Tent City in N.Y. Times, today.

	Picture of tent city, as it appeared alongside the N. Y. Times article.

Well, now we've hit the Big Media zenith. Tent City made it into the New York Times [today, online; tomorrow, in hardcopy]: "Residents of Sacramento’s Tent City to Move to Fairground."

Loaves & Gandhi

In his column two weeks ago Marcos Breton compared Loaves & Fishes' Executive Director, Sister Libby Fernandez, and Director of Advocacy, Joan Burke, with Mahatma Gandhi, writing, "These two ladies have triggered a standoff [re tent city] by evoking Mahatma Gandhi bringing the British Empire to its knees. They are righteous, humble servants living the word of God."

Now, if we were to take Gandhi's message regarding Customer Service, above [which he uttered in 1890], and merely substitute Libby and Joan as advocates of this service policy, and use "guest" in place of where Gandhi said "customer" -- since L&F insists on calling its denizens "guests" -- and, what the hell, let's Americanize the spelling of "favour," making it "favor," and not leave things male-specific, by using "they," instead of "he." And we should call L&F an organization, instead of a business. Can you imagine such beatitudinousness, so grand a welling up of kindness, in the way Loaves & Fishes would be run?

Guests are the most important visitors on our premises. They are not dependent on us. We are dependent on them. They are not an interruption of our work. They are the purpose of it. They are not an outsider to our organization. They are part of it. We are not doing them a favor by serving them. They are doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

-- Sister Libby & Joan Burke for Loaves & Fishes

Or, how's this: How about if, for kicks, we put these words in the mouth of Mr. Neto on behalf of Overflow. How does this sound:

Sheltered guests are the most important visitors on our premises. They are not dependent on us. We are dependent on them. They are not an interruption of our work. They are the purpose of it. They are not an outsider to our organization. They are part of it. We are not doing them a favor by serving them. They are doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

-- Mr. Neto on behalf of VOA, administrator of Overflow

Marcos Breton is a Fool and an Ignoramous

	Photo kiped from the Loaves & Fishes webspace.

For the second week in a row, Marcos Breton has demonstrated his profound ignorance of the homeless situation in Sacramento. It must be that Breton never leaves the office. this week's column is entitled "Too much hypocrisy on homeless," and concludes with this sentiment, "Sacramento is compassionate toward the homeless – maybe too compassionate."

In the middle of his article he spends a lot of time talking about nearby cities and communities who, he says, wouldn't stand to have homeless people in their midst. He cites the communities of the Fabulous 40s, Curtis Park, Land Park, the McKinley Park area, East Sacramento and the Pocket. And the 'burbs, near and far, El Dorado Hills, Granite Bay, Carmichael, Fair Oaks, Rocklin and Roseville. [btw, Breton DOESN'T get so far-afield to mention Fairfield, where, it was reported, yesterday, in the The Vacaville Reporter, the go-ahead has been given to build a $7.7 million, 23,985 square-feet homeless shelter-and-support center on a 3-acre site.]

A scant fifty years ago, Breton might have easily been able to cite many communities within and cities near Sacramento who wouldn't have standed to have "negros" living near them. Fortunately, we've come a long, long way toward overcoming THAT prejudice. In India, fifty years ago, there was a common prejudice again so-called Untouchables. Happily, India has significantly overcome THAT prejudice.

So, how were India's Untouchables treated? Here's what it says in The Laws of Manu, as published in the 1997 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions:

"Their dwelling place shall be outside of the village, and their wealth shall consist of dogs and donkeys. Their clothes shall be garments of corpses, their food eaten from broken dishes. Their ornaments shall be of black iron, and they are condemned to wandering from place to place."

Well, we don't own any donkeys that I know of, but we homeless do have dogs; we do eat from dishes others wouldn't have; we CERTAINLY wear garments formerly owned by people now deceased and there's a lot of wandering from place to place, that's for sure. So far, we haven't been kicked out of every village that Breton can name, but that may come.

One more thing, near the end, Breton passed on this foolishness:

We also need an acknowledgment that some people can't or won't take help. For example, Kraintz [a long-time homeless fellow] predicted that some people in the current homeless camp would not go to a shelter at Cal Expo – Sacramento's temporary solution to illegal camping.

"It's about freedom, man," he said.

What Breton doesn't understand is that staying at the shelter at Cal Expo [aka, Winter Shelter and Overflow] means a person must arrive at the Delany Center, in the Loaves & Fishes facility, at ~3:30pm every day for transport to Cal Expo.

You are held at the shelter where you must stay in the dorm area [or smoke at an enclosed area outside or go to the bathroom in an area outside]. Two usually-very-violent movies are shown, but they are frequently interupted by chatter, or dinner, or the shelter staffs' caprice.

A breakfast of cereal is served before the sheltered are bussed back to the Delany Center at 5:30AM. At 5:30, in the cold and dark, there's nothing for most of us to do but wait for Loaves & Fishes's Friendship Park to open (on weekdays; it's not open on weekends), at 7:02AM, or for weekend lunch tickets which are given out beginning at 8:00AM.

Thus, you see, 15 1/2 hours {!!!!!} of each and every day is consumed by staying at the shelter, not including the time getting to the Delany Center each afternoon. That's A LOT of time for sleep, gruel, and a dinner (which is famously stinting). [And then there is this chestnut: The shelter does not provide showers.] [And a second chestnut: On the men's side, though the tables for eating are empty except during meals, management will not allow men to sit at them outside mealtime. A man cannot sit down to write or read or study. Make do with your bunkbed or one of the few benchs, if available, or "that's tough." Also, though not strictly enforced, the rule from time to time is that men may bring only toiletries to the shelter, in a clear bag.]

But the worst thing about it is that the time-devouring shelter MAKES IT NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE ANY MOVE TO BETTER ONESELF. People using the Overflow shelter cannot take or keep employment [because of the tight time constraints].

Questions about the near future in Homeless World Sacramento

Recent polical events may manifest as successful at kicking the can down the road until midyear. By then, the media buzz will have buzzed off somewhere else.

If the mayor succeeds at increasing the bed count and extending the duration of Overflow shelter [and, likely, this is as good as achieved] and getting temporary camping ground at Cal Expo [this seems difficult, but perhaps it's been done behind the scenes], then Tent City, east of Loaves & Fishes on property belonging to SMUD and Union Pacific, can be rousted, fences can be put in place, and all the media hoopla may be but a blip in the history of Sacramento, a rather-strange web of events and tangle of stories that came and went and signified nothing.

But in the middle of this year, long after Big Media have completely forgotten us, homeless people will still be living in Sacramento and will be needing services, including "places to be," and means to repair their damaged lives.

Let's look at how, recently, the worm has turned. In today's paper, Cynthia Hubert, the Bee's homelessness reporter, writes about Dreher Street residences' impatience with the homeless who use the street as their path in and out of the camp community. Hubert calls the encampment "Sacramento's notorious tent city" in her story. The homes on Dreher Street number exactly nine.

I don't doubt that a huge increase in pedestrian and bicycle traffic on the short street, and the often-boorish behavior of many homeless people, will disrupt the quiet that residents were accustomed to. I don't doubt for a minute that there's a problem here that needs to be addressed.

But we should all be aware that Tent City was never organized and never got to the point of a needs assessment and never got to a stage where becoming permanent, in some configuration at that location, felt like it was truly within reach.

The rug is getting pulled out from under Tent City and we should wonder what the Powers that Be are up to. Are they just wanting all the media attention to go away, because the true business of a city is attracting business? What business would want to put a branch or storefront in Sacramento if what comes to the public's mind when the city's name is mentioned is, gulp, homeless people?

Making the story go away means making Tent City go away. So long as Tent City is there, or anywhere on county property, the snoopy media of the world will be interested in developments. Tent City, Sacramento, is iconic. Tent City must die.

Tent City is like Howard Beale in Network. It needed to be killed because of the damage it was doing to the network's/city's ratings, so that's been arranged.

In the future, interest in Homeless World Sacramento may be as intense as interest in Vanilla Ice. And prospects for homeless people in Sacramento relaunching their lives may be only as good as Vanilla Ice getting good reviews for his next album.

Tent City campers to be rousted; Overflow closing date to be extended three months

A Bee article by Cynthia Hubert, today, tells us,

Homeless campers who live inside Sacramento's tent city will be asked to move to shelters and other indoor structures, officials said Thursday. Responding to growing concern and criticism about the burgeoning homeless encampment north of downtown, Mayor Kevin Johnson announced a plan to move as many as 150 campers to "safer, more sanitary" grounds.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which owns the bulk of the tent city property, plans to fence off the area within the next month ...

[Mayor Johnson's] plan, to be brought before the City Council on Tuesday, calls for relocating the campers to various types of temporary and permanent indoor housing, including existing shelters and modular buildings at Cal Expo.

Funding for the project will include local redevelopment money, Johnson said. He said the exact costs and funding mechanisms will be laid out Tuesday, and that he is confident the money will be available. ...

Here is the agenda for the City Council's special 2:15 meeting this Tuesday, Mar. 24, that is alluded to in the Bee article, quoted above. This public meeting follows a closed meeting of the council.

Men who stayed at Overflow last night tell me that the facility's manager, Mr. Neto, announced yesterday evening that Overflow would be extending its closing date three months from March 31 to June 30. Overflow, which has more-formally been known as Winter Shelter, is a facility at Cal Expo that has been shelter for 104 men and 52 women and children since it opened on November 24.

In fiscally normal times, Overflow has operated for the five months from Nov. 1 to Mar. 31. This year, Overflow opened late, due to funding limitations, and was going to close early, because of that same reason. It received a reprieve when Sierra Health Foundation awarded a grant to Volunteers of America, which operates the facility, allowing the facility to close at on its usual March 31 close date.

Apparently, now, due to the general increase in area homeless folk, and specifically due to the mayor's new effort to close Tent City, Overflow is to be kept open an additional three months.

UPDATE: According to a KCRA report, paraphrasing Mayor Johnson, The city has asked Cal Expo to add 50 more beds to Overflow, and to extend the time when the sheltered must leave the facility to 10am. Cal Expo has also been asked to consider providing a tented area. In a picture at the KCRA webpage, Libby Fernandez, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, is seen standing close to the mayor, who is standing at a podium.

What effect all this will have on the effort to create a permanent homeless tent village in Sacramento is not known.

Marcos Breton would roust the tent people and be rid of them

	Photo kiped from the Loaves & Fishes webspace.

In a piece published Sunday, demonstrating foolishness and ignorance, Bee columnist Marcos Breton writes, "Other cities would have rousted the tent people long ago. Sacramento got a black eye [from the "Oprah" exposure]. Do Roseville, Granite Bay or Fair Oaks carry a burden like [Sacramento does with homelessness in its midst]? No way."

Breton doesn't explain how he'd deal with the homelessness problem in our area and nation, he seems just to figure that nobody wants them and that they are by definition undesirable, so they must disappear by being rousted from everywhere.

Laughably, Breton cites Loaves & Fishes' Executive Director Libby Fernandez and Advocacy Director Joan Burke, mucky-mucks of a "charity that caters to the homeless," as the responsible parties for the quandary politicos have here with tent city.

Breton believes that Fernandez and Burke are righteous modern-day Sister Teresas who have hypnotized the city by evoking Mahatma Gandhi in their "practice [of] unconditional love on the addicts and mentally ill souls at their [charity's] door."

It is clear that Breton lives in a world of half-century-old stereotypes and does not understand Loaves & Fishes nor the rest of Homeless World Sacramento, and has never met the real Libby (who can be sarcastic, mocking, rude and display a compassion deficit).

But, then, I've never been to 21st & Q where Breton composes his columns on a big Underwood typewriter before passing out from the effects of tippling from the flask in his back pocket.

Had Breton had so much as a clue regarding the topic he chose to write about, he would know that for many, many weeks Fernandez's Friendship Park was a mud wallow, a pig habitat. And that a distinct, very noticeable feature of L&F is the strange lack of compassion on the part of some who are on staff there.

Had he a modicum of experience in Homeless World Sacramento, Breton would come to realize that many of us homeless have noticeable problems of different sorts, and that our problems drag us down. We are truly suffering and haven't the wherewithal to escape our painful circumstance. He would also come to know that rather than being a bunch of lazy, no-account slobs, we live in a time-devouring universe that strips us of dignity.

And if he had access to compassion, Breton might learn that most of the people in Homeless World Sacramento are amazing and splendid and fine, even when we are a wee bit unclean and unrefined.

Bee reports on Homeless-People Whisperer

	Jvance Stewart, a Navigator of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, whom the Bee identifies as a people whisperer.

Jvance Stewart and his fellow Navigators are cited as homeless-people whisperers in a story titled "Workers quietly help street people, guide them toward housing" in today's Sacramento Bee.

Reporter Bill Lindelof tells us in his article that "Navigators are employed by the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, a nonprofit organization of property owners dedicated to improving the central business district."

A recent issue of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership newsletter, called insideDowntown, gives us this definition of Navigators:

The Navigator program’s primary goal is to effectively reduce the homelessness downtown by connecting the underserved homeless population with social and health care services. By developing personal relationships with cooperative individuals, Navigators connect street homeless with local community service programs to increase their access to care and identify solutions to their homelessness.

Writes Lindelof in his Bee piece,

Navigators walk the streets daily and chat up the homeless. While Oprah Winfrey and the media recently focused on a tent city outside the city's core,the Downtown Partnership has worked for years to get street people in the city center into housing. [Jvance] Stewart, [55,] one of four Navigators, is admired for his sympathetic methods. Rita Spillane, the district attorney's community prosecutor for downtown, said Stewart seems to gently nudge the troubled into accepting help.

"He does a world of good for the downtown homeless population," Spillane said. "Affable, happy, helpful, humble, he's got it all. You've heard of horse whisperers; he's probably a people whisperer."

Navigators take homeless clients to Social Security offices, make telephone calls for them, contact family members, arrange transportation to doctors' offices - and work to find them temporary or permanent housing.

The Bee story goes on to tell several stories of Stewart helping, or attempting to help, homeless people downtown, within "the city's core, from Front Street to 29th Street."

UPDATE 3/18: The first commenter to this blogpost makes a good point. The reason for Downtown Sacramento Partnership's existance is to make the downtown area pleasant such that customers come and spend their money in downtown establishments. This purpose can be at odds with the needs of and well-being of homeless people.

Lindelof's article tells us that DSP also employs "yellow jackets," guides to help tourists and others maneuver downtown and to deter panhandling by homeless people. Downtown businesses' goal is for there not to be any homeless people downtown.

Sac'to anti-scavenging ordinance gets attention of L.A. Times columnist

	Gregory Rodriguez

"What's really wrong with the anti-scavenging picture? It's that as times get tougher, the middle-class mores that inform such ordinances don't fit the reality of the growing number of people in our towns and cities who will be obliged to find innovative and, shall we say, quasi-respectable ways to survive," writes Gregory Rodriguez in his column in the Los Angeles Times, today, titled "Punishing scavengers? It's un-American: Ordinances meant to discourage the practice fly in the face of our values of self-reliance and resourcefulness," which was specifically about the Sacramento council and its approval of an ordinance that harms area homeless.

[See item #14 (pg 5) on summary of March 3 Sacramento Council meeting.]

Rodriguez tells us, "Not long ago, British historian Simon Schama wrote that 'American resourcefulness is one well that won't run dry,' and for the most part I think he's right. But these days we're more likely to define resourcefulness as high-end technological innovation rather than low-level scrappiness. We tend to celebrate the successful entrepreneurial maverick who cuts corners or goes against the grain, while denigrating the hard-nosed survivor on the other end of the social spectrum."

And: "Of course, we'd rather not have people scavenging through bins to find recyclables to sell for money to buy food, not to mention the fact that scavenging can undercut city recycling programs. Naturally, we'd prefer that all retail businesses adhere to some sort of regulated standards. But barring outright criminal activity, in times like these when more and more Americans are losing their homes and their jobs, it seems counterproductive to discourage anyone from finding relatively innocuous ways to help themselves.

"Punishing resourcefulness? It's downright un-American."

Rodriguez's bio tells us he's "an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute. He has written widely on issues of national identity, social cohesion, assimilation, race relations, religion, immigration, ethnicity, demographics and social and political trends. His book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, was named one of the "Best Books of 2007" by The Washington Post.

Yet More About Val Jon Farris

	Val Jon Farris appears in the center of this photo [wearing an American-flag headband] while distributing items to residents of Tent City. This picture appears in slideshows at both SFGate and MSNBC's webspaces.

A fellow, purportedly from nearby Grass Valley, Val Jon Farris, with his upstart homeless organization, iCare-America, has been successful at making a local-media splash in Sacramento.

He's appeared on KCRA, channel 3, [On Feb 25, here and here.] and the ABC affiliate, News10 [on Mar 13]. He's also gotten the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle in its online source, S.F. Gate.

Farris is the author of a 1999 book Inca Fire! Light of the Masters [amazon page] which, it is claimed, won the Independent Publishers Book Award of 2000, in the category of New Age publications. Purportedly, Farris's book won out over 500 other nominees for the award. This award cannot be verified since the webspace for the book awards does not list archives going back farther than 2001. UPDATE 3/18: Verification that Ferris's book DID win a Year-2000 IPPY Award has been found.

Here, from the Amazon webspace, the beginning of the introduction to Farris's New Age book.

In the summer of 1998 I embarked on an expedition that led me to a mysterious pinnacle of granite on the north slope of the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu.

On the night of July 9, under a full moon, I received a flurry of inspired messages, seven to be exact, that triggered a sequence of events which redefined the meaning and purpose of my life. The seventeen chapters in the book go into great detail about each of the messages, the events that transformed his life and the means by which you, the reader, can reap the benefits of my journey through participating in a literary adventure.

Visiting a place like Machu Picchu, Peru, is not new for me. I have been a seeker and explorer for as long as I can remember. My inquisitive nature began when I was a child. Like all kids, I had a million questions about life. Why is a tree called a tree? Why do dogs bark? Where is heaven? [You can read more here.]

Chapters in Farris's book include "The Seat of the Condor"; "Truth: The Third Dimension of Knowing"; and "In the Light of the Sun."

The publisher of Farris's book, cited at Amazon, is Keystone Group, which cannot be found online as a book publisher, but IS a company Farris shows as his most-recent employer on his resume.

According to the Amazon webspace, a New York Times review of the book is supposed to include these glowing words of praise: "A compelling spiritual adventure story set in Machu Picchu, Peru. Along with author Val Jon Farris, experience the seven dimensions of knowing that will transform you and forever change the way you look at your life." These words sound radically NOT like anything that might appear in any hoity New York Times review, or in the book review of any credible source. A book review in the Times, even when at its most-ardent and -ecstatic, would never sound like an advertisement. In recent years, the Times got an agreement with its writers union such that its website now includes archives going back to the year 1851. There is no indication whatsoever that Farris's book has been mentioned anywhere in the New York Times. UPDATE 3/18: My error. The review is from New Times, not the New York Times. I could not find an old review of Inca Fire, in any of the New Times publications on the Internet, including, perhaps most prominently, The Tampa New Times Naturally.

It has also not proved possible to find or verify any of the other glowing-review snips that are posted at Amazon for Inca Fire! Neither Midwest Book Review nor Leading Edge Review have a review of Inca Fire! in their archives. We couldn't find a website for, nor indication that an organization now exists called Today's Librarian. The NAPRA Review webspace appears to be in a state of dissolution, only some of its music review webpages are accessable.

UPDATE 3/18: I have now gotten hold of a copy of Farris's book, a 1st edition from Sacramento Public Library's Central branch. One curious thing is that all of the media-review snips at amazon are replicated exactly on the second page of the first edition of Farris's book. The book is ten years old, admittedly, but I find it a bit suspicious that I haven't been able to find any of the reviews, nor any other review of Farris's book, online.

Frankly, I find the book isn't that bad! It's kind of sweet and charming, even as it is also rather ridiculous and clearly a The Celestine Prophecy knock-off. James Redfield, the The Celestine Prophecy author, admits his book is a fantasy, a novel. Inca Fire!, too, is clearly a novel, but has a Dewey Decimal classification [at Sacramento Public Library, anyway] of 299.8 ["Religions not provided for elsewhere"] In a "From the Publisher" review at Barnes & Noble it says, "... Acknowledging thematic similarity to Redfield's Celestine Prophecy and Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Farris nevertheless distinguished his as an account of a true experience: part travelogue and part metaphysical guide to developing multidimensional ways of knowing that will enhance wisdom and the connection to soul."

Bee Reports on International Attention Given Sacramento's Tent City

	Picture that appeared with today's Bee story, showing an Australian TV crew conducting an interview in Tent City.

Great interest and attention and benefits and detriments and wild factual errors have come in conjunction with the international media frenzy that has descended on Sacramento's Tent City.

Sacramento Bee homelessness reporter Cynthia Hubert writes about it all in a frontpage story, today, titled "Spotlight shines -- and stings" [in hardcopy] and "Some feel burned as media spotlight falls on capital's homeless camp" [in the online edition of the Bee]

Reporter Hubert does an excellent job at targetting the weirdness and inaccuracies in reports that are going out around the country and around the world. What's most troubling are great inaccuracies in the reporting of local TV stations, which couldn't be more out-of-touch if they were headquartered in Zanzibar and their News Directors were seriously psychotic.

One local TV station reported that the population of Tent City was 1,200 with 100 new residents coming to the encampment daily. Later, for its website, the station re-edited its report to say that only 50 new residents were being added daily. This data is wholly bogus. As Hubert properly reports, the true population of Tent City is between two and three hundred folks, with only a smattering of new residents getting added, daily.

Hubert also does a great service to Sacramento and the public view of this new phenomena of tent cities by writing about the true nature of the population. Tim Brown of Sacramento Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative is quoted saying "While it's very true that we are seeing increasing numbers of middle-class familities hitting the streets, it's still a very small percentage. At tent city, 90 percent of the people are chronically homeless."

National news stories -- on Oprah and the Today Show [video] -- have misrepresented Sacramento homelessness. While these Big Media TV shows certainly sometimes-unconsciously skew their reporting such that it seems to most-directly impact their audience, it is possibly also the fault of so-called leading Sacramento homeless "advocates," such as L&F's chief executive Libby Fernandez, who steer reporters to usually-young, caucasian, formerly upper-middle-class families. Fernandez has "found" Deanna Van Slate, Favor Whitesides and her children, and nice, white Tent City families for reporters.

Judging by what makes national and international news, and news over our local TV stations, people would have to come to think that burgeoning homelessness in Sacramento comes mostly from recently displaced white families, when in truth most Sacramentan homeless people have been in the circumstance, on and off, for many, many months if not years. Most of the so-called chronically homeless are solo men. [Many of these men do have families they are not now living with, or with whom they have a strained relationship.] Most solo men are black, though you would never guess this from news reports.

What's more is that most recently-rendered-homeless Sacramentans are solo men who live in shelters, or parked cars, or sleep on the streets, or in tents within or outside the Tent City encampment.

One thing that is worrisome about the Bee report is the continuation of concentration on Loaves & Fishes as the fulcrum of homelessness and source of spokespeople regarding homeless issues. Both L&F Executive Director Libby Fernandez and Director of Advocacy Joan Burke appear as sources of "objective" information when, in fact, the situation and their leadership at Loaves & Fishes is troubling and ought to be the target of some reporting. It seems clear to SacHo that L&F is angling to benefit directly from city and county contracts that will be forthcoming to provide care for the burgeoning Sacramento homeless community.

Loaves & Fishes is beloved by the great majority of homeless people, but this comes without an understanding of the great amount of donations that come to the organization, much of which is not utilized efficiently. Despite its public face, a great many on-staff at Loaves & Fishes are not compassionate toward the homeless people the organization is meant to serve.

More News on Farris

Val Jon Farris has gotten himself on TV, again.

Though he has no background working on homeless causes and has only very, very recently gotten into the biz after his effort to get re-employed as a corporate consultant failed, Farris and a nonprofit he started just two months ago, iCare-America, were featured yesterday on News10.

While Farris's intentions might be honorable, he and his organization have appeared on the scene out of nowhere.

In the video below, [or, found at News10 here] we hear about how Farris is scoping the situation at Camp Hope in Ontario, California, as a possible model for grounds and governance for Sacramento's encamped homeless. See video, below, where Farris is called in the intro a homeless advocate:



A very curious thing is that much of the video from the News10 report comes from an unacknowledged clip from a documentary done on Dec. 26, 2007 by a group called Mission4Him. See viddy, below:

News10's report tells us that Farris is on a mission for the city of Sacramento. And the text for the report at the Channel 10 webspace tells us that he's "investigating the camp for Sacramento officials."

UPDATE 3/15: If you now look at the webpage at News10 for their report, you will find three comments, all dated 3/14, written by Mission4Him [real name Gabriel Provencio], the Mission4Him team leader.

Provencio writes, "we have been here in Ontario since the beginning of Tent City and we know for a fact that there has not been one person at this Camp that has lost their home because of the foreclosure crises." And, the reporting "lacks integrity, because it give the impression that the video clips where was shot this month when in fact it was shot on Dec 26 2007 by me"

Provencio advises News10 and its readers see this video his organization shot for an up-to-date view of what Tent City in Ontario looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSAKPDVGD_E

Here, Provencio's video, embedded in SacHo:

The Future of Tent City

	An area in Tent City, as pictured by KCRA.

The encampment east of Loaves & Fishes in Sacramento is getting enormous attention nationwide for being emblematic of the souring economy.

It many ways, this is unfortunate since the encampment is real, not a symbol. The people living in tents there are actual, factual, and not iconic -- not empty husks for Media and others to use to frame other problems.

Still, Media attention, for all its hype and falseness, brings welcome benefits (even if they come for wrong, misguided reasons).

Right now, there are people and organizations with a fount of unalloyed compassion that are lovingly giving to homeless Sacramentans. There are others who may or may not be just as compassionate who have an angle -- an organization they belong to that needs a revenue source or a job they want funded down the road.

Homeless citizens of Sacramento, particularly those in Tent City [aka, the Wasteland; the Snakepit; Smudville; Libbyville; Almond encampment; SacraTento; Safe Ground (a name Val Jon Farris gives it in one of his viddies) and (according to a John Kloss editorial cartoon in the 3/12 issue of SN&R) Shackramento], should be on their guard!

There are many out there who want a piece of the Tent City action. L&F CEO Libby Fernandez is openly trying to wrest control of the encampment for Loaves & Fishes and link the encampment with her conclave of nonprofit enterprizes on and near North C Street.

In a recent KCRA texted report titled "Loaves & Fishes: Don't Bring Food To Tent City," there's this:

Sister Libby Fernandez, the executive director of Loaves & Fishes, said those who bring goods to Tent City are creating a major health hazard.

Fernandez said rats and seagulls go after the trash and bring their diseases along.

"It's really not a very good thing to do," Fernandez said. "For one thing, you have to have trash pickup. You bring things out there like clothing, suitcases food, water ... it just builds up an accumulation of trash."

Fernandez said she thinks homeless residents need to find help off-site and shouldn't be catered to.

Volunteers of America is perhaps a more-logical choice as a organization to administer Tent City. Because of the souring-economy pullback in county services, VOA has lost a lot of its business, and with the close of Winter Shelter at the end of this month, they will have even more skilled people available for work.

To VOA's discredit, their administration of Winter Shelter isn't well thought of. The worst of it is the staff at Winter Shelter, a joyless, imperious lot, who make the experience for those staying at the shelter unnecessarily unpleasant.

A third candidate organization to participate in running Tent City is iCare-America, which was incorporated only eight weeks ago by a soon-to-be-homeless former corporate consultant, Val Jon Farris. Farris made a splash in the media by bringing donated supplies to the encampment and has quietly expressed interest in gathering camp leaders, perhaps as a means for his organization to aid the encampment at governing itself.

The fourth possibility is that Tent City, itself, could govern itself, on the model of Portland's Dignity Village. Dignity Village has Articles of Incorporation, a Board of Officers, bylaws, and a contract with the city/county. It even has a Tent City Toolkit [an interactive DVD] its staff has created to aid in the creation of self-governing tent cities that might arise elsewhere -- in places like, mmmm, let's see, SACRAMENTO.

Tent City already has the beginnings of governance with Luis Morales acting as a leader.

The residents of Tent City would benefit by mobilizing themselves to assure that they have some say in the development of a permanent encampment.

First, it would be good if the encampment decided on its name. "Tent City" is probably too generic. Names like the Wasteland are depressing and won't gather support from Sacramento citizens and its government. Names that are overly exultant, like Friendship Park and Dignity Village, have an Orwellian or Stalinist cast, and will unecessarily irritate conservatives and truth- and freedom-loving liberals.

Next, if they haven't already, the encampment should put together a putative Board of Directors that can interact with the county and city, and agencies that are licking their chops to get a piece of the Tent City action.

And, then, of course, this being the 21st Century, there needs to be a website for the tent city.

You rock, Tent City! The time is ripe. Be wary. Be wise. Do well. Prosper.

Who is Val Jon Farris and what is his organization iCare-America up to?

The video, below, [from a 2/25 late-evening news broadcast on channel 3 in Sac'to] is featured on the homepage of iCare-America. In all ways it shows Val Jon Farris, the founder and president of iCare, to be a friend toward and, even, a new member of the metropolitan-Sacramento Homeless community.


Here, a second KRCA video where reporter Brian Hickey interviews Farris, which I cannot embed. This, from a report broadcast earlier on the day of 2/25 than the embedded video, above.

Recently, Farris was involved in a bit of a dust-up with Loaves & Fishes chief executive Libby Fernandez and Sacramento Assistant city manager Cassandra Jennings, as reported in a KCRA text article. In the article we are told that Farris was distributing tents, sleeping bags and cots to people living in the Wasteland encampment, but Fernandez and Jennings objected.

Fernandez said. "For one thing, you have to have trash pickup. You bring things out there like clothing, suitcases food, water ... it just builds up an accumulation of trash." She also says, "homeless residents need to find help off-site and shouldn't be catered to."

Jennings agreed with Fernandez: "It's not safe," Jennings said. "It's not healthy and those people deserve better." Jennings said the city wants to channel donations through other venues like Loaves & Fishes and food banks.

As most homeless citizens of Sacramento are very well aware, individuals and very small organizations give life-saving goods and services to we homeless many times, absolutely every day. Direct giving is by far the most efficient, best way to help homeless Sacramentans.

But while Farris's actions can be assessed as wholly compassionate, what are he and his organization really up to? How is it that recently-made-homeless Farris has an organization behind his donation-giving? And how is it that Farris is in a position to act as a Good Samaritan when he is, himself, broke, busted and out-of-luck?

At the iCare website, we are told that the organization is a 501(c)3 non-profit, registered in California. Wikipedia gives us this definition of the IRS-proscibed purpose of a 501(c)(3): "Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations."

iCare-America is probably a new organization, since I cannot find any listing for it at GuideStar, a service I subscribe to that gathers information about non-profit organizations. There is nothing I could find at the iCare webspace that cites its founding date. [See update, below.] Indeed, the date issue raises some yellow flags for me. A message from Val Jon Farris at the webspace is undated. I cannot find a business address for iCare-America at their webspace, nor from a look-up on the online yellow pages. A friend of mine says he found, somewhere, that they are headquartered in Tehachapi, CA. I cannot verify that.

The iCare-America webspace is in many, many ways very impressive. Unfortunately, merely seeming to be impressive is nothing. Talking the talk is cheap; truly walking the walk as a valid, purely compassionate, low-overhead do-gooder organization is something else, again. I cannot find enough reason to dismiss, in my mind, the very real possibility that Farris might be a wolf in sheep's clothing.

In an email Farris sent to me, today, in response to my question to him, which was, essentially "What do YOU want?," he wrote:

I want to be of service to others and I want America to wake up to the sacred action of giving, giving from their hearts, not from their heads. I want America and Americans to reclaim their integrity, their sense of decency and their willingness to get off their high horse. I spent the first half of my life “getting what I want,” Tom. And you know what I learned? WE CAN NEVER GET ENOUGH OF WHAT WE/I DON’T REALLY WANT. What don’t we want, Tom? In our hearts we don’t want to be selfish, we don’t want to control and we don’t want to cause damage to life. Now is that what we actually do? ... I plan on spending the second half of my life, “giving.” I already had all the stuff, the American Dream, the house, cars, job, healthcare, all the goodies. I’m no longer interested in that nightmare, Tom. Whatever money comes I turn it into supplies and equipment for my friends out there. Whatever media comes I use to create respect and dignity for my friends out there.

I am endlessly suspicious, perhaps, but it may be that Farris is telling me what I want to hear. Anyone perusing my blogsites could learn that I'm Buddhist and particularly suseptible to the appeal that Farris makes. Yet, I'm not sure what more I could get from him to abate my suspicions.

It would help if his past [based on the bio he links to], including his very recent past, didn't tell us he is a driven corporate ladder-climber who is not well educated.

The house Farris is losing in Grass Valley is a very, very big one. [See viddy, above.] How recently did Farris see the light? If Farris is truly speaking, now, from a fount of compassion, surely he should understand my skepticism and doubt, and may understand why he might not have the right resume to be trusted as a hero to suddenly dive in and greatly help the Sacramento Homeless.

UPDATE 1:30pm 3/10: Farris emailed me, citing his organization's Articles of Incorporation, found at iCare's webspace. The date of incorporation is January 12, 2009.

His email was not friendly. He seems to assume, from text in this blogpost, that I was claiming or endorsing the idea that he was trashing the encampment. Quite the contrary; I hope readers can see that I was, if anything, exposing as nonesense what Fernandez and Jennings were saying.

Farris concluded his email to me with these words: "This is the last time I will explain what we are doing and the last time I will 'defend' our actions. If your [blog readers] want to know the reality of what we are doing have them ask all the people out there who I have been respecting and caring for in the last two months. Hearsay is cheap. Before you form an opinion, give the truth a chance to sink in . . . we’ll all be better for it."

UPDATE 1:40pm 3/10: In a follow-up email, Farris writes, in part, "Plus did you know that Sister Libby personally called me last Thursday about the allegations against my org and told me it was a miscommunication and that she did not mean to include iCare America in the groups that went out and DID cause problems?" He, then, included text, for no apparent reason, from an email he received from Sister Libby which was wholly this, sans salutation and closing: "Keep up the good work! We are planning a SAFE GROUND Rally on 4/21/09 at 2 pm. I am making a flyer this week!"

The Conjunction of Sacramento, homelessness, L&F, the Internet and the Media

Those of you who are wired up and stuck in or involved with poverty in Sacramento are likely to know that Sacramento has been getting a lot of attention outside Sacramento these days -- and it all has nothing to do with our body-builder governator.

A two-day story in the middle of February in the fast-declining [soon to disappear?] Sacramento Bee may have been the beginning of things. After a sad experience on Friday the 13th, Deanna Van Slate got a valentine on the 14th when Bee reporter Kim Minugh ran a story about how the 50-year-old woman had on Friday had her car taken away from her by the police and was left on the roadside with her pile of belongings.

Loaves & Fishes quickly set up a fund for this poor lady who was homeless and destitute for half a day and the response from Sacramentans was bountiful. Quoting L&F CEO Libby Fernandez in the follow-up Bee article, "People offered help, ranging from cash to free accommodations for Van Slate. Some offered rooms for free for two weeks, some for a month."

Next thing we hear is that "Oprah" had been in town. NOT Oprah her bonnie self, but the "Oprah Show," in the form of a camera crew and show regular Lisa Ling. In town on February 11 thru 13, a show episode, later broadcast on the 25th, was filmed. The show focused on the homelessness of recently well-off Sacramentan Favor Whiteside and her children, and other families who have fallen in today's sour economic times. It also filmed people telling their homelessness stories in the Wasteland encampment, east of Loaves & Fishes.

Most recently, Saturday last, a film crew from The Today Show filmed a story about the Wasteland and other news of Sac'to homelessness. See below:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And here: A Today slideshow of the Wasteland encampment.

But this is by no means all. The ripples spread out on the lake. There are now lots of news stories and blog stories, through out America and beyond about circumstances in Sacramento relating to homelessness, usually relying overmuch on the Big Media articles and telecasts. The story that's out there is warped from the reality on-the-ground, here.

Of great concern to SacHo blog is the focus of these stories and the way they are managed. The story that is 'getting out,' that is trumpeted by aid agencies here and desired by Big Media, is one about families that have been homeless only a very short time. Most Sacramento homeless people are solo men, homeless for many months, sometimes years. Most of the new homeless are single men, though you'd never suspect it from the way these stories get framed by Libby Fernandez and the Media.

One recent story, covered by KCRA and picked up by MSNBC concerns a "dispute" between L&F CEO Libby Fernandez and Jon Von Farris of iCare-America. Fernandez wants her and her organization to have control over the Sacramento encampment, even to the exclusion of letting other agencies or people bring help and supplies to the homeless. This is an area of great concern: L&F has not proved to be a capable manager of conditions at its dirty Friendship Park, or to keep food poisoning from being a recurring problem in the kitchen it oversees.

City Approves Scavenging Ordinance

According to this morning's Bee:

By a 6-3 vote, the [Sacramento city] council made it illegal to dig through any container in front of your home – garbage, yard waste or recycling. It had previously been illegal to go through recycling bins only. In discussions, opponents ... focused on the ban on recycling scavenging, saying it harms those who exchange bottles and cans for food and clothing money. Supporters cited identity theft and spilled waste issues. Opposed were council members Rob Fong, Kevin McCarty and Bonnie Pannell.