Well, when members of Central Atlanta Progress, the AJC and Bruce Gunter, take a shot of this nature in Monday’s paper it is a political move. The Creative Loafing had the chance to be exactly what they claim to be: an alternative news source. Instead, it sounds as if they called Colin Campbell and Rhonda Cook for advice of how to best slander Anita Beaty and the Task Force and still sound credible once again. This story, at best, editorialized and narrowly summed up a 27 year long battle between a local government and a homeless service provider. How many times are we as citizens of this city going to allow our press to cover this story so unfairly?

I have recently moved from Macon, GA to Atlanta. I was offered a position as an AmeriCorps member in Atlanta to serve at the Task Force for the Homeless. In order to afford to LIVE on an AmeriCorps stipend (less than minimum wage), I was allowed to move into the Task Force. I lived there for one year serving in one of the most respected and renowned domestic service program in the nation. My team served in New Orleans for a week among 200-300 other AmeriCorps members, most of which had heard of the AmeriCorps Force (The Task Force for the Homeless AmeriCorps Program) program.

During one of my 10 month terms of service at the Task Force I served under a Senegalese born American citizen that served our country in the first gulf war. After his service he suffered from PTSD and he became homeless. He was embraced by the Task Force, went through their transitional program and used their Photography Therapy program as a way out of depression and eventually came on as staff to run the program and become my supervisor.

I saw a man come from the place where we apparently “warehouse” people and move onto to drive our bus, taking women and children to their shelter placements that were made but a JOINT effort of service providers. I saw him work 16 hour days while he himself was experiencing homelessness to serve these women and children. He eventually moved on, and some would argue that he still is, to become the best caseworker women and children had in the city of Atlanta.

I saw men break down their macho shell and serve their fellow brothers and sister even during their most dire times because the people they were serving simply needed a hand up.
I answered calls on the city’s ONLY 24 hour crisis hotline for placement and place hundreds of people in shelter. I also sat beside people that knew the shelter system because they were living in it while placing people at these lifelines of organizations.

To refute the charges that the Task Force staff is doing NOTHING to transition people out of homelessness I shall give you the numbers that JUST the AmeriCorps Force produced between 2007 and 2008. We served 16,472 hours. We served 31,181 people directly. We placed 1,955 people in temporary or permanent housing. We wrote 11,402 referrals for service. All of which was in a 10 month span. The AmeriCorps Force program has existed for 15 years every year producing similar numbers. The AmeriCorps Force members at Task Force serve under and with the Task Force staff and only make up a third of the Task Force caseworkers. Visit our website see the VAST amounts of services we provide, I beg you.

The yearly numbers of Task Force’s success rate are significantly higher. Do not EVER claim that we are simply warehousing people when some of the staff is serving just under 80 hours a week some times in order to obtain fair and adequate housing for their fellow brothers and sisters because there is no other place for them to turn. You must visit our facility before such slanderous accusations are thrown about. By making such accusation you are not just attacking the idea of poor African American men on Peachtree Street in a classist and racist manner, you are attacking the very dignity of those who have given their lives to serve an unmet need and you are dehumanizing those which are being served by implying that they would allow themselves to be warehoused.

After so many startling and life changing experiences within those walls, I was asked to stay on as an employee as the director of their legal protection program. I started researching the organization for which I was going to work in order to better understand the politics of the organization.

I found editorials by Debi Starnes claiming the homeless to be as pigeons and street rats. I heard stories from former city officials about the closed door meetings regarding out facility. I found letters from public officials to the funders of the Task Force requesting that they no longer be funded, or threatening them if they do fund the Task Force. I interviewed the only two housing commissioners of the city of Atlanta and asked them why they chose to work for the Task Force if this organization was such a burden on the system for which they worked. I found by looking at the history of this building that every time Task Force dared to question the motives of the City or of Central Atlanta Progress they were slapped with articles and funding cuts such as these. I found Ms. Beaty and Co. not to be “righteous hand-biters” but justified whistle blowers that would not stand for injustice if that injustice would result in the frozen bodies of Atlanta citizens. Ms. Beaty is not biting the hand the feeds her. She is demanding the other hand to stop displacing poor people.

I have sat in meetings listening to City Officials claim that homelessness is not a City of Atlanta problem, that it is regional problem implying that people who are homeless in Atlanta are the problem of the greater Metro Area, not the City’s. Because if we can throw the problem on the region and move our shelter facilities outside the city limits, you can effectively decrease the homeless count inside the city limits and tout the ten year plan to end homelessness as working. I’ve heard them say they have decreased homelessness by 16% in the worst recession we’ve seen since the great depression and the highest unemployment rate in Georgia in 20 something years!

I’ve seen the Gateway stop taking referrals of women and children from us because of politics which results in people sleeping outside and sleeping shoulder to shoulder in our lobby. I have picked men up off the steps of Gateway at 9:30 at night in 21 degree weather. When asked why they would not let him in during such conditions, re replied, “I’m not in a program.” He came back to the Task Force with us. I’ve talked to people turned away from city facilities FOREVER because they do not have the means to WALK 2 HOURS from the new Ellis Street Location to the Atlanta Day Shelter from women and children. I’ve seen the list of WOMEN that aren’t allowed to EVER receive service again because they “have already been placed.”

I saw Ms. Starnes and Co. plan the closing of Task Force and sell it by LYING to everyone saying they had the capacity to take 700-800 men on the COLDEST night Atlanta had seen so far. I took the call from the Gateway saying they only had the capacity to take 250 and heard Ms. Starnes say she could take 500. When questioned about the other 200-300 people, she stated she could produce those beds in less than a day. This would have and will be if our doors are shut the equivalent of a natural disaster. All of this implying that on the coldest night Atlanta had seen so far, the city’s plan consisted of leaving 200-300 brothers and sisters in the cold. Veterans. Women. Children. Mentally Ill. Sick. Disabled. All in order to “shut her down.”

I found out the following day that their plan consisted of emergency natural disaster cots from the Red Cross in the halls of other service providers for only a short time and that if someone refused to be put into the system at Gateway, they would be put out into the cold. I learned that officials from NUMEROUS city departments met with United Way, the Regional Commission on Homelessness telling them that it was time to shut us down.

I also learned in that time frame, that if the courts stand behind us, as they have at our loudest points in history and seem to do now, we are doing something right. If we are protecting the dignity and the civil rights of our brothers and sisters, the courts will be required to order the City and Ms. Starnes to cease and desist this attack for it is unconstitutional.

I am ready for the day our city will stand up and say, “No more of this!” It is time that we tell the developers that want this town so badly that it is ours and they cannot have it. They can have their suburbs that they created in order to flee from integration in the 70s, but they cannot have our whole city. This is not too much to ask.

I beg you all to read Larry Keating’s Study on the city’s urban expansion: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion. Read Anita Beaty’s paper on the Olympics: Atlanta’s Olympic Legacy. Go to the library and see the MANY studies about this 40 year long effort. Read these studies and look up old articles to see that this is so much bigger than the politics between the Task Force and the City. Examine the relationship between the City Government, Central Atlanta Progress, and the major developers. This is an implementation of the “sanitized corridor”, the “vagrant free zone”, and the “safe-guard zone”(All Central Atlanta Progress’s usage regarding Peachtree Street). Before you make blanket assumptions. Read read read. Take a break, and read read read some more. Without the historical context, your arguments are built on sand.
Merry Christmas.

Seth C. Clark, Legal Protection Program Director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless
(apologies for the typos and errors)

I saw something at Peachtree Pine this morning that made me scratch my head. A guy was “camped” on the north wall of the building, next to the sidewalk in the dialysis center parking lot.

Was he late? Couldn’t get past the velvet rope?

It was just weird that a guy was wrapped up in blankets outside a shelter with a policy of not turning men away.

A a portion of the homeless won’t accept help, so what to do about them?

@Chuck: You seem to be advocating that societally we have an obligation to help the homeless (which I agree with) but that we shouldn’t expect any effort on the part of the person who gets the services. No one is saying there aren’t tough cases of addiction or mental illness that require patience on behalf of the service provider. What the critics’ are saying is the Task Force’s approach swings too far to the side of simply providing bed, food and shelter and does not place enough emphasis on responsibility and treatment.

Your argument seems to be, “Well, they gotta go somewhere,” and at its core, the argument has merit. But the Task Force’s belligerent stance toward criticism and outrageous approach to activism has as much or more to do with its current state than the admittedly powerful people who criticize it.

The bottom line is if the Task Force would pay its bills and operate within guidelines, there’s very very little the gov’t can do to affect it. Perhaps Anita’s supporters should concentrate first on helping her get the Task Force in order, eventually giving the critics less ammunition to fire at them.

-Bruce Gunter was quoted as saying that one cannot be a homeless advocate and run a service center…That type of mentality is one that treats the symtoms of a illness while allowing the causes of the illness to go unadressed. Bruce tells us how “you need public officials on your side; you can’t bite the hand that feeds you.” It seems that he is saying that when public officials do wrong by the very population that service providers are serving, the providers must look the other way and keep thier mouths shut…

-Debi Starnes, who has spearheaded many of the efforts against the Task Force, was listed yesterday in the AJC as the Mayor’s homelessness advisor… despite the fact that her $96,000 was dropped from the City’s payroll in July. So who pays Debi? I would like to know. Maybe she was able to find some private homeless advocates that believed so much in the quality of her advisment to the mayor that they picked up her salary…
http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/freshloaf/2008/07/24/atlanta-homeless-wont-lose-advocate/

Your not going to build a lot of support like that. This article didn’t make a case for shutting you guys down it just laid out some facts. Anyone want to castrate DaleC, he actually wanted you to do something, like move a bus out of the street.

Here is the big policy issue. The Task Force offers shelter to any man who needs it, provided he abides by the rules of the facility. Critics argue that this open-door approach does not hold homeless persons accountable for their self-destructive behavior. They say that the prospect of “a cot and three hots” only reinforces the vicious cyle of poverty and dependence that perpetuates homelessness.

But what is the alternative advanced by the Task Force’s critics? This is a crucial question but Scott Henry does his readers a disservice by never bothering to ask it.

The Task Force’s critics argue that the most effective way of addressing the problem of homelessness is to target the “chronically homeless.” This group is defined as single individuals (overwhelmingly African-American men) who suffer a disabling condition and who have been on the street for a prolonged period of time. The Task Force’s critics maintain that the “chronically homeless” consume a disproportionate amount of support services that would otherwise be available to other needy groups (children, families, individuals without disabling conditions).

What the Task Force’s critics carefully avoid mentioning is that many of the individuals defined as “chronically homeless” either decline to enter treatment programs or fail to complete the treatment programs that are provided for them. The high failure rate is not peculiar to the homeless population. It’s not easy for people with addiction problems or other disabling conditions to conquer their demons, whether their homeless or not.

So what should we as a community do with the “chronically homeless” who don’t respond positively to treatment programs?
The Task Force says that everyone can find shelter at Peachtree-Pine. It bases this policy on the premise that a person who failed treatment the first time might succeed the second or third or twentieth time.

By contrast, the Task Force’s critics insist on a policy of “one strike and you’re out.” Anyone who fails the first time through forfeits his eligibility for future services, including “a cot and three hots.” The proponents of this position conclude that service providers that give someone a second, third, or twentieth chance are “enablers.”

Those who criticize the Task Force and its policies should think hard about the alternative that is being offered by the City, Central Atlanta Progress, and the Gateway Center. The approach favored by these powerful groups would create a new homeless population whose only shelter would be a cathole or a prison cell.

In his piece on the Task Force, Scott Henry had a wonderful opportunity to invite a serious public discussion of these policy issues. He missed it.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2008/12/22/shelter_owes_money.html

(sorry CL for posting to a competitors site)

This whole place just doesn’t add up.

It didn’t show up on the page so I posted it again and voilà there it is twice.

Be well,
Lynne

Why should the Task Force for the Homeless, sleeping approximately 700 men a night, in the dead of winter, have to struggle for the money to do this kind of work?

Please read the rest of my comment on the front page of the website of the Task Force @ http://www.homelesstaskforce.org.

You seem to know a lot about my views without having asked me what I think and you make assumptions that are far-fetched.

Yes, I have been in the Pine Street Shelter (but felt the problems were better expressed with stories of others than my own). Yes, I have spent the night at other shelters as a homeless person and I can compare what I saw among shelters. Yes, I know that lice occurs among school children. And yes, I think the Pine Street Shelter does nothing to eliminate the problem of homelessness and needs to go.

I would encourage you (as another poster did above) to refrain from personal attacks and assumptions. It is okay for people to disagree with you without being evil and in fact that is part of what makes our nation the free democracy that it is. I would encourage you to realize that disagreement can occur without insults and without belittling or mocking someone with differing views.

I respect the fact that you disagree with me and I respect you for your views. I also thank you for sharing the story of the student going to Stanford. I am surprised that any audit could find an organization that owes $150K in water bills financially responsible and all of the evidence I have seen clearly shows that the Pine Street Shelter needs different management as the aggregate impact of the shelter is to (as the article says) do more harm than good for the homeless of Atlanta. The writer says this not because he is controlled by powerful interests who smoke cigars in a backroom and make decisions, but because Scott, with open eyes, sees the problems and chose to write about them in a fair and accurate manner.

There are many in Atlanta who care about helping those who are homeless who want to see change occur at the Pine Street Shelter. This change is critical to helping Atlanta be one community that works to help those who are homeless.