Back in June, St. Anthony’s partnered with anti-hunger organizations and advocacy groups from across California to help educate people about the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) Restaurant Meals Program. The Restaurant Meals Program is part of the the CalFresh program (the new name for California’s food stamp program) and it allows CalFresh recipients who live in a place without a cooking facility (a Single Room Occupancy hotel room, for example), or who are homeless, elderly, or disabled to use their CalFresh benefits at a restaurant.

We talked to our Dining Room guests about their use of the program and its importance in helping them obtain healthy meals. Some of their stories were recounted here. After hearing the stories of our Dining Room guests, we realized how important both the Restaurant Meals program and our Dining Room are to low income people who can’t afford food and who don’t have the ability to cook their own food at home.

We are proud to have helped with the making of this video, which does a great job of telling the stories of some of the Californians who benefit from Restaurant Meals. Please check out the video and the SNAP Restaurant Meals website to learn more about this important program.

It’s City Budget advocacy time!

We still have a little ways to go to get to a fair budget: we are facing about $10 million in cuts to substance abuse treatment, mental health, homeless drop-in, senior services, violence prevention, support services in supportive housing, and employment services for homeless and formerly homeless people.

Although St. Anthony’s receives no government funding, we stand up with our clients and our community partners for a fair budget that helps to support low-income and homeless San Franciscans.  Without these vital services, our community will suffer: we want to work together with our community to create a city where everyone can achieve stability and have the chance to succeed.

Today at noon we’ll be at the sidewalk in front of the Polk Street City Hall steps for a budget bake sale to remind our City leaders that the budget needs to be just a little bit sweeter for poor folks, homeless people, and seniors.

Tomorrow we’ll be participating in the hearing before the Board of Supervisors Budget Committee. Tomorrow’s hearing is a chance for anyone from the public to provide comments on the proposed budget.  Public comment will go from 10:00 am – 12:00 noon and from 1:00 pm until the last person is heard.

If you want to make your voice heard, but can’t make it to the hearing, please take a moment and write an email to Supervisor Carmen Chu, Chair of the Budget Committee.

We’ll keep you updated with the latest updates on the City Budget as we continue to support vital services for seniors, homeless people, and other low-income San Franciscans.

The numbers from this year’s official homeless count are in, reflecting only a slight increase in the number of people without a home.  According to the report, there were 6,514 homeless people at the time of the count, up only 2% from the last count in 2007.

I’m certainly not the first to say it but it’s worth mentioning the potential flaws in the logic of the count.  For one, it’s taken on January 27, in the thick of San Francisco’s rainiest, coldest season, on a day when weather is likely to compel many to seek temporary shelter with family or friends, if available.  When those connections are worn thin, of course, people end up back on the streets or in shelters, though by then far from the gaze of homeless counters.  I wonder what the count would be like on, say, a sunny day in August.

Which brings me to the second point: how are we to get an accurate impression of the homeless population from just one day of counting?  And, without actually talking to people–volunteers are instructed to count solely by sight–how are we to be sure the count is accurate?  I would think that an average of several days of counting, coupled with subject interviews, would yield a more accurate number and a more comprehensive understanding of the issues facing the homeless.

It will be interesting to see how the count pans out during the next pass, as the economy forces more out of their homes and into marginal housing or the streets.  Will these people count, or will they remain invisible?

As you may know, California’s recently adopted budget package calls for a May 19th special election.  Included on the ballot is Proposition 1E, which seeks to divert $460 million over two years from Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) revenues to the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) program.

The acronyms are a mouthful, but what they stand for is important: MHSA was established through Proposition 63 in 2004 to expand and reform county mental health service systems targeting uninsured, homeless and low-income residents; EPSDT is the child health component of Medicaid that ensures a range of pediatric care for low-income children.

Both of these sound like services worthy of promoting, right?  Which is why I have trouble with the proposition: it scapegoats one underserved community (low-income adults with mental illness) for another (low-income children), and belies that fact that what we are really dealing with is another drastic cut to vital social services in California.

Groups like the California Mental Health Directors Association agree, and in a recent report detail why the proposition is bad news.

You’ve run out of ideas. You’ve run out of time. You have time to shop, but not time to think.  Is there such a thing as knowing someone too long? Relationships grow richer as years pass, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to presents.

Your idealistic friend, family member, honorary aunt or uncle may appreciate a a gift to St. Anthony Foundation in his or her honor. We’ve just had beautiful new cards designed; they open up almost like a present.

Does your loved one live or have they ever lived in San Francisco? Do they worry about poor people, hungry people, underfunded veterans, seniors alone in the world? Are they thinking of someone struggling with an addiction or a psychiatric disability?

A gift to St. Anthony’s may have more meaning for them than anything you can find in a store.

It’s simple. Make a donation by mail or on line. Include the name and address of the person being honored and the occasion you’re honoring: birthday, graduation, anniversary. You get a letter acknowledging your gift. Your loved one gets the card shown here, informing them that you’ve give a gift on the occasion they are celebrating.

Money can’t buy love, but love can transform money into health, hope, and human dignity. And that can transform lives.

Recently, C.W. Nevius posed the age-old ‘chicken or the egg’ question in his twice weekly column.  As so many people do, he wonders,  why is it that there is such a concentration of homeless services in the Tenderloin?

“The question is,” Nevius asks, “Do the homeless and low-income people flock to the Tenderloin because there are so many services, or have the charitable groups been drawn to the neighborhood because so many residents need help?”

As with any questions regarding social services, the answer depends on the person’s beliefs of who “deserves” services.   At St. Anthony Foundation, we firmly believe in each person’s right to eat, to have affordable health care, warm clothing, to have shelter and to have the opportunities to build employment skills, and find community to overcome addiction.

As service providers city-wide brace for impact of the budget crisis, it is becoming clearer that privately funded non-profits will fiscally weather the storm, but more and more of the clients who sought help from city services will be turning to us for help.

What tragically some people see as the “easy work” of feeding the hungry, mentioned in Nevius’ article, what they are missing is that the children and young adults who partake in service-learning will have a deeper understanding of the issues of homelessness and poverty.  That direct experiential learning will more greatly impact youth than any fifth period lecture on the economy, and they will carry those stories to the family members, and friends, continuing the dialogue.

It is through volunteering, through service-learning and education and that greater issues of homelessness and poverty are understood and approached with insight.  Not through columns written outside looking in, questioning whether or not we might scare the tourists.

Tonight at 8 p.m. San Francisco volunteers will begin the city’s biennial count of its homeless residents. The survey will include the number of people living on the street, in shelters, and in other city funded programs. The last count of 6,377 was done in January of 2007.

The city is required to conduct this count every two years in order to receive federal assistance and uses the data collected to evaluate current programs.

Change is certainly in the air with the new year. In case you haven’t noticed, St. Anthony Free Medical Clinic recently moved across the street into a brand new facility. The new clinic is larger, better designed and better equipped, and will enable us to treat an additional 5,000 patients per year. With increased seating capacity in our new pediatric waiting room, larger exam rooms, a private counseling room, and the greater capability to respond to medical emergencies, we will offer a calmer, more comfortable environment for our guests.

The change is certainly a welcome one for patients who will benefit from the new clinic’s expanded capacity and services, and for the staff who’ve been working out of a converted garage space for the past 50+ years. Our therapists, who have moved from a glorified broom closet to a large counseling room with windows, couldn’t be happier. All the clinic staff seem to share a collective feeling of excitement and enthusiasm about the new space. We are all looking forward to a future of hope and healing for the poor and homeless guests we serve.

“It’s a sexy thing for people to mock and minimize.” San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said in regards to his “homeless meters,” a city plan that would encourage citizens to drop their spare change into special meters instead of giving them to panhandlers.

The installation of these meters, slotted for November of 2008, has been pushed back until February. The early 2009 unveiling of these meters will now coincide with a marketing campaign to educate the public what the mayor’s office calls the “serious consequences of giving money to panhandlers instead of charities.”

As I was reading a recent SF Weekly, one article really caught my attention. The title read: Homeless SF State Students struggle to stay in school and stay loaded. Being a college student in San Francisco myself, I was shocked to learn that in this very city there were homeless drug addicts also working toward their college degrees. The article followed the trials and tribulations of two journalism students, Rex and Steve, and their lives at San Francisco State University. Getting through college is hard enough on its own, then add sleeping outside an abandoned building and keeping up with a drug addiction and I can assume it’s near impossible.

As an intern at St. Anthony’s I have become very aware of how much poverty, hunger, and addiction affects the wonderfully dysfunctional city of San Francisco. Everyday the foundation’s Dining Room serves thousands of hot meals to the hungry. Fr. Alfred Residential Treatment Center has participants as young as 18 trying to kick life threatening drug habits. And the recently upgraded Employment Program / Tech Lab offers a way for people without computers to check e-mail, search for jobs on the web, and etc.

In the midst of this “economic crisis” everything seems to crumbling around the American people. Is my next paycheck coming? Will I have a job in a month? Can I pay my mortgage? Can I feed my family, or even just myself? You get the idea… These are the questions people are asking themselves daily. The SFSU students from the article seem to be doing the best they can considering the cirmcumstances. Once you become comfortable with a situation, whatever it may be, it’s hard to change. Thankfully there are places like St. Anthony’s who are working to help. Here people can get involved in any number of programs that can help them, whether they need rehab services, medical services, or just a hot meal.