Showering the Homeless - Please Donate

Our blog has a dedicated page called 'Showering the Homeless' and we'd like you to read it. This is part of Matt Haney's tweet today, validating the severity and urgency of our Showering program:

SF CARES advocates for the needy, the poverty and the ones living on the street that need a break in life. Once Saint Paulus Lutheran Church relocates back to 999 Eddy Street later this year, their church will have showering and laundry facilities. Instead of the standard 'have a shower, let us clean your clothes and send you back on the street' integrity that other churches kindly offer, SF CARES and Saint Paulus have teamed up to take this to a whole new level:

We'll encourage the homeless to bring in resumes. While showering, we'll match their credentials to a new government initiative that's launching this year - pairing the individual to a govt featured nonprofit job. The nonprofit will pay for the individual's hotel stay during their 30 or 60 day work probation. During that time, we'll source the new employee affordable housing. 

Note that around 30% of the homeless have qualifications, are recently homeless, are not street conditioned nor have addictions. By SF CARES reducing San Francisco's poverty by one third, this will make national and international news headlines. The media attention will encourage other churches and .orgs (with showers) to use our blueprint formula, so we can collectively end poverty. We have so much of our plan locked into place yet seeing Matt's tweet reinforces that we need to work harder once Saint Paulus opens their Eddy Street doors. 

Please donate today to our Showering the Homeless program and please share this post. Even $10 will be a tremendous help. Thank you!

Everyone Of Us Can Help The Homeless

Many people have felt helpless over the homeless the past two months. Shelter in place forced us to pound the streets less. Supermarkets were limiting supplies. Food banks requested less people, to avoid crammed environments. This all made sense, in order to keep everyone safe from spreading the virus. With kitchens closed and less foot traffic, hand out food has reduced to a minimum. But now that the shelter has shifted towards a slightly more relaxed state, please consider the ways you can help the homeless. It'll be a tremendous support for our neighbors who live on the street:

Grocery shopping: Please buy a few extra bananas. They're really cheap at Trader Joes and Grocery Outlet, costing around 20c per banana. Hand them out to the homeless when you pass by.

Supermarket freebies: Even though Safeway's Play Monopoly has ended, Safeway confirmed they're still handing out a few extra tickets. Please check yours and if you've won a bagel, donut or any other food, wouldn't it be nice if you paid forward by giving it to a local who lives in a tent?

Food Runner support: Food Runners is San Francisco staple but they had to tweak their business during Covid-19. Instead of accepting donated food by local institutes, hotels and restaurants to distribute to ones who needed it most, they received food that required cooking. So they jumped on the task, set up a kitchen space at 1525 Waller and volunteers have been donating their time (two hours during the week or weekend) in helping prepare and package food for others. 

Lend an ear with phone help: Many people have suffered depression from living in isolation. Please contact Shanti.org and donate your time by signing up to the Shanti program and calling ones that just need someone to chat with. 

The above are temporary pay-forward initiatives but if you're like the SF CARES team, you know that once you start, you won't stop. Those bananas won't eat themselves, the phone won't dial itself, the produce won't chop itself and freebie supermarket wins won't cash in themselves. Let us all do our part and help others. 

 

Case Study on Hotels + Law Enforcement + Homeless Covid-19 Crisis

Did you see this tweet by Poor Magazine? 

The magazine ran a test to see how hotels in San Francisco reacted to potential, new occupants. They told the hotel they were doing a documentary on the multi billion dollar hotel industry (true) and how it related to the homeless, who have been banned from staying in these hotels by the city's top official.

Back to the tweet story: The hotel was friendly towards the magazine, gave them a decently priced deal on rooms and let them see the rooms without demanding any ID or payment. Once in the room, the magazine said they weren't leaving, were homeless and had nowhere else to go. The hotel then stated the individuals would be handcuffed and arrested by the SFPD, and escorted out the building. 

It's important to note that SF CARES doesn't support anyone who acts without genuine intention. Poor magazine hit that cusp yet their case study proved that if you look decent i.e. clean and well dressed, you'll get a room no questions asked. So the hotels are just sitting, empty ducks.

Thousands of homeless have turned our city into a dumping ground because they have nowhere else to go. The Tenderloin district is riddled with human feces and needles. Apartment residents in the area are petrified for their lives, for fear of mugging or abuse, so can't leave their homes. Think we're over-reacting? Read our recent post including a lawsuit filed again the mayor by UC Hastings, local businesses and residents, all located on the Tenderloin border that are completely sick of this situation.

Nevertheless, over a third of the homeless are not street conditioned, nor addicts, yet are refused a hotel room. Even if the city accommodated these people, there would be one third less living on our sidewalks. It would make a huge dent in fixing this problem.






Homeless is Big Business for San Francisco

This tweet says it all:

 

SF CARES knows too well how assumed nonprofits have turned a major profit from San Francisco's 10,000 homeless. These nonprofits have adopted the start up status system i.e. they create a model to combat an area of homeless, run the gauntlet on fund raising like a tech company with a series of financial rounds (via their rich pal network) and then sabotage their monthly burn rate (like a tech start up), raise more funds based on the founders alleged past 'experience,' achieve not a dent in the poverty system, raise even more funds...and the pattern repeats again. The homeless are the least of these nonprofits focus. The homeless are still in the ditch, with numbers doubling in the past five years alone, and the homeless aren't even given a glimpse into receiving the benefits of these mass nonprofits, who state they advocate for the poverty yet earn great, cushioned salaries, have all you can eat mini-food courts and spend serious thousands of fund raised cash in adorning their office with stunning furniture. Because first impressions count, right? 

There are around 75 billionaires living in San Francisco. Only a couple have been acknowledged in the news for contributing towards the Covid-19 outcry to help the city. At the last report, this amounted to around $2,000,000, which is an embarrassingly low number compared to the number of 10 figure earners. The wealthy barricaded themselves in their plush homes, ordered food in (using food delivery services that eat away 70% of the restaurant's earnings) and have not been heard of for over two months since shelter-in-place became a thing. Philanthropy, to them, only comes when there's free champagne and a photo-op. Shelter in place has squished the latter, causing the volcanic silence.

As a cause and effect of Covid-19, deep pocket nonprofits have also suspiciously abandoned ship. The ones that made a killing off a swell living from their motto 'the more homeless, the more investment we'll receive' have miraculously vanished. 

UC Hastings, their office positioned at 200 McAllister Street right at the Tenderloin heel, filed a lawsuit this week against the city. You can read it here. The cliff notes: The City, you had two months to place 10,000 homeless in 40,000 empty hotel rooms and you failed on epic proportions that will go down in San Francisco history. Note, 20% of the city's virus sufferers live on the street. Residents fear for their lives, the streets are filled with human defecation, there are more needles than cars etc.  This public humiliation seals the deal - San Francisco's mass of nonprofits, to help the poverty, pre Covid-19 fled.

SF CARES has always been poor. We live among our neighbors who live on the streets. We survive from scraps by our partners. We need to be among our people in the gutter because you should always help and lead by example. Any nonprofit that doesn't survive at least month to month isn't genuine. How can a nonprofit understand how the homeless live if the former don't think twice about spending $20 on a quick Monday martini? How can a rich nonprofit support the ones that their business model is designed around, if they're hunkering down, safely.

The rich will always stick together which is why the rest of us are glued to the poor - and we're proud of it.

Psalm 37 - The Wealthy Taking From The Poor Will Fall On Their Own Sword

Here is the most recent list of wealthy corporations that applied for and received SBA government loans: https://factba.se/sba-loans Astonishingly, even after being publicly named and shamed by the media, they have refused to return the money. The SBA loans were for small businesses that will go under, not for wicked corps that have stolen from the fund-lifeline pot. So let's dwell on the mentality here for a moment:

Why would a deep pocket, cash healthy company steal from the needy small businesses? And refuse to return the cash to help other small, struggling mom & pop companies, even when they've been publicly cited? We have a one word answer:

Entitled

These corporations believe they are absolutely entitled to the cash out. They didn't break the law, they didn't steal since the opportunity was offered to them, and they saw a clause loophole that encouraged them to apply (loan eligibility if the company has less than 500 employees at one site).

But there's a moral and ethical high ground that should have come with this opportunity door knocking. When that door opened, the ethical compass should have triggered a red flag: If we take this cash, will it leave others without? Do we really need this cash, even though it's available to us? When greed over rides morals, that trigger never rears its head because we're talking about the selfish that only have one trajectory, a trajectory that is now part of their corporate DNA: take, take and take even more; give me, give me and give me more.

These bullish companies took without any consideration that by taking for themselves, they greatly took from others who needed it so much more. They wanted to fill in missing revenue to reach their monthly profit goal yet didn't once consider that small businesses would tremendously suffer as a result from having zero income because the loan fund was now drained out. Which comes back to the greed and need to maintain that critical word: Entitled.

SF CARES has always advocated for the needy, the poor, the ones down on their luck and the ones that really need a break in life. Please read Psalm 37 since these words are so appropriate for today. We just hope and pray that this large list of unsavory companies do return the money back to the Treasury by the 5th May deadline, or the wrath they'll receive from the government will be kids play compared to the future wrath they'll receive from God.