Hello all,
We’d love to hear your stories about getting medical coverage through the Affordable Health Care Act. Was it easy? Difficult?
Are any of you still having trouble? Would it be useful for an in person assister to come to POWER?
Join us on Monday for:
Resource Roundtable: Living Well on a Budget
Hosted by Parents Organizing for Welfare and Economic Rights
Monday, March 3, 2014, 5:30pm - 8:00pm
Darby’s Café in downtown Olympia, 211 5th Avenue
Join us at the next POWER Outage on March 3rd for a Resource Roundtable and potluck! We will be sharing the many creative ways we've found to live well on a limited budget. As low-income people, we have a collective wealth of knowledge about how to make money last and meet the needs of our families without using money. We also know how to have fun on the cheap. Let's get together to share our ideas and maybe brainstorm some new ones. We will take notes on these ideas, which may later be compiled into a pamphlet for POWER to give out.
Topics will include:
-Budgeting: How do you keep track of spending and make that check last through the month?
-Food: Do you have tips on where to shop for what? Do you have recipes for your Food Bank groceries? What do you eat at the end of the month/ when food is running low?
-Non-food items: Where do you get your clothes, shampoo, and baby supplies? Do you have recipes for homemade beauty/ cleaning products?
-Holidays: What do you do to make birthdays and other holidays special? What are some low-cost family traditions?
Please bring if want to: A potluck dish you made with low-cost ingredients (and recipe!), Food Bank recipes, examples of your budget tracking system, ideas for cheap home products you can make, and maybe samples if you wish to share.
Bring your wonderful self, kids, family and friends!
Childcare will be provided at the POWER office by the Child Care Collective
Darby's is closed, but they kindly let us use the space in downtown Olympia, 211 5thAvenue.
Below:
1. Free beds!
2. Help an Evergreen student with their interesting project on economy and politics?
3. Great article in the New York Times about Quixote Village!
4. An article about the US’s role in the destabilization of Venezuela.
5. Article on causes of child poverty in US.
______
1. A resort is wanting to donate 30 “bed bug free” slightly used beds. If you have any households interested please contact Charlene directly to let her know.
______
2. Dear Participant,
I am a student at the Evergreen State College. As a part of my coursework in the class, “Alternatives to Capitalist Globalization,” I will be doing an independent project titled, “The Voices of the Multitude.” My purpose in doing this project is to gather information about the experiences people have had with our current economic/political system and about their opinions of the system based off of those experiences.
Another purpose of the project is to see what patterns of connections and differences arise along the lines of class, age, and political orientation. In the end, I plan on compiling the interviews into a final poetic product based on the questions I ask you in your interview. Each question will have its own section where I combine verbatim phrases from all of the interviews into a poem that provides an ‘answer’ to the question. I will stay true to the phrases’ original intended meanings and in order to ensure that people do not feel as though I am twisting the meaning of their words by taking them out of context, I will include the full transcribed interviews in the back. I will not use names or any identifying information in the final product.
Any risks to you are minimal. For one, the anonymity of the final product will ensure that anything you say will not be used against you in your personal life. Also, any recordings of interviews will be kept on an audio recorder or on my password protected computer, both of which are accessible only by me. After completion of the project, I will delete all of the recordings. Most likely, the only risk will be possible emotional distress when talking about any personal experiences that you have had with the economy. On that note, your participation is completely voluntary and therefore you may skip any questions that you do not feel comfortable answering or discontinue the interview at any time without penalty. There will be no compensation for your participation, except for a copy of the final product upon your request.
I will be creating a final product that compiles the interviews into a single piece. Those who will see the final product will include my faculty sponsor and other participants who request a copy of the final product. I will be the only person aware of the participants actual identities. A potential benefit gained from compiling the interviews in this fashion will be a very real and visible example of what connects or divides us all across different social divisions in terms of economic experiences and visions. This would benefit me individually, because it is a question that I have been concerned with for quite some time. But even more, you may gain benefits from requesting a copy of the final product. For instance, it may give you room to question your own answers or to think more in depth about things that you had not thought of before related to our current economic/political system. The greatest benefit would be if you were able to realize connections that you have with certain groups of people that you had previously seen as completely separate from yourself.
If you have any further questions about this project or your participation in it, you can call me at612-919-1782 or email me at .
SKIP ANY QUESTIONS THAT YOU DO NOT FEEL COMFORTABLE ANSWERING
1: What is your:
Age:
Race:
Political Orientation:
Job Title:
2. What goals/values do you believe should be prioritized in any society?
3. Do you think that our current economic/political system supports or works against these goals/values? Why?
4. What do you believe is the greatest strength of our current political and/or economic system?
The biggest problem?
5. Describe a situation when money (lack of/ excess of) affected your life, or the life of someone that you know.
6. How has the current economic system affected you as an employee? Student? Parent? Business man/ women? Homeowner? (Pick one)
7. How would you define democracy?
8. Based on your definition of democracy, how well do you believe our country supports/realizes democracy? Why? (i.e What supports it? What damages it?)
9. What changes or improvements would you like to see in our economic and/or political system (if any)?
10. Do you believe that either your vision or the changes that you would like to see are possible? Why or why not? What do you believe needs to happen for those changes to become a reality?
If there are any questions you do not feel comfortable answering, feel free to skip them. Just answer the ones you can.
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New York Times
Home & Garden
3. Small World, Big Idea
By MICHAEL TORTORELLOFEB. 19, 2014
Quixote Village opened Dec. 24 on 2.1 acres in an industrial park near Washington’s capital. Jeremy Bittermann for The New York Times
OLYMPIA, Wash. — On Christmas Eve, Kevin Johnson received the following gifts: a bed and mattress, a blanket and sheets, a desk and chair, a toilet and sink, towels and washcloths, toothpaste and floss, and a brand-new house.
Mr. Johnson, a 48-year-old day laborer, did not find that last item beneath the Christmas tree, although it nearly would have fit. At 144 square feet — 8 by 18 feet, or roughly the dimensions of a Chevrolet Suburban — the rental house was small. Tiny would be a better descriptor. It was just half the size of the “micro” apartments that former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed for New York City.
This scale bothered Mr. Johnson not at all, and a few weeks after moving in, he listed a few favorite design features. “A roof,” he said. “Heat.” A flush toilet! The tents where he had lived for most of the last seven years hadn’t provided any of those things.
In what seemed like an Oprah stunt of old, Mr. Johnson’s friends (21 men and seven women) also moved into tiny houses on Dec. 24. They had all been members of a homeless community called Camp Quixote, a floating tent city that moved more than 20 times after its founding in 2007.
Camp Quixote, a floating tent city, became Quixote Village.
Beyond its recent good fortune, the settlement was — and is — exceptional. Quixote Village, as it is now called, practices self-governance, with elected leadership and membership rules. While a nonprofit board called Panza funds and guides the project, needing help is not the same thing as being helpless. As Mr. Johnson likes to say, “I’m homeless, not stupid.”
A planning committee, including Mr. Johnson, collaborated with Garner Miller, an architect, to create the new village’s site layout and living model. Later, the plans were presented to an all-camp assembly. “Those were some of the best-run and most efficient meetings I’ve ever been involved in,” said Mr. Miller, a partner at MSGS Architects. “I would do those over a school board any day.”
The residents lobbied for a horseshoe layout rather than clusters of cottages, in order to minimize cliques. And they traded interior area for sitting porches. The social space lies outside the cottage. Or as Mr. Johnson put it, “If I don’t want to see anybody, I don’t have to.”
It is rare that folks who live on the street have the chance to collaborate on a 2.1-acre, $3.05 million real estate development. Nearly as surprising is that Quixote Village may become a template for homeless housing projects across the country. The community has already hosted delegations from Santa Cruz, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle; and fielded inquiries from homeless advocates in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Salt Lake City; and Prince George’s County, Md.
In a few other cities, “micro-housing” is close to sheltering populations of the chronically homeless. OM Build, a subsidiary of the economic-justice movement Occupy Madison, runs a workshop to construct 99-square-foot wood cabins on wheels in Wisconsin’s capital. After appealing to the City Council for the right to park these structures on lots like church property, Occupy Madison began a $50,000 crowdfunding campaign to build 10 more dwellings. A prototype finished last fall cost $5,000, said Bruce Wallbaum, a workshop organizer. “We could probably do it cheaper, but we’re trying to do a home,” he said, “not a shed or an RV.”
Some advantages to building small are obvious. Ginger Segel, of the nonprofit developer Community Frameworks, points to construction costs at Quixote Village of just $19,000 a unit (which included paying labor at the prevailing commercial wage). Showers, laundry and a shared kitchen have been concentrated in a community center. When you add in the cost of site preparation and the community building, the 30 finished units cost $88,000 each.
By comparison, Ms. Segel, 48, said, “I think the typical studio apartment for a homeless adult in western Washington costs between $200,000 and $250,000 to build.” In a sense, though, the difference is meaningless. Olympia and surrounding Thurston County hadn’t built any such housing for homeless adults since 2007.
Most of that demographic, an estimated 450 souls, is unemployed. While the residents of Quixote Village are expected to pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, 15 of the 29 individuals reported a sum of zero. Ms. Segel added that the average annual income for the rest of the residents — including wages, pensions and Social Security payments — is about $3,100 each.
Regular affordable housing is a luxury these folks cannot afford. “This, to my knowledge, is the first example of using micro-housing as subsidized housing for very poor people,” Ms. Segel said. “It’s such an obvious thing. People are living in tents. They’re living in cars. They’re living in the woods.”
The “woods” is both an abstraction and a real place. See the fir trees behind Quixote Village, on the far side of the freight rail tracks? Last summer, Rebekah Johnson (no relation to Mr. Johnson) subsisted out there in a tent with her former boyfriend, just off a bike trail.
“He went to jail, and I just couldn’t stay out there anymore,” Ms. Johnson, 34, said. “If you leave, someone is going to steal your stuff. You’re not very social with people.”
Solitude did not suit Ms. Johnson. On a recent Saturday morning, she was sitting in the community center, calling out to everyone who walked by, while also tucking into a plate of French toast, working on a 500-piece puzzle and flipping through a vampire-hunting novel by Laurell K. Hamilton.
Residents wanted a horseshoe layout rather than a cluster and traded interior space for sitting porches.Jeremy Bittermann for The New York Times
Ms. Johnson, who last worked as a cashier, ran through a list of the other places she had stayed recently. There was jail, where she landed after her arrest for meth possession. And before that, a drug house. “And before that I was in a three-bedroom apartment,” she said. “I went from living in a home with my children to living in the woods alone.”
Her oldest child, 15, now stays with his father. “My younger two kids live with my parents,” she continued. “I’m working on going through treatment so I can get my children back.” She went to see “Frozen” with them recently, and they toured her new cottage at Quixote Village just before she moved in.
Custody may be a long way off, Ms. Johnson admitted, but she was trying to look at her circumstances another way. Her children were never going to come see her while she was out in the woods.
Jon Waddey, who lives a few cottages away, describes Quixote Village “not as an end, but a means.” He had been cooking in a restaurant that closed, and bottomed out in jail on a felony heroin possession.
Even after starting methadone, he was in no state to look for another job. “I had a huge beard,” he said. “I needed a place to shave and shower. I just needed a place to feel human.”
At other homeless shelters, the staff rummaged through your bags, breathalyzed you and kicked you out from morning to evening time. “It’s a horrible feeling having no place to be,” Mr. Waddey, 41, said. At a facility like that, “you’re really made to feel where you’re at.”
Of his new cottage, he said: “I absolutely love it. I have my little writing desk, my reading desk, a lovely view of the trees. In a way, that’s what I’ve always wanted.”
A few weeks after settling into Quixote Village, Mr. Waddey was starting to investigate how long it would take at the Evergreen State College to finish his long-deferred undergraduate degree. At night, he was making his way through the John le Carré BBC mini-series “Smiley’s People,” and cooking for friends in the community kitchen.
“I think cooking is one of the most fundamental things you can do,” Mr. Waddey said. “To feed people and see how happy it makes them.”
The classic image of a tiny home is a grown-up dollhouse, a spot to play make-believe. The scale is humble, but the architectural detail is rich: eyebrow windows, stick-style trusses. This is the jewel box you’ll see on a website like Jay Shafer’s Four Lights Tiny House Company or in a dream-book like Lloyd Kahn’s “Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter.” It stands somewhere on a lost coast, or in a hermit’s hollow: private Edens, places you’d like to be.
The tiny houses of Quixote Village, by contrast, stand 10 feet apart in what looks like an industrial park. Check that; the site actually is an industrial park, two miles west of the state capital. Parked across the street is a fleet of gas-delivery trucks.
This is the vacant land that Thurston County gave to Quixote Village on a 41-year lease (at $1 a year). It wasn’t easy to find an agreeable site, said Karen Valenzuela, 64, a county commissioner who supported the project. The next-best location, she said, was “a piece of property adjacent to our county waste and recovery center — known as the county dump.”
Before construction began, the planners discovered that you could practically reach the water table with a straw. All this drainage had to go somewhere. And so, during Olympia’s galoshes season, which appears to be eternal, the water collects in three retention ponds qua mud pits.
The residents hate these overgrown puddles, Mr. Miller admitted. “I like to joke that you have waterfront property,” he said.
The original design called for the community center to have a loft and library, visitors’ quarters and an infirmary. Ultimately, all these items went the way of “value engineering.”
Likewise, the first drawings of the cottages show handsome cedar-plank siding and cork flooring. The finished units ended up with board-and-batten and bare plywood floors. Almost impossibly, the dimensions shrank, too. Within the five-inch-thick insulated walls, the mattress, bathroom and closet fill up almost half the interior dimensions of 123 square feet. If these houses were any tinier, you could fit them in a bottle.