Sean Gonsalves' 2005 classic, "Alms-Giving or 'Charity Wounds'?," which never really got the traffic it deserved, is posted today for your weekend reading pleasure.
"Whenever I write about biblical economic ethics, some offended conservative Christian writes to chastise me for my alleged ignorance of all the great charity work that Christians do, as if I haven't been steeped in a fundamentalist church tradition my entire life."
The other groups who show up every Saturday are not yet broadcasting their goodness online.
There is more action on the way, though.
Tri-County Outreach is also a Saturday regular, but they are taking the month off and will not return until October, but will be making a scene on Saturdays at 2pm.
Not sure when this Sunday lady is coming back. She promises to come back at least two times before year end.
Charities and wannabes: Please stop making it so difficult for our homeless service agencies to get people the help they need. And bring garbage bags and take your garbage home with you. And show our homeless a little more respect than smushed sammiches. Or if you can't do any of that, please just stay the hell home and send COTS a check. Nearly $0.90 of every dollar they raise helps house homeless Detroiters every year.
San Francisco Examiner editorial calls out some candidates for mayor for not having any plans to deal with homelessness in the city. Editorial notes that among their homeless population there are 20 homeless people who have cost the city "$2.3 million in repeated ambulance and emergency care as well as detox and psychiatric services."
The candidate on the list who stood out -- I know nothing else about him, but I like how he thinks:
Tony Hall advocates replacing what he calls “nonprofit homeless industry providers” that are “scamming the system” with “organizations whose business is charity, not welfare.”
Tell it like it is, Tony! Welfare, not charity! Not the other way around!
And keep checking back here where we will continue document charities-gone-wild and other activities that lure homeless people away from the resources they so desperately need. We will continue to keep you updated on affairs in Cass Park and Midtown, goings-on at CAYMC, and things you can do to give people facing hard times a hand up instead of a handout.
Wonder if Detroit has ever even tallied how much we have spent on medical, psych, and detox bills for our chronically homeless, money that could have been saved if the homeless in Midtown could have made it to the charities that best serve them instead of getting sidetracked by sideshows in Cass Park. Call your councilmembers and mayor to find out how much it's costing our city. Just don't bother calling Kwame Kenyatta's office -- he must have had a helluva week after Diane Bukowski's article came out.
The Mack and Third concert organizers got all the garbage out of Cass Park, but the lawns on properties surrounding the park were not cleaned up by the cleanup crews:
Employees of the African-American-run Michigan Chronicle arrived to work today to find a pile of event trash on their front lawn. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed that they'll note where this mess came from in their next edition, as they were one of many media outlets promoting the event last week:
Maybe if the Michigan Chronicle calls the event organizers and tell them trash was left on their lawn, Kem will say he knows nothing about that, too:
But the Kem event has a history of denying responsibility. After a year of trying to get them to pay for the restoration of the sculpture in the middle of the park -- which a citizens group had to pay over a thousand dollars to restore -- the event organizers said that it wasn't the event volunteers who painted over it. But in the first two seconds of this Kem video on YouTube his volunteers are seen white-washing the sculpture:
Didn't know about that either, eh, Kem?
There would have been a lot less garbage in the park if Detroit was forward-thinking enough to cut down on park waste by outlawing the use of foam containers in parks as California state legislators are proposing. There would have even been less park waste had the organizers used reusable flatware, plates, and drinking glasses when they served the homeless with dignity, but providing real plates, real flatware, and other tableware was an expense organizers weren't willing to pay.
Mack and Third promoters, please come back and clean up the rest of the mess you left. The city of Detroit is hurting and doesn't have the money to clean up after you or any of the other foam-container fly-by-day charities your activities encourage to come down and make messes of Cass Park.
Piles of garbage bags in front of the former assisted-living facility:
Pallets abandoned by the Forgotten Harvest trucks:
Twenty Cottage Inn pizzas were delivered to the Baptist Center, Kem's base of operations, after Kem performed. I guess the pizza from Midtown pizzerias weren't good enough for them:
Litter and and an overflowing garbage can east of Cass Park:
UPDATE 5:00 PM: It looks like someone came by and cleaned up in front of the Michigan Chronicle, but the other piles of garbage remain.
Kemistry Records' neighbors in Lathrup Village, or any Oakland County resident, who missed this weekend's up-close-and-personal-with-homeless album promotion can experience the Midtown homeless experience firsthand, thanks to the efforts of year-old West Bloomfield charity and urban adventure organizer Action By Presence.
For $250, the startup charity will let you participate in a Street Retreat, and get face-to-face with the drugs and guns in Detroit. They'll event let you camp out with homeless people overnight at Redmond Plaza at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Selden, which is walking distance from an elementary school, upscale condos, Detroit restaurants Mario's and Traffic Jam, and the performing arts high school.
Participants are even encouraged to blog their experience in real-time as they make their way across the city begging for bus fare and handouts. One participant described the experience in Zen detail:
"... We heard stories of the Detroit Rescue Mission, open 24 hours, where one can come as long as one stays in a seat, and people being shot and throats being slit."
It's hard for folks living out in West Bloomfield to get a real feel for the Midtown Detroit experience, so the non-profit's Street Retreats help participants "experience homelessness first-hand, begging for money, finding places to get food, to use the bathroom, etc."
Stray-cations, hmm? I wonder if participants have to sign a waiver that they won't sue the upstart charity if they are approached by this guy with the gutter spike.
Action By Presence's website doesn't offer its financials and their 501(c)(3) is still under review by the Feds. I'm off to check to see if there are other non-profit stray-cation companies offering homeless tours of Detroit.
If Action By Presence's Street Retreats keep encouraging people to pretend to be homeless in Detroit, how much harder is it going to be to find the people who really are homeless and in need of help to get the help they need? Think of all the responsible Detroit charities who go from park to vacant lot every day to get people to resources and imagine the waste of their time when they have to filter through pretend homeless people standing between them and the truly needy.
So whatever you do, Detroit, please don't do anything to get the homeless out of vacant lots and city parks and into substance abuse treatment, to get them the medical attention they need, to get them into homes. You'll only hurt the suburban charity Action By Presence's ability to send people on Street Retreats.
And special thanks to our neighbors in the Willis Selden Historic District for allowing Action By Presence to draw drug traffic and charity outreach away from Cass Park and from "Mack" and Third further in the direction of the Oakland County-based non-profits who serve them by opening up Redmond Plaza to outreach groups. You're doing your part to help keep drugs and violence out of Cass Park.
We mentioned Mariner's Inn, a Detroit non-profit that offers substance abuse treatment to adult men in Southeast Michigan as well as short-term and long-term housing (getting guys off benches and into beds and eventually into their own homes).
This afternoon I'll mention another Detroit non-profit with an excellent track record, Alternatives For Girls which provides shelter to at-risk and homeless young women age 15-20. This charity has been looking out for young women in the city since 1987.
"AFG Street Outreach serves as a lifeline to many young and adult women seeking to remove themselves from situations and activities that threaten their well-being, their futures, their lives. Staff and volunteers encounter girls and women on the streets, in all seasons, during daylight and after dark, providing harm-reduction kits, a ride to AFG and other safe places, referrals, and direct services — links to life-saving and support services."
If you cannot afford to give a donation to Alternatives For Girls because you put your last $5 in the bucket at the Kem Fest yesterday, see if there's anything on their wish list you might have lying around -- like extra 5-subject notebooks or school supplies so the girls can succeed in their studies -- or scrapbooking supplies.
If you cannot donate in-kind, they are also always looking for adults who can mentor or tutor.
Whatever you do, please don't donate them cans of food that have been sitting in your pantry for five years.
Like Mack and Third, the Burning Man organizers are in the process of switching to non-profit status, but unlike Mack and Third, people are actually concerned about the money that Burning Man raises:
In Detroit we don't care what happens to the money. We just like believing we've made a difference and don't dare ask where the pocket change thrown in the buckets at the Kem concert ended up, how much was raised, or if it just disappeared. Since the Kem concert's non-profit partner, Detroit Rescue Mission, doesn't make its audits accessible (at least on their website), we might never know.
Megan McArdle, senior editor of The Atlantic, talks windmills and Walmarts and the N-word:
Ms. McArdle assures her readers that they're not NIMBYs to think that stranding"a whole lot of people with a whole lot of problems in a pretty small neighborhood" makes problems even worse for the homeless and neighbors alike.
Sounds like she was describing Cass Park, but she was writing about Washington, DC.
A lot of the few hundred residents who live in the immediate vicinity of Cass Park are living paycheck to paycheck, and this weekend's event gave them trouble getting to work, to church -- even just getting out for groceries or to do some laundry.
And for what it's worth, when I finally made it out to the only liquor store here that remained open after the concert ended I found a line of people upset that all the beer coolers were completely empty. A dry event, but the other liquor stores that weren't open must have sold out of beer as well, which explains the Milwaukee's Best cans littering the street:
Not much streaming coming out of the Cass Park Kem concert on YouTube yet. So far only this one popped up, and this poor woman did not seem pleased about being ambushed, and I'm not sure whether "Are you videotaping me?" was permission enough to upload her to YouTube.
The day starts with a breakfast prayer by Khary Kimani Turner, disgraced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's cowriter and a local freelancer who invoked today's call to service.
I've never had barbeque for breakfast. It must be a Nashville or Lathrup thing.
At how many neighborhood and community meetings have residents been told that there just isn't any money to fix street lights to make our streets safe? Too many times to count. Too many times being told that the parts are out of stock but will be in in a few weeks, only to wait two months and still not have street lights. Too many times told to call 311 and get a tracking number.
Well, somehow the PLD found money to fix the lights in Cass Park in time for this weekend's event. Two PLD trucks were here fixing lights yesterday and returned with more parts to fix some more during this morning's cleanup.
Somehow there's no money when residents are repeatedly asking for streetlights in neighborhoods to be fixed, but somehow there's money when the Lathrup Village singer has to get his show on the road.
Well, he found four people looking for a Kim Owens autograph:
Oh, here's another woman who wanted his autograph. That brings the total up to five.
But once the only five people who got theirs had gone, he wandered around looking for more fans.
Well, at least he didn't run out of ink.
I suppose folks who want his autograph but missed out on this morning's volunteer effort could always send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Kemistry Records or the event organizers, Project Producers, LLC.
