessing Center.  This is an agency located in Redlands, about a mile from the University. This organization helps both the hungry and those in poverty. Their goal is “to help alleviate poverty and despair through multi-faceted resourcing of poor and disadvantaged families and individuals who are hurting, in need of food, clothing, medical and dental care, job resources and many other needs.” This goal description also gives a little insight into what type of services they provide and for whom.

The Blessing Center provides a food bank every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. For these three days, the volunteers at The Blessing Center only have two hours to distribute food boxes to upwards of 400 families, with Tuesday’s typically being their most popular day. These boxes contain food provided by local companies and farms, all of which has been donated. 

Since they cannot give out boxes everyday of the week, they do provide sack lunches every day. This is a little easier to obtain, all you have to do to receive a lunch is to sign in at the front desk. These lunches typically include items that will perish faster, but also easy to eat foods, such as sandwiches and bananas. The number of people that come in for a lunch is around 20 people, which is much less than the amount that come in on food bank days.

The Blessing Center has its own “store” full of donated items. Clients can come in each day to pick out a different outfit for free. The criteria for receiving clothing is just like the sack lunches, where they only have to sign in at the front desk. But the clients are restricted as to how much time they are allowed in the store and how much clothing they can take, which varies for single people and families.

The Blessing Center provides many services to make sure people can get on their feet a little easier. Some of the services include: GED courses, AA meetings, resume classes, life coaching classes, computer classes, and job coaching classes. All of these services plan to help people succeed in landing a job and being successful in their careers.

The Blessing Center provides a medical and dental clinic that is free to everyone who does not have health insurance. Here people and families can sign up to be an applicant for the clinic, the only requirement is that they do not have any form of health insurance. This clinic offers general dentistry, such as fillings and cleaning, as well as health screenings, primary care, and minor surgeries.

I spent most of my time in clothing organizing the clothes and their sorting system, but I also spent some time with the food distribution and observing. While volunteering I looked around a lot and observed what was happening at the center. While some days there wasn’t much going on, I still got a feel of how the clients and volunteers were treated and received a little feedback from both.

I don’t think that I actually spent enough time in my organization to be able to fully understand how they operate daily, but I did learn a lot about how important volunteers and donations are. This organization would not survive without the help of private donations. All of their food and clothing is donated, so they wouldn’t have to spend any money on purchasing these items. Without volunteers, they probably wouldn’t have enough money to spend on salaries for their workers, especially those in the medical profession for the clinic.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of remarks on social media about homeless issues, and too many times they have been negative. I wanted to discuss this one example, that recently caught my eye. I follow a page on Facebook called “Redlands Buzz 2.0” this is a public group where people can post about the on goings around Redlands and has 18,000 members following the page. The last few days I have been noticing multiple posts about homeless people on this page in particular, many people concerned about what their city is coming too, not realizing that this is an ongoing issue for many years.

This post in particular caught my eye, partially because I attend school right off this off-ramp. The post is calling for people of Redlands to call in to get the “trash” cleaned up. While they may have been only referring to the physical trash being left behind by these homeless people, I got a different vibe from this post. To me it seemed as though they were referring to these PEOPLE as trash, and that is definitely something that the city of Redlands can not stand. The reason I took it this way was how it was said and the comments following the post. But, I could just not believe that so many people had an issue about the people and the place that they go to sleep at night.

One comment said “RPD should do frequent raids on the camps to get the transients on their way.” My reaction to this is, where do these people expect them to go to next? Homeless are constantly moved from camp to camp, being kicked out of places to stay and where they have their belongings. Most people who become homeless stay in the cities that they are from, which is something not many people know, but at one point that person was someones neighbor and now they are expecting them to just leave town and move elsewhere.

Another comment said “I don’t want to solve these people’s lifelong ability to make incredibly poor decisions. I just want them out of my community. I want to be able to take my 6 year old daughter out into the town without being accosted by these leeches on society. They should round them all up and drop them off at Jerry Brown’s front door. Maybe when they’re all hanging out at his house we will repeal the laws he signed into law making it easier for the to live off of the taxpayers.” This comment just goes to show some of the beliefs of the people in this city.

For me, it is frustrating to see how many people agree with this post and how many people this post reaches. This page is a pretty popular page, and while they have the power to help educate on homeless issues, they are only harming it by posting so many negatives about homeless people.

I recently saw a post on social media, of people congratulating the “heroics” of a cop helping out a homeless woman, so I sought to find another article about it. There was to be a snow storm to hit Massachusetts, when the police department received a call at a Walmart about a woman in distress. After arriving and assessing the situation the cop on the call found out that the woman was in fact homeless and hadn’t eaten in days. The cop took it into his hands to buy food for her and help with paying and finding a hotel room, for her to ride out the storm in. The police department, took a photo of the exchange and later posted on Facebook to share what their own had done; and since then has been shared and viewed thousands of times.
For me, this brings up many concerns, but the main one is the cold. What are the ways in which homeless protect themselves from the cold?
I personally am so cold when the temperature drops below around 70 degrees, from there I have to have enough to cover up or have a heater right next to me. Here in this case the weather is dropping below 32 degrees, since there is snow, but is probably even lower. With the homeless typically outside, how do they stay warm? Sure, some might be able to go into shelters, but many shelters close at a specific time or only allow so many people. Or those who typically make enough money to buy some form of room for the night, what if they couldn’t make enough money because of the storm and then will be kicked out. So what can they do?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/massachusetts-cop-helps-homeless-woman-food-shelter-before-storm/

Working at a restaurant, you see many different types of people, regulars, travelers, couples, foreigners, and just about everyone. We all need to eat. But what about the homeless? What happens when they walk into a restaurant?

I walked into my restaurant the other day, for another day at the daily grind, to find a lady by herself in my section. The other waitresses told me that she had been sitting there for many hours. Come to find she had been there since about 11 in the morning and it was already reaching 4 in the afternoon when I got into work. I stopped to check in on her where she asked for a slice of pie; my manager had just gone over to talk to her, so I assumed she decided to order something in order to stay longer. After about another hour, she asked for a refill of her coffee to-go. It was then that I realized that it was the coldest it had been all week and she might want a hot drink to warm her up.

When another server came on and started to take over my section, he began talking about her loud enough for her to hear of course. He would say things such as, “shes been here since 10,  she shouldn’t still be here” or “she smells and is grossing the customers out”. And shortly after that is when she decided to leave, most likely due to his comments.

Many of us wanted to help, but we were unsure of how; from the class I am currently taking, I know that there are some shelters in San Bernardino, but we were in Redlands. My manager called the police to see if there was anything we could do, there apparently is a Goodwill just down the street, but the only problem is they don’t accept people until after 8 pm, and that was about four hours away. Before she left, my manager was able to tell her this information for which she only nodded.

But how is it that we don’t know what to do in these situations, where we want to help someone, but don’t know if they want it or even how to give it. There wasn’t much any of us could do, since we were at work, but even if we could, we didn’t know what to do. None of us wanted to send her on her way since it was really cold out, but there wasn’t much we could do in the first place. And what if we were in her shoes, someone just trying to stay out of the cold, but being commented on by other people. Would the other server treated her differently, if he only imagined he was in her shoes, wouldn’t he hope for some compassion?

So, what can we do in our town to help the homeless?