Coalition on Homelessness Turns 20
Next to its tenacity, one of the Coalition’s greatest strengths is its longevity. No, Gavin Newsom didn’t say that and he probably never will. In fact I can’t think of any Mayor who has praised the Coalition’s longevity, and that’s okay. They’re all gone and the Coalition on Homelessness is still here, working its ass off. 20 years of busting its butt. 7,300 days, 240 months, 960 weeks, and an absolutely amazing number of hours dedicated to one mission and one mission only: Creating a community that has no need for a homeless coalition.
When the Coalition was formed in 1987, homelessness had just recently re-emerged in America’s cities. I don’t think any of us had any idea that 20 years later, not only would the COH still be alive and kicking, but that we would still be dealing with so many of the same damn issues. It’s ironic that one of the first actions of what was then a brand new COH was a protest of police sweeps in Golden Gate Park. Our mayor then—as did the next one, the next one, and as our mayor is doing today—responded to media pressure about people sleeping in the Park with a punitive policing “outreach” program. In response, the Coalition did what it has gotten pretty good at: it defended against the criminalization of people who are without housing.
The civil rights work—which generates the most media—and the Street Sheet are probably what most people think of when they think about the Coalition, and that’s fine because we are very proud of this work. But these projects are not the reason the Coalition has lasted so long. In all honesty, the civil rights work is the work that has generated attacks by politicians and media pundits that inevitably have led to foundations shying away from us. Think about it: When have you ever heard a mayor or columnist lambaste the Coalition for the role we played in creating hundreds of units of housing for homeless people, or a treatment program for women and their families, or a housing subsidy for homeless families? Or any of the other programs we facilitated the development of. You never hear them say a word or give any credit to anything the Coalition does that doesn’t fit into the “it’s the Coalition’s fault we can’t lock them up/get rid of them/march them into the sea” excuse, so important to mayors when they find out they can’t make homelessness disappear through the police.
It’s kind of sad, really, and has gotten us further from ending homelessness than we would otherwise be. When communities come together and create programs and design approaches that a majority of us have reason to believe will work, a mayor’s response should be to acknowledge that people are working together, and to instruct City staff to follow the communities’ lead.
For the first couple of years of the Agnos administration, it seemed like this might happen. The Coalition and City staff worked to bring together the combined community and City expertise to create Beyond Shelter, a document nationally recognized as excellent in its thoughtfulness and in its call to move a community forward, to get beyond providing shelter and start developing housing. As soon as Mayor Frank Jordan was elected, the plan was discarded, and mayors alone have been running SF’s homeless programs ever since.
The Coalition’s outreach, community organizing, and our community meetings, however, continue. We will continue with the work we do because we have learned that the combined experience of all members of a community makes for a far superior process for solving these issues. We have seen programs created, expanded or saved because people from all walks met together and figured out how to work together to make it happen. We have seen people take the work they were doing at the Coalition and spin it off to create a new group (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) that is truly a powerful force, and we have been able to create partnerships with other organizations like the Community Housing Partnership, Shelter Client Advocates, and the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights. We have passed legislation, like that which created the Shelter Monitoring Committee, or the Single Standard of Care for psychiatric treatment that have ensured individuals have safe shelters and access psychiatric treatment even if they have no insurance.
The main thing about the Coalition turning 20 years old is that no matter what happens tomorrow, this organization—which means the people of this organization—will leave a mark on San Francisco for generations to come. The thousands of people who have donated, the hundreds who have served as staff (for little or no pay), and most importantly the people of our community who have talked with us during outreach and come to the meetings in our office, should all be incredibly proud. San Francisco is one of very few cities where enough people feel it is important to ensure that an organization like the Coalition can survive and thrive to actually make that happen.
The Coalition may not always tell you what you want to hear, like when we called the shelters everyday to expose the lies behind Frank Jordan’s Matrix Program, or when we tell you now that homeless people are now paying for shelter beds under Care Not Cash, our current Mayor’s “epiphany” program (his word, not ours), but the Coalition will always tell you what it knows to be the truth.
And the Coalition knows what it is talking about because before we can claim to know anything about anything, a whole lot of people had to have already told us what was up. Take, for example, our Locked Out mental health report. Even with the changes this report brought about in the mental health system, the most classic moment for us came when KRON reporter Evan White did a special segment to investigate our findings. He was told by homeless people, service providers and Department of Public Health big shots, “Yeah, they know what they’re talking about. Homeless mentally ill people are getting screwed.” This particular moment stands out for a couple of reasons. One is that this was the first time the City admitted straight-up that the community was the expert on homelessness issues. And two, because of the way our reports are compiled, the reporter had to talk to a lot of different homeless people about a systems change issue in order to validate what the Coalition was saying. And he did. Hopefully it won’t take another 20 years before we see another reporter do that.
The Coalition wants to be challenged. Every organization should be, especially an organization that claims to represent a community. If there isn’t a long list of people who helped write the report and a whole methodology section on the outreaches conducted to compile it, then it’s probably not a Coalition report. It’s called accountability. At Coalition staff trainings it’s called, “and just who are you talking about when you say we.” It is hard to say which came first—our wanting to be challenged or our love to do the challenging. Since Bob Prentice, the first point person for the City in the mid ‘80s, there has not been a homelessness point person for any mayor in this town who embraces being held accountable. At least not by our community.
After we validate ourselves, we train Coalition members to file official public information requests. This is very important because it is a moment when you can mess with the power dynamic a little bit and remind some City staff that they are supposed to be working for us. It is a sad comment that so many City staffers are surprised a homeless coalition even knows what a simple thing like an information request is.
It is sad because it means that person is missing the big picture of what a community is: We’re families, single youth and adults, service providers, organizers, doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, teachers, housing developers, clergy. We’re everybody and we’re nobody. We’re talented and we’re organizing so that people in our city no longer have to live without housing, treatment, income, and education.
The Coalition is honored, and deeply grateful, that people have wanted us to be a part of this community for 20 years. We work for the day when we can all work together on other issues, and no longer need to focus on homelessness in our community.
PaulBoden