Some day soon take yourself a stroll from Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza down the east side of Telegraph Avenue. Thread through students and shoppers past a couple of blocks of funky bars and stores. Soon, you will come to Rasputin Music, the flagship of nine Bay Area music outlets. There, in the windows at 2401 Telegraph, you will encounter a colorful experiment in “counter-education.”

Rasputin offers window displays featuring Japanese internment camps, disability rights, Black Panther history, and, as of this writing, homeless art.

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From May through July, most US taxpayers will be receiving $300-600 as part of an “economic stimulus package” passed by the Federal government earlier this year. The basic idea is that by spending that money on consumer goods, we’ll all pump a little more life back into the national economy, encouraging growth and countering the looming recession.

Back in the days of another great empire, Juvenal wrote that Rome was in decline because the people could be bought off with the promises of, “bread and circuses.” Over the past quarter century, the United States government has abdicated its responsibilities to its people by slashing public housing and income assistance, and reallocating necessary service funds to frivolous wars and corporate welfare. Now, as the past couple decades of economic policy are failing, the government is trying to buy the public off with a little bit of bread, while Fox and Clear Channel manage the corporatocracy’s circuses.

You could register your protest by, say, investing your stimulus check in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but we at the Street Sheet propose a perhaps more productive means of protest: Invest in us.

Your economic stimulus check—or part of it—can help us to create a voice for more humane governmental economic and social service policies. Donations may be sent to:

Street Sheet Economic Stimulus Package
c/o Coalition on Homelessness
468 Turk Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

or you can donate on-line here.

Juvenal also wrote, “Honesty is praised and starves.” Your donation can cut a little edge off that starvation.

Friends and allies gather to listen to one of the speakers at Saturday’s celebration.

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Tonight, Coalition Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach will be recognized alongside Barbara Garcia of the Department of Public Health, and the Women’s Community Clinic in the 2008 TenderChamp Awards, as part of a benefit for Central City Hospitality House.

The Funniest Celebrity in the Bay Area Contest will begin at 7 p.m. tonight at the Great American Music Hall at 859 O’Farrell Street. Among the contestants are Renel Brooks-Moon of 98.1 KISS FM, Rachel Gordon and Phil Matier of the Chronicle, Michael Krasney of KQED FM, MC Hammer, Liam Mayclem of CBS 5, and Ronn Owens of KGO AM 810. Supervisor Tom Ammiano and former Mayor Willie Brown are special guests. Proceeds will go to support the amazing work that Hospitality House does.

General admission is $150. Non-profit admission is $100.

On Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at City Hall, the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women, and the Board of Supervisors, in Coordination with International Women’s Month (March) and International Women’s Day (March 8), also commemorated at the United Nations, held the Women Making History Awards Ceremony.

Eleven San Francisco women were honored for this prestigious award, among them Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

Originally from Redwood City, Ms. Friedenbach, Supervisor Tom Ammiano’s nominee, has worked “about 17 years” on homelessness and poverty issues, including welfare rights, housing, homeless prevention, healthcare, disability, and human and civil rights.

For five years, Ms. Friedenbach worked at San Mateo County’s Hunger and Homeless Coalition moving from administrative assistant to Director. She relocated to San Francisco 12 years ago to work with the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. Jennifer, 41, has two sons, Mateo, eight, and Makayln, four.

Jennifer co-authored reports including Locked Out! The Voices of People with Mental Illness, a 1999 study citing bureaucratic blockage of access to San Francisco’s mental health system for people in crisis; Housing First for Families, which documents the impact of homelessness on children; and Shelter Shocked, which presents a statistical study of human rights abuses in San Francisco’s shelter system.

Ms. Friedenbach sits on the Implementation Council for the Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, and was a founding member of the People’s Budget Collaborative, which redirects City funding toward supporting poor people’s programs in San Francisco.

Please join us to commemorate homeless people—our friends, relatives, neighbors, acquaintances, and even some who none of us got the opportunity to know—this Thursday, December 20, at 5:30 p.m. at Civic Center Plaza. Bring a candle, if you can. If you know of any one who has passed away, please make sure that their name is included in the service by contacting San Francisco Network Ministries at 415.928.6209.

On August 27, Bill Sorro, one of San Francisco’s most influential, beloved, and passionate activists, passed away. Though the loss of such a unique and devoted man has sent ripples of sorrow throughout the community, the story of his life continues to inspire everyone he has known and everyone who has come to know him, even if only through his memory.

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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.

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On May 8, hundreds of Tenderloin residents marched through the streets with slogans like “Stop the Violence” and “Community Not Containment”—the latter a reference to the San Francisco Police Department’s method of containing crime to designated blocks. Of course, in the neighborhood, those designated areas are the first few blocks of Turk Street, Jones Street, and Golden Gate, with three homicides, two rapes, and 237 aggravated assaults in the last 90-day period. After a slew of recent killings, a coalition of groups that includes the Safety Network, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the North of Market Community Benefit District, the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center, and residents, decided that it needed to engage in a symbolic act against the violence and crime that overwhelmingly plagues the Tenderloin. With no set platform, but a desire to make the neighborhood a safer place for children, for seniors, for people with disabilities, for all residents, they marched to City Hall, where they joined the Budget for Families Coalition. On the way, they stopped to commemorate the victims of violence, including a 16-year-old, who was shot at Golden Gate and Hyde Street.

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Today, even cultures that contain strong safety nets for preventing homelessness are finding that more and more people are slipping through cracks in the structures of family, community, and faith that used to protect them and finding themselves on the streets. And when individuals from such a culture come to this country lacking even the benefit of language skills to help them navigate the perilous shoals of our more socially indifferent culture, they are likely to find themselves truly at sea.

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