Kalamazoo residents give to those in need year-round

From Jeff Barr of the Kalamazoo Gazette:

KALAMAZOO — Examples of Kalamazoo Gazette readers lending a hand to those in need are as plentiful as they are generous.

In the past six weeks, there have been three such gifts after stories appeared in the Gazette, and many more before that.

Last week was such an instance. A response came after a Sunday column profiled the plight of Michelle, a woman walking in the bitter cold who had missed the last bus of the night after Christmas shopping for her children.

Details of Michelle’s optimistic smile despite her tenuous financial condition touched a heart. A local dentist reached out with a $100 bill that made it into Michelle’s hands.

Another example came just before Thanksgiving, after a Gazette column told the tale of Kevin Whitfield. The resident of Kalamazoo’s east side wakes up at 3:30 a.m. five days a week and walks an hour to catch a Ministry With Community shuttle to a temp agency in hope of finding day work.

Soon after the column appeared, a $25 money order arrived for Whitfield. Another call offered a new bike and a lock; another reader gave a holiday food basket.

In the past few years, dozens of residents have responded with various gifts after reading Gazette stories.

A few examples: A $300 check arrived for a man who couldn’t fill up his oil tank; donations poured in to completely renovate the bathroom of a woman with multiple sclerosis after a contractor collected money and didn’t complete the work; more than 90 respondents donated to a cerebral palsy victim who couldn’t afford summer camp; a bike was given to a mentally challenged girl who had hers stolen.

These are a few of the generous examples of which we are aware. Undoubtedly, there are anonymous gifts that are given quietly and without notice.

It is true that the holidays are a season of giving. But in Kalamazoo, it goes on year-round.

Local charities offer ways to give something different for Christmas

Rebecca Bakken of the Kalamazoo Gazette offers a few alternatives to traditional gift giving in favor of donating money to a charity:

For those looking to avoid the malls for last-minute shopping, giving the gift of charity can help forgo stress for the gift-giver as well as for some of the less fortunate people in the Kalamazoo area.

• Open Door Next Door Shelters: Employees can process donations and give cards for gift recipients until Christmas Day. Call (269) 343-6064.
• Kalamazoo Valley Habitat for Humanity: Alternative gifts can be bought at any time at www.habitatkalamazoo.org. Gift givers can also call (269) 344-2443 or visit their offices at 534 E. Kalamazoo Ave. until 3 p.m. on Dec. 24.
• Ministry with Community: Alternative gift buyers can visit the shelter to donate and receive a card from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. any day, including Christmas.

Area charities are making it easy for people to reject traditional gift giving in favor of donating money in a friend or a loved one’s name to help provide basic needs for those who are less fortunate.

“It can be a very satisfying way to give and even receive a Christmas gift. Even a small amount can make a big difference,” said Rick Stravers, executive director of Open Door Next Door Shelters.

The organization is dedicated to helping young homeless people acquire permanent housing and maintain employment and sober living.

Stravers said $10 can provide a resident with food for one guest. He said $30 can pay for 10 days of job hunting on a city bus and $16 can provide heat and electricity to an entire shelter for one day.

Those who donate will receive a card to give to the gift recipient, stating that a donation has been made in their name, Stravers said. Kalamazoo Valley Habitat for Humanity and Ministry with Community also provide cards so the gift-giver has something to present.

Donating money to Kalamazoo Valley Habitat for Humanity can help purchase tools, lumber and fixtures so the organization can continue to build homes for people in Kalamazoo.

“We do promote giving to Habitat as a way to honor someone’s service or memory, birthday, Father’s Day — any holiday — and people do that pretty regularly,” said Ann Kilkuskie, development coordinator.

Twenty dollars can buy four boxes of nails that will help hold together someone’s future home, $35 can buy shingles to put a roof over a child’s head and $150 can buy the door to a struggling individual’s first home.

At Ministry with Community, people who are homeless or have fallen on hard times can receive breakfast and lunch, do their laundry and receive counseling with a social worker, among many other things, all free of charge. Its alternative gift-giving program is called Giving Tree.

Rob Oakleaf, deputy director, said he started giving alternative gifts to those on his list after hearing that his mother was doing the same through Heifer International, a group that allows people to purchase cows and other animals so people in developing nations can eat and achieve a sustainable lifestyle.

“I do it for my family every year. I don’t think anybody else needs another iPod,” Oakleaf said.
For $25, a person trying to get their life together can visit with a social worker for one hour, while $50 can help a person have clean laundry for a year. One hundred dollars will buy work clothes, boots and transportation for a person willing to work but lacking the means.

“The response (to Giving Tree) has been modest but growing,” Oakleaf said.

Heidi Bryant, missions elder at the First Presbyterian Church of Richland, said the church holds an alternative gift market every year around Thanksgiving and during Wassailing in Richland in early December, raising money for several area missions.

This year the church raised $2,600 for organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Ministry with Community and Open Door Next Door Shelters, among others.

“We all have the parents and grandparents that just don’t need another nick-nack,” Bryant said

Read the full story from the Kalamazoo Gazette

Over 200 show up to hear about Kalamazoo RCAR Program

Last night over 200 residents attended an information session about Road Construction Apprenticeship Readiness (RCAR) program in Kalamazoo.

The RCAR program is a 9-week paid training program offers training and jobs skills in the construction industry. RCAR will accept 15 applicants in 2010 who represent racial minorities, women and low-income individuals.

These applicants will be given the tools and skills to be successful in a road construction career. The training in this program also helps prepare these applicants for the realities of working in the construction field.

Chad Miller speaks to the group about some of the realities of working in the construction industry in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNCLZwr58cE





To learn more about RCAR, visit http://www.haltpoverty.org/rcar

Kalamazoo churches to leave homeless ministry over sexuality conflict

According to the Kalamazoo Gazette:

"Theological disagreements over homosexuality are causing a divide within a downtown ministry that serves the poor, homeless and lonely.

Martha’s Table, through which eight churches have provided Sunday afternoon worship and meals for the needy at First Congregational Church, is losing three of the churches because of the issue of homosexuality, even though the ecumenical ministry takes no position on it, said the Rev. Matt Laney, pastor of First Congregational.

Agape Christian Church and Word for Life Church of God plan to withdraw from Martha’s Table at the end of the year, and Centerpoint Church (formerly Third Reformed Church) has already done so, Laney said.

“The founding principle of Martha’s Table was that churches would come together and put aside their differences in light of what unites us, which is our common commitment to serve Christ and others,” Laney said. “But now this difference has risen above our common commitment to serving Christ.”

Laney said representatives of all three churches have been “very clear” that they don’t want to be “guilty by association” with First Congregational and its inclusiveness of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, said Laney, who publicly supported an ordinance passed by Kalamazoo voters in November that protects GLBT people from discrimination in housing, jobs and accommodations.

“To me, it’s incredibly disappointing,” Laney said. “That’s the best word I can give it. It’s also mystifying. I was very shocked and surprised when they pulled out.”

The man who came up with the vision for Martha’s Table — Jeff McNally, pastor of Word for Life and owner of McNally’s Kitchen, which provided most of the meals — declined to comment on the reasons for his withdrawal from the ministry that began in 2007.

“I would just as soon let it go,” he said. “We are just pulling out. That’s all. ... We would just as soon take a position of silence.”

But Ron Vestrand, senior pastor of Agape Christian Church, said it was conversations with McNally that led to his church withdrawing from Martha’s Table.

“As time went on, Pastor McNally was becoming concerned with Pastor Matt Laney’s stand on homosexuality. I believe it was causing some disunity. ... I think the primary issue was that we felt that Matt’s stance on homosexuality as a valid Christian lifestyle violated our biblical worldview.”

Read More

Rev. Matt Laney, left, and Jeff McNally pose at Laney’s First Congregational Church.

Allegan County grant helps create program for low-income pregnant women

An Allegan County Grant will focus on opening an Early On Head Start Center in Plainwell and creating program openings to enroll kids in existing daycare centers. Program officials also will work with the Even Start program, which offers low-income parents of young children the opportunity to earn their high school degree.


The two-year program annually will provide services to 78 pregnant women and children from birth to 3 years old, said Cathy Weirick Farnsworth, assistant director of Allegan County Resource Development Committee. The services range from child care to early-education for infants and toddlers.

The federal grant is one of 600 awarded nationwide through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Congratulations to our partner Cathy Farnsworth in Allegan on her work towards this project.

Read the full story here

Making the Neighborhood Family: Kalamazoo's Peace House

National NPR reporter Kyle Norris covered a story on the Kalamazoo Peace House, which is located on Phelps street on the Eastside Neighborhood. Jerry Berrigan, Molly Mechtenberg, and Mike and Jen DeWaele combined their efforts to merge two neighborhood houses into the "Peace House." The DeWaeles are Quakers, whereas Molly Mechtenberg and Jerry Berrigan are Catholic Workers.

From the Article:
(Listen to the report)

The couples have devoted their lives to building community and helping poor and underserved people and they picked the Eastside because it was one of the most underserved areas of Kalamazoo.

All four adults run The Peace House, which is actually two houses. The couples raised $60,000 from family and friends and got a $20,000 grant from the congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Kalamazoo. They used the money to help buy the two old houses.


They're focusing their efforts on helping local kids. Each day after school, the Peace House provides tutoring for kids. Peace House regularly throws barbeques and parties and bike repair workshops. This summer, Peace House hauled-out decades of trash from the backyard, then built a huge jungle gym and a garden.

Both Quakerism and the Catholic Worker movement encourage simple living. The two families live without cable and cell phones, and for Jerry Berrigan, without health insurance. They grow a lot of their food, and cook and eat their meals together at the table

he Catholic Worker movement started in the Great Depression. There are about two-hundred houses world-wide. Michigan has Catholic Worker houses in Detroit, Saginaw and this one in Kalamazoo.

One of the goals of the movement is to help the poorest of the poor by living with them and serving them. Berrigan says he, and the Catholic Worker movement, find inspiration in faith.

"If we take seriously the notion that God is our parent, then we have to take seriously, maybe even literally the notion that we are kin to each other. And that that should actually mean something, that we should try to treat each other that way."

Berrigan says living this way is a small, modest, meaningful alternative to the huge issues of poverty and war and starvation.

Tonya Pratt has lived in the neighborhood for thirteen years and her kids love hanging out at Peace House. She says Peace House has made a big difference in the neighborhood.

"They try to get the neighborhood as a whole. They want the neighborhood to just be one person, just not everybody as just neighbors, they just want to be a big family I don't know of they've got a big family or not but I take it as they my family."

Pratt says if you go over just a few blocks, there are fights and drugs and problems. But she says this block is quiet and calm, because of Peace House. She also says people at the Peace House helped her talk through a problem she was having with another neighbor, and they helped her find a peaceful solution.

The four adults who own Peace House say they're not really the owners. They say they're caregivers. Right now they're trying to figure out the legal work involved in turning PH over to the neighborhood.

It’s Time for a Better Poverty Measure

The way we measure poverty is critical in determining both our understanding of what poverty is and what resources and methods we use to combat it. The current poverty measure is an outdated reference on what poverty was in 1960's and does not give a clear insight into the struggles that those in poverty face today.

The current poverty measure was based off of a 1960's agricultural report that stated food comprised about one-third of a person's budget. So the poverty measure is basically the cost of the lowest cost nutritional diet multiplied by three. Today we know that food only consists of about one-sixth of a person's budget, juxtaposed to the costs of rent, transportation and healthcare which have skyrocked since the 1960's. The poverty measure also does not take into consideration resources such as tax credits and food stamps.

Where is in one way it understates the poverty level by not providing an accurate budget-cost analysis, it also overstates poverty by neglecting to include the many resources families receive that allow them to operate on a functional level above poverty.

The National Academy of Sciences recommends that there should be a logical relationship between how poverty thresholds are constructed and resource-counting rules. Specifically they suggest:

• Poverty thresholds should be calculated by using current data about how much families actually spend on food, clothing, and shelter, with an adjustment for “a little more.” Operationally, the NAS panel recommended using an amount somewhere between the 30th to 35th percentile of family costs as measured in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, along with a multiplier of 15 to 25 percent for other necessary expenses.
• Thresholds should vary geographically to reflect variations in the costs of meeting the needs in the thresholds.
• All resources available to meet the needs in the thresholds should be counted, including tax credits, food stamps, the value of subsidized housing, and other benefits that can meet those needs.
• Funds that are not available to meet the needs in the thresholds—because they are used to meet tax liabilities, pay child support, or pay out-of-pocket medical costs or work-related expenses—should not be counted as resources.

How exactly would these new measures affect the poverty thresholds?

• Poverty thresholds would be higher than under the current measure. For example, in 2007, the official poverty threshold for a two-parent, two-child family was $21,027. For that year, according to the Census Bureau, an NAS-style threshold would have been in the range of $23,465 to $27,744, depending on how home mortgage principal and medical costs were treated. In New York City, the threshold for a family of four calculated under an NAS approach was $26,138 in 2006, as compared with the official threshold of $20,444.
• Poverty rates would be higher. In 2007 the official rate was 12.5 percent, but the census experimental work suggested that the poverty rate would have been in the range of 15.1 to 16 percent under the approaches most similar to the NAS recommendations. Under New York City’s calculations, the poverty rate for the city would have been 23 percent in 2006 under an NAS approach, versus 18 percent under the official measure.
• Elderly poverty would go up. How much it would go up would particularly depend on how households without mortgage costs were treated, but it seems clear that elderly poverty would rise, both because thresholds were increased and because medical expenses were given consideration.
• Extreme poverty—having an income below 50 percent of the poverty line—would go down, because the measure would count noncash benefits such as SNAP and housing assistance.
• Immigrant poverty would likely go up because of the higher thresholds and counting of work expenses, and because immigrant households are less likely to participate in some of the counted benefits programs than are other comparably poor households.
• Poverty would likely go up in high-cost urban areas relative to other areas, all else being equal, though it doesn’t follow that poverty rates would necessarily go down in other areas, given the NAS thresholds and resource-counting rules.

The Measuring American Poverty Act’s approach

The Measuring American Poverty Act, introduced by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) in the House and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) in the Senate, would direct the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics to adopt a “modern” measure of poverty drawing from the recommendations of the NAS. Among the bill’s key provisions:

• Thresholds: The Census Bureau and BLS would be required to adopt thresholds along the lines recommended by the NAS. The bill would also provide for geographic variation, and provide authority to further develop the thresholds to better reflect the needs of children, including young children. The bill would provide for lower thresholds for households owning their homes free and clear, and authorize additional threshold development for other subgroups if reliable data indicated substantial variation in the amounts of money needed by the subgroups to purchase similar quality shelter.
• Resources: The bill would adopt the NAS approach of counting tax credits, noncash benefits such as food stamps, and housing subsidies if they are available to households to meet the needs in the thresholds. At the same time, per the NAS, the bill would provide for subtracting expenditures for health care, necessary work-related expenses, and child support paid.
• The historical measure: The bill would treat the current official poverty measure as the “historical” measure, and require that calculation and reporting of poverty rates should be done for both the modern and historical measure.
• Use of the new measure: The bill would specify that adoption of the modern measure would have no automatic effects on program funding formulas or eligibility rules that currently use the official poverty measure. Instead, Congress could over time make whatever adjustments it considered appropriate on a program-by-program basis.
• Decent Living Standards and Medical Care Risk Measure: The bill would direct that new National Academy of Sciences panels make recommendations for Decent Living Standards and Medical Care Risk measures. The Decent Living Standard would be defined as “the amount of annual income that would allow an individual to live at a safe and decent, but modest, standard of living,” that is, an amount intended to be above that of the poverty thresholds. The Medical Care Risk measure would calculate the extent to which individuals are at risk of being unable to afford needed medical treatment, services, goods, and care, taking into account both uninsured and underinsured statuses.
• Calculation of relative measure: While the bill would not mandate reporting of relative poverty measures using percentages of median income, it would require that public online tools be made available to allow members of the public to calculate poverty using alternative approaches, including calculations based on 50 and 60 percent of median income

Invisible People: Video blog shows faces of the homeless

A blog called Invisible People demonstrates the faces and voices of the homeless all across the United States. Its use of personal video interviews really demonstrates the power of the narrative in creating empathy with those who have lost their places of habitation.

Lori and Savanna from InvisiblePeople.tv on Vimeo.

Words from the Author of the blog:

I once heard a story about a homeless man on Hollywood Blvd who really thought he was invisible. But one day a kid handed the man a Christian pamphlet. The homeless guy was shocked and amazed, “what! You can see me? How can you see me? I’m invisible!”

It isn’t hard to comprehend this man’s slow spiral into invisibility. Once on the street, people started to walk past him, ignoring him as if he didn’t exist… much like they do a piece of trash on the sidewalk. It’s not that people are bad, but if we make eye contact, or engage in conversation, then we have to admit they exist and that we might have a basic human need to care. But it’s so much easier to simply close our eyes and shield our hearts to their existence.

I not only feel their pain, I truly know their pain. I lived their pain. You’d never know it now but I was a homeless person. Fourteen years ago, I lived on Hollywood Blvd. But today, I find myself looking away, ignoring the faces, avoiding their eyes — and I’m ashamed when I realize I’m doing it. But I really can feel their pain, and it is almost unbearable, but it’s just under the surface of my professional exterior.

For years I’ve used the lens of a television camera to tell the stories of homelessness and the organizations trying to help. That was part of my job. The reports were produced well and told a story, but the stories you see on this site are much different. These are the real people, telling their own, very real stories… unedited, uncensored and raw.

The purpose of this vlog is to make the invisible visible. I hope these people and their stories connect with you and don’t let go. I hope their conversations with me will start a conversation in your circle of friends.

After you get to know someone by watching their story, please pause for a few moments and write your thoughts in the comments section, or maybe email them to a friend and link back to this vlog . By keeping this dialog open we can help a forgotten people.

The invisible guy didn’t intend to become homeless. I didn’t plan on living on the street. Everyone on the streets has their own story, some made bad decisions, others were victims, but none of them deserve what they have been left with, and it is a reflection of our own society that we just leave them there.

Please always remember, the homeless people you’ll ignore today were much like you not so long ago.