SOS: Save our Safety Net

Save our safety net. http://www.povertyaction.org

“My TANF grant is $562 a month. My rent is $550. I am living on $12 per month right now with three kids.” –Angela, Vancouver

Washington State’s safety net is a critical public asset that ensures our neighbors and loved ones are able to survive when they have fallen on hard times or are unable to work due to an injury, age or disability. Safety net programs help families like Angela’s avoid homelessness and provide vital support as they regain their economic security.

Over the past three years, the Governor and legislature have cut billions from programs that Angela and other Washingtonians depend on to meet their basic needs. Cuts of this magnitude have whittled our state’s safety net down to its basic foundation. Now, the state is facing yet another
$2 billion revenue shortfall. In less than two weeks, lawmakers will convene at the state capitol for a special legislative session to pass a supplemental budget for the 2012-2013 fiscal year. Last month, Governor Gregoire released a “road map” of an all-cuts budget to guide lawmakers as they draft their supplemental budget proposals.

Milk is not a luxury.

The proposed cuts in the Governor’s road map would put Angela and her three children 76 cents away from becoming homeless. After multiple rounds of deep budget cuts, it is difficult to fathom the possibility of further stripping programs like TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), Disability Lifeline-Housing and Essential Needs, and health care. Low-income families cannot afford to absorb another round of cuts to the programs they depend on to survive!

On Monday, Nov. 21, the Governor will release her final supplemental budget proposal, and she needs to hear that people like Angela are barely making ends meet and cannot afford another
all-cuts budget.

Contact the Governor TODAY and urge her to include revenue in her final supplemental budget proposal.

For more information and to find out how else you can get involved, go to povertyaction.org.

On an upward continuum

Our November 2011 Groundviews newsletter features a remarkable young woman who is both one of the first residents in permanent housing at our Brettler Family Place and is giving a year of service through our Washington Reading Corps. To read the entire issue, visit our Publications webpage.

By serving with WA Reading Corps and living at Brettler Family Place, Penni Carter accesses services while giving back.

A year of AmeriCorps service can be challenging for anyone. Members of Solid Ground’s Washington Reading Corps, for instance, tutor children who read below grade level five days a week – and take intensive leadership development, social justice and anti-racism trainings – all while living on a subsistence stipend. For Penni Carter (not her real name), add to that the struggle of landing on her 27-year-old feet, fresh from escaping domestic violence.

“I was with her dad,” she says, pointing to her two-year-old cutie pie in a pink tutu. “And it was not a healthy relationship. I just got to the point where [I felt], ‘I can’t do this anymore and I don’t want my daughter to end up getting hurt.’ So, I packed up a suitcase and a stroller, and I literally just walked away from my life.”

Accessing support while giving back
Solid Ground provides a range of services that meet people at various stops along their life journeys. When Penni was preparing to exit her domestic violence shelter, she connected with a Solid Ground JourneyHome Case Manager who helped her apply for permanent housing in our new Brettler Family Place program. In addition to housing, Brettler provides support services and case management for formerly homeless families. People accepted to live there must have stable jobs or be moving in a positive direction in their work lives.

Penni moved into Brettler last spring. Soon after, she learned of Washington Reading Corps (WRC) through a coworker and became a volunteer in its summer program, Cities of Service. From there she applied for and was accepted to serve a year with WRC. Thus, she became both a program participant and an AmeriCorps Member with Solid Ground.

Opportunities for self-awareness & growth
Like all Solid Ground employees, Penni and her fellow WRC Members were sent to Undoing Institutional Racism (UIR) training, an intensive experience that unpacks the impacts of racism in America.

“I went to the UIR training and that was life changing,” Penni says. “Being white, you have to look at yourself. It is not them that is the problem, it is me, too. And I have mixed kids, so it really hits home. A lot of these things that people of color are expressing, my kids are going to go through, too. I’m a white woman, so it is hard to find that balance: How do I support them and not let them think that being white is bad or being black is bad?”

And Penni says the UIR training helped her learn how to talk to other white neighbors about racial dynamics and make better connections with neighbors of color.

“Talk about being an ally; Brettler is the best place to do it,” Penni says. “It is good to talk to my neighbors about white privilege, and let them know there are people out there that know it is real. It is going on and it is not OK – and you are not crazy for thinking it. It is nice to know that I can be an ally to so many people in my community that live just where I live.”

Building bridges at Brettler
Over the summer, Brettler Family Place turned from a location where 51 formerly homeless families live into a true community. Penni says, “This summer was incredible. A lot of families had just moved in, so they were just trying to get on their feet.”

One night, “Everybody was outside and I just said, ‘I really want to play kickball.’ We ended up having a big kickball game. I think the youngest kid playing was three, all the way up to the parents and everybody in between. People were sitting on the sides even if they didn’t want to play. We had wheelbarrow races and jump rope and handstand contests – just fun stuff. And all the moms got together and everybody watched everybody else’s kids.”

From this stable sense of community, Penni has started to rebuild her life and imagine her new future. “Last year during my internship, I learned so much,” she says. “I definitely want to do my second year in WRC, then I want to go back to school. I want to either be a teacher or work with DV [domestic violence] abusers or inmates, and help them go through treatment, and realize, ‘Just because you did these things, you are not a bad person – but what do we need to do to help you not fall back into that pattern?’ ” 

Raised by a single mom in Section 8 housing, Penni’s experience could have been one of succumbing to generational patterns. But a continuum of Solid Ground programs supported her in finding stable housing, establishing a goal plan, and getting employment training, community service and leadership development that will help her family thrive.

For more information, please visit:
● Brettler Family Place
● Washington Reading Corps

Left Broadview smiling

Mary Ann (not her real name or photo) and her 7-year-old son moved into Solid Ground’s Broadview Transitional Housing program under very difficult circumstances.

Her son had leukemia and was in recovery. He could not walk up stairs and he had no hair. They spent most of their time at Children’s Hospital initially. He could not go to school and could not play with other children.

After Mary Ann’s son improved, a Children’s Advocate stepped in to help him integrate into the Broadview community. They helped mom with school enrollment, and then his really big moment came: He started school and could participate in onsite activities. He attended Children’s Group and went on some field trips, too. He was so happy just to be outside with the other kids on the playground. He made friends and some of the kids came to visit him in his unit. He limps but he can climb the stairs now; he smiles a lot and he has lots of hair again.

Mary Ann has been looking for work and has gone on several interviews. She found permanent housing and thinks she has a job as well. Broadview Transitional Housing gave them a place to heal physically and emotionally. Mary Ann says that they feel normal now. Both Mary Ann and her son left Broadview smiling.

To contribute to the important community and support happening at Broadview, please visit our Broadview donation page.

Folk instrument’s historical connection to racism in the U.S.

Legendary musician Taj Mahal is featured in the documentary Give Me the Banjo

The banjo is a humble instrument, initially made of wood, skin and gut. Pirated thousands of miles from its African origins, the banjo has come to be the butt of countless jokes, and a symbol of our nation’s racial history.

A stunning new video documentary showcases the instrument’s musical and cultural ramifications.

PBS’ Arts from the Blue Ridge Mountains: Give Me the Banjo  debuts tonight on PBS stations around the country (in Seattle:  KCTS Channel 9) at 9pm. (It will no doubt be repeated many times and be available for rent and purchase; check your local PBS station for details.)

“Give me the banjo…When you want genuine music – music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose – when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!”  ~Mark Twain

Give me the Banjo is a polished, nuanced social and cultural history. It features archival footage of historic players like Gus Cannon and Doc Boggs, performance clips of modern masters like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka (who was the project’s music director and main collaborator of writer-producer Marc Fields) and Steve Martin (who also narrates) – and a cogent analysis of the connection between the banjo’s history and racism in our nation.

“You can’t talk about the history of the banjo if you can’t talk about racism, slavery, misogyny appropriation and exploitation,” ethnomusicologist Greg Adams says early in the show. And considerable energy is spent documenting how the banjo’s ancestors came to this country from Africa, hostage to the slave trade, and how its role in the American entertainment experience represented dominant culture attitudes towards people of color through time.

In the 1700s, the banjo was the province of slaves and free immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, a handmade folk instrument that connected its players to their home culture.

In the 1830s, Joel Walker Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo, which he later turned into the featured instrument of the first minstrel shows. As Give Me the Banjo documents, the stunning rise of the black-faced minstrel show as a dominant form of entertainment “trivialized the African-American community,” according to musicologist Christopher Smith, and became an early embodiment of the appropriation that later played out in the early history of rock and roll: “white boys playing the blues.”

From Sweeney to Pete Seeger, the humble five-string manifested a fascinating journey, coming to symbolize in turn industrialized aristocrats, country bumpkins, working class revolutionaries and others. All of these plot twists and turns are lovingly presented in Give Me the Banjo, sumptuously illustrated and musically represented by the finest players. The documentary started under the working title The Banjo Project and used the grassroots fundraising tool Kickstarter to raise funds needed to complete the production. With its depth of research and deft editing, it comes off as a polished project, one that will come to be seen as a classic in the cannon of banjo literature and, perhaps, in the cannon of literature about racism as well.

Tenant Tip: Tenant Screening

Landlords typically screen prospective tenants to decide their eligibility to move into a rental unit. Often landlords hire a screening company to decide tenants’ suitability. Screeners investigate potential tenants’ credit, rental history, employment history, criminal background, previous evictions and court records. RCW 59.18.257 is the section of the Washington Residential Landlord-Tenant Act which provides information on tenant screening. The screening process can be burdensome, costly and unfair for tenants, especially if they have wrongful evictions on their record or because of their status as domestic violence survivors.

One of the main challenges is that the tenant is responsible for paying the cost of screening fees which may range from $30 to $75 per application. Even if the landlord decides not to offer a unit to the tenant, the tenant loses their screening fee. Currently, tenants can be denied for any number of reasons, causing them to pay many screening fees. Often people with poor credit or evictions on their record are faced with spending hundreds of dollars on screening fees without ever being offered a unit. These fees can prevent low-income tenants from being able to afford move-in costs and can leave tenants facing homelessness.

A report released this month by the Seattle Office for Civil Rights (SOCR) indicates that housing discrimination based on race or disability occurs frequently in Seattle. In their investigation, nearly 70% of landlords showed some sort of race-based discrimination in which inconsistencies favored white applicants. Disability-based discrimination tests revealed that 38% of the properties used practices that created barriers for people living with disabilities to get access to housing. Read the full press release on the SOCR webpage. These issues of discrimination in tenant screening are happening outside of Seattle as well. We receive calls on our Tenant Services Hotline from all over Washington State from tenants who face housing discrimination based on race, ethnicity, criminal history and disability status.

In addition, mistakes contained in the screening reports or credit reports used to decide tenant eligibility can also cause tenants to be wrongfully denied housing. Tenants may never even see a copy of the report to find an error and dispute the inaccuracy. These inaccuracies may include wrongful evictions that were filed illegally or incorrectly. Once an eviction, or Lawsuit for Unlawful Detainer, is filed with the courts, the eviction record remains on the tenant’s public record for life. Even if the judge rules in the tenant’s favor and they win the case in court, potential landlords are still able to see the eviction on their record and deny housing.

Domestic violence survivors also face discrimination in the tenant screening process, and they are often denied housing because of a protection order on their record. Even though RCW 59.18.570 states that it’s illegal to deny housing based on an individual’s history as a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking, many landlords will deny housing to these people without providing a reason. Stronger protections are needed for survivors so they do not have to face discrimination in trying to meet their basic need for safe housing.

Tenant Advocates are working to improve laws to help tenants when going through the screening process in search of housing. The Fair Tenant Screening Act proposes to address the following issues within the screening process:

• Wrongful evictions
• Inaccuracies on screening reports
• High screening fees
• Additional protections for domestic violence survivors

In order to make these changes, state legislators need to hear from renters throughout Washington State who are directly affected by this serious issue that creates so many housing barriers. If you’d like to share your story and be part of the advocacy effort to support the Fair Tenant Screening Act, please call our Tenant Advocacy Line at 206.694.6748 and attend the Access to Housing Forum to learn more about the Fair Tenant Screening Act and how you can help.

The tenant information contained in this article or linked to the Solid Ground Tenant Services website is for informational purposes only. Solid Ground makes no claims, promises or guarantees about the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of the information contained in or linked to its website. Solid Ground cannot act as your attorney. Solid Ground makes no representations, expressed or implied, that the information contained in or linked to its website can or will be used or interpreted in any particular way by any governmental agency or court. As legal advice must be tailored to the specific circumstances of each case, and laws are constantly changing, nothing provided here should be used as a substitute for the advice of competent counsel. Solid Ground Tenant Counselors offer these tenant tips as generalized information for renters. People with specific questions should call our Tenant Services hotline at 206.694.6767  Mondays, Wednesdays & Thursdays between 10:30 am and 4:30 pm.

Tenant Tip: Access to Housing Forum

You are invited to attend an open forum to learn more about opportunities to increase access to housing, address discrimination in the tenant screening process, and work to break down other barriers that low-income renters and domestic violence survivors face in finding housing. Please join the Race & Social Justice Initiative, the Seattle Women’s Commission, the Tenants Union and the Housing Alliance for:

Access to Housing Forum

Thursday, November 10, 2011, 6:30pm
Seattle City Hall, 600 4th Ave
in the Bertha Knight Landes Room

Snacks and Childcare provided. To request childcare, please click here.

Join tenants, advocates and invited elected officials to discuss how we can break down barriers to housing.

Panelists include:

Eric Dunn, Staff Attorney
Northwest Justice Project

Linda Olsen, MA, MSW,
Housing Program Coordinator
Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Laurie Lippold, Public Policy Director
Children’s Home Society