HealthyCal.org

By Chris Richard

The Mojave Desert community of Hinkley is best known as the setting for the legal battle over chromium 6 contamination in groundwater, as portrayed in the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

Now, activists say Hinkley faces a new environmental threat – this one carried on the wind.

Sewage composting company Nursery Products is seeking to build a processing plant eight miles west of Hinkley. Residents fear that Mojave Desert winds of up to 80 mph will carry dust contaminated with bacteria, industrial pollutants and other pathogens into town, making people sick.

“Hasn’t Hinkley had enough happen?” asked Linda Snively, a member of HelpHinkley, an activist group opposing the project. “First there was the chromium 6 fiasco, and now this. Somehow there’s this target on Hinkley.”

Nursery Products’ 80-acre site is designed to accept 400,000 tons of waste per year, half of it partially treated sewage, referred to in the waste industry as biosolids. That sewage can include not only what people pour down the drain or flush in the toilet, but chemicals and metals from industrial waste and street runoff.

The other half of the processing plant’s raw material will be green waste, such as wood chips, grass clippings and tree trimmings, says Chris Seney, Nursery Products’ operations director.

He said he hopes to win final government approval and have the facility running within six months. Some of the processed waste, Seney said, will be sold as fertilizer. Other compost will be sold to golf courses and schools as fill and soil amendment, he said.

But there’s increasing debate over the environmental and public health impact of treated sewage.

The Environmental Protection Agency describes it as “nutrient-rich organic materials resulting from the treatment of sewage sludge.” According to the EPA, biosolids “can be safely recycled and applied as fertilizer to sustainably improve and maintain productive soils and stimulate plant growth.”

Despite such benign descriptions, in 2009 the EPA also found that sewage sludge contains dozens of toxic and hazardous materials, including heavy metals, pharmaceuticals and endocrine disruptors.

Last year, the activist group Food Rights Network published a report on toxic substances found in the processed biosolids distributed free to the public by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission as “organic compost.”

The commission discontinued its giveaway program, but later issued a report claiming its compost was no more contaminated than are many commercial composts.

In June, Yale University researchers published findings that biosolids that meet federal standards still may spread emerging pathogens such as noroviruses, a family of microbes that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, causes more than half of all foodborne stomach flu outbreaks nationwide.

In light of such findings, HelpHinkley founder Norman Diaz doesn’t trust Nursery Products assurances that its facility will be safe.

“There are no protections at all,” he said.

“There are a lot of things you could do to make this safer. You could enclose it, like they’ve had to do for composting plants in other areas. But here, there’s nothing. Nothing but ‘Let’s hope the wind doesn’t blow.’”

HelpHinkley has been protesting the project since it went before San Bernardino County planning commissioners in 2005, and has waged a court fight under the state Environmental Quality Act since 2007. In April, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge John Vander Feer ruled on the sole remaining obstacle to the project moving forward. Nursery Products must revise its water use plan because the aquifer under the proposed plant is depleted, Vander Feer ordered.

Seney said the requirement will be easy to meet. When it’s in full operation, the processing plan will use just 1,000 gallons of water a day – a consumption level equivalent to that of two residential households, he said.

Far from being the public health menace that HelpHinkley activists describe, the proposed plant is an environmental model, Seney said. It’s solar powered, more remote from dwellings than any similar facility in California and separated from the water table by more than 300 feet of dry, rocky soil. Opening the facility will markedly reduce greenhouse gases, with sludge trucks no longer required to travel to processing sites as far away as Arizona, he added.

The composting process will take about 15 days per batch, with the mixed sewage and green waste piled in long rows about six feet tall and heated through a natural chemical reaction to 131 degrees, Seney said.

Jordan Peccia, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Yale University and a co-author in the recent study on pathogens, called such a process “pretty rigorous.” Further, the site’s distance from Hinkley probably does reduce exposure risks “by several magnitudes,” he said.

Still, Peccia said, scientists have a lot to learn about what pathogens are removed in the sludge processing treatment and what remains. His own research demonstrated that there are a lot of health risks that current treatment standards don’t address, Peccia said.

“In a perfect world, these facilities should be enclosed,” he said. “Thinking strategically, if I were in the community and upset about this, the fight wouldn’t necessarily be to ban everything and get everything out of there. The fight would be to enclose the facility.”

Seney said Nursery Products has already satisfied Judge Vander Feer that enclosure is cost prohibitive.

County Supervisor Neil Derry, who also serves on the board of the Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District, said Nursery Products’ proposal makes environmental and economic sense.

“This is a logical step. It’s a relatively inexpensive step for cities and residents throughout the county,” he said. “If it’s not financially viable, it won’t get built. If it doesn’t get built, you don’t solve your problem, which is what to do with sludge and green waste.”

Hinkley resident Bob Conaway said Nursery Products and government regulators could have shown more imagination. One possible model might have been a University of Nebraska project in a windy area that successfully contained dust with plasticized sheets and soft covers, he said.

Conaway said he wishes Nursery Products would establish a community advisory panel, similar to the body recently formed by Pacific Gas & Electric to discuss chromium 6 containment and remediation efforts in Hinkley. Instead, he fears that Nursery Products will show the same disregard for Hinkley’s residents as was reported in nearby Adelanto.

Nursery Products began operating a composting facility in that town in the spring of 2002. In a public hearing a year and a half later, city officials took more than four hours of testimony from people outraged at the revolting smells and clouds of flies that they blamed on Nursery Products. One woman quoted in court papers said the stench made her eyes water and made breathing difficult.

“You open your car door and hundreds of flies go in,” she said.

In a legal settlement, Nursery Products agreed to move out of town.

The state Department of Health Services determined there wasn’t enough data to tell whether the health problems residents claimed they suffered were caused by the composting. Still, in a report, senior environmental scientist Tracy Barreau wrote that “some of the symptoms … expressed to DHS are consistent with biosolid-related exposures documented in the scientific literature.”

In an interview at the proposed Hinkley site, Seney called the claims of filth and stench exaggerated.

“No one was sick like they claim and all these other issues,” he said. “I had eight employees and myself. Every single day I was there. No one was sick.”

Further, Seney said, there’s no comparison between the Adelanto operation and Nursery Products’ plans today.

“The facility there was next to homes. I mean, you could throw a rock,” he said. “This is a completely different scenario.”

By Helen Afrasiabi

Kathia Canlas spends almost every working minute on her feet as an aid at the Santa Ana Senior Center Community. Canlas works at one of the two senior centers in the city, which serve 100 to 150 people each day. She prides herself on the kind of resourcefulness that lets her help local seniors without formal training, but she’s also been confronted with situations that have sent her into a tailspin.

“An elderly lady who had come here for the first time told me she wanted to end her life,” Canlas recalled. Canlas and staff immediately went scrambling for phone numbers they could call and had the center’s greeters rally around the newcomer. The woman ultimately rebounded from her severe depression and now comes to the center regularly.

“All we knew is that we had to do something for this lady,” Canlas said.

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This article is one in an occasional series on aging with dignity, independent living and public policy that affects both. For a complete archive of the articles, click here.

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Resourcefulness and a little luck are fueling senior center staff across the state, advocates say. Municipalities operate 60 percent of California’s 800 senior centers. As municipal revenues dwindle, fewer and fewer resources are trickling down to fund services for seniors.

“What we’ve been seeing in this environment in the last five years is a reduction in resources and consolidation of recreational programs,” said Sandi Fitzpatrick, California Commission on Aging Director.

The commission is finishing a survey of at least 750 of the state’s 800 senior centers. Fitzpatrick has overseen the survey, as a joint effort with the Congress of California Seniors called the Senior Center Initiative, since 2009. The outlook for the immediate future is grim, Fitzpatrick said.

“They’re having trouble making ends meet,” Fitzpatrick said. “As city coffers continue to go down, they’re cutting back on everything, including staff, and indeed some are closing.”

Local centers are feeling the cuts. In certain cases, Canlas said, measures she and her staff take are outside of their purview.

“We just don’t think about it or talk about, we just do whatever is necessary,” Canlas said.

The survey also checks on infrastructure issues, emergency preparedness and accessibility. The Santa Ana Senior Center is in no danger of closing, according to the report. But the need for remodeling and updating is noticeable, and as far as Canlas knows, updates aren’t anywhere under the radar, she said.

Among things lacking at some centers throughout the state are air conditioning units, disabled access and earthquake safe buildings, Fitzpatrick said.

Municipalities, not state, fund centers

Santa Ana Senior Center is usually bustling with regulars by 9 a.m., engaged in a variety of activities including learning computer skills, selling handcrafts or socializing.

For some, however, coming to receive services is not a matter of choice. Mary Steiner, 95, lives on Social Security and walks aided by a cane. The exercise classes she takes there for free, Steiner said, are vital to her physical wellbeing.

“People here are very nice,” she added. “Sometimes I can’t pay, but I still get lunch too.”

The need for senior centers is high, but there is no infrastructure on the state level to fund such services. Instead, senior centers are often part of existing community centers.

“Senior centers in state structures are non-existent,” Fitzpatrick said, adding that there has been nothing targeting the senior population from a state policy standpoint. Community centers are either assigned to the Parks & Recreation area of city or county governments or run by nonprofit organizations.

Fitzpatrick recited a short roster of centers that had met unfortunate fates, including Woodland Community & Senior Center in Northern California. Woodland was built by the city to simultaneously serve as a senior and community center.

“One day we walked in and saw there was simply no staff on the senior side,” Fitzpatrick said. When the city’s budget was compromised, it was the senior services half of the operation that got sacrificed.

Cuts increase pressure on centers

To add to the problem, during the 2010-11 fiscal year, many programs for seniors were hit by budget cuts. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, vetoed funding for the Alzheimer’s Day Care Resource Center program.

A number of senior centers operated jointly as Alzheimer’s’ Day Centers, and the veto put a moratorium on new licenses, leaving the growing number of families in need of day services looking for a solution. The reduction in funding also forced some ADCRC’s to close their doors.

The CCOA survey found that working families are dropping off relatives with dementia and similar illnesses at the regular senior centers after their adult day health care centers have been eliminated. This is something that has not escaped notice of patrons, either.

“It used to be just a senior center,” said 72-year-old Santa Ana resident and Santa Ana Senior Center regular Jack McCoy. “Yeah, now I see everything. You’ve got everyone in here.”

Because many senior centers rely significantly on volunteers, many staff members are not trained to provide specialized care.

Santa Ana Senior Center is no different, Canlas said, saying that it depends heavily on volunteer help. In addition to depression, common conditions she regularly sees include early stages of dementia, cancer and people recovering from stroke.

“Volunteers simply are not and cannot be trained on all issues that come through the door,” Fitzpatrick said.

“We’re seeing a lot of resiliency,” Fitzpatrick said, citing the ability of those in charge to tap every resource to keep the centers afloat. “I think it’s a special kind of person that runs a senior center, trying to do the best they can with increasing population and decreasing resources.”

“But we’re still on the downside,” she added, “for the time being.”

By Heather Tirado Gilligan

The East Oakland Youth Development Center should feel institutional, with its white walls, scuffed but clean blue linoleum tile floor and tiled drop ceiling. Instead, the small lobby brims with the lively sounds of young people laughing and sneakers squeaking, spilling down the hall from the gym.

On a recent visit, a young boy sat alone on a bench in the midst of the liveliness, head low, shoulder hunched. Regina Jackson, the center’s director for the past 17 years, strode down the hall towards him, dressed in jeans, a crisp polo shirt and polished sneakers. She was slightly out of breath from joining the kids in the races in the gym.

Jackson was about to put the Center’s philosophy of change into action. She leaned in front of the young boy and asked him to apologize for pushing another child in the gym. His contrition was genuine. Jackson enveloped him in a hug before she sent him back to the summer activities.

Exchanges like this are crucial to the development of kids at the center, located in a high-poverty, high-crime area of Oakland where children don’t always get the mentoring they need at school or at home. The hands-on guidance provided by Jackson and other leaders – including local teens – is complimented by a range of classes at the center that prepare East Oakland kids for college and careers.

“Our theory of change is steeped in character development, embracing who we are, and then readiness – training and attitude,” Jackson explained.

Their theory of change is part of the center’s mission. “We hold a four or five-year-old,” Jackson said, “to the same standard as we do 30-year-olds.”

The 30-year history of the center illustrates how well this approach works. More than 150 students participate in EYDOC’s summer Cultural Enrichment Program each year. Their Pathway to College program has a 100 percent college acceptance rate. Ninety-six percent of those students graduate from two or four year institutions. Perhaps the most telling measure of EYDOC’s success, however, is the return of former participants to teach and mentor younger neighborhood kids, who give what they’ve learned back to East Oakland’s next generation.

Safe Routes

Jackson doesn’t sugarcoat the hard realities of the neighborhood. EOYDC is in a rough part of Oakland.

“We are located in the middle of the killer corridor,” Jackson said.

Rates of violence in the center’s East Oakland neighborhood are three times higher than the national average, Jackson explained, describing a recent week that saw two shootings within a few blocks of the center – one of which was fatal.

The center’s location was deliberate. Founder and former Clorox CEO Robert Shetterly wanted programs available in the neighborhood where they were most needed – and at little or no cost to participants.

The center is partnering with the city on new projects to make ensure that kids’ short term needs are met so they can grow up to realize their full potential. The center will remain open on Friday nights till midnight as part of a larger Oakland program, Late Night Live, because violence goes up in the neighborhood during hot summer months.

EOYDC is also part of the summer free school lunch program, and has 20 extra meals each day to give out to people in the community, too. Whole families often come to the center for lunch during the summer.

Violence and poverty have a ripple effect on neighborhood kids and their parents. Rates of stress for women in East Oakland, for instance, are three times higher than in the rest of Oakland, Jackson said. The pressures, including high rates of unemployment, are many.

“You get home, if someone is there, it’s because they don’t have a job,” Jackson said. Working parents are often overwhelmed, Jackson added.

“And sometimes,” she said, “where you live can just be an extension of the street.” That means while kids have a roof over their heads, they don’t get much else in the way of nurturing from their home.

The young people in the program are all too aware of the challenges they face. Recently, a group of teens put together a book of poems called “Y U Gotta Call it Ghetto?” with help from poet and recent Berkeley Ph.D. LeConte Dill. Jackson pulled out the slim book of poems and read from one by Jamal Cole, called “Safe Routes”:

Caution: This area is over-rated and under-estimated
When you observe my section, think 2 yourself
about the environment and how society
or the government treats the lower classes.

The center teaches kids to respect where they come from, Jackson said. They draw on their experiences as a source of strength, as they do in the book of poems, and they are also expected to have empathy for their neighbors in need. “We are compassionate,” Jackson said.

Teen leadership

The summer program goes a long way towards fulfilling the center’s mission of character development and career training. Kids aged 6-13 get a full compliment of courses, from computers to cooking classes, at the very subsidized rate of $75 for the whole summer.

Youth Instructors run the center’s summer classes, and having teens in a leadership role helps give all of the center participants a sense of ownership of EOYDC, Jackson said.

Science teacher Ashaki Scott, 17, teaches with a hands-on approach. Scott grew up eight blocks away from the center. Now she’s on her way to UC Davis to major in computer engineering, but she plans to keep spending her summers teaching at EOYDC.

Scott’s not alone, Jackson said. Recently, a former program participant and college student came back with a group of friends spend a day replacing tiles in the center ceiling. Famous alumni of the center, including former NBA star and LA Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw, continue to raise funds for the center. Jackson has worked for the center since she was 21 years old.

Scott recreated the experiment from that day’s science class in the parking lot. After cautioning onlookers to stand back, she dropped a Mentos in a bottle of Coke to demonstrate the difference between a chemical and a physical reaction – and shot an impressive arc of soda into the summer sky. That’s a physical reaction, she explained.

“They get to see someone like themselves who looks like them and is excited about learning,” Jackson said of the influence teen instructors on kids in the summer program. “If we look at Ashaki and think she is amazing, imagine what the younger kids think when they see her.”

And the interaction with younger people is the best part of the job, said 17-year-old physical education instructor Jamal Rashead: “Knowing the kids are having fun and just being themselves without worrying about whatever problems they’ve got when they go home.”

Cooking instructor Trent Robbins, age 19, agreed with Rashead’s sentiments. He’d spent the morning teaching 6-year-olds how to make macaroni and cheese and turn boneless skinless chicken breasts into fried chicken strips. “Making the food and seeing the kids smile as they are interacting,” he said. “That’s my favorite part.”

An elevated sense of possibility

EYODC offers a comprehensive program during the school year too, with computer literacy, job training, college prep classes and courses in arts and music.

One of the Center’s successful year-round programs is the GED course. Participants pay a small fee for the test prep classes. The summer course held about five participants learning to convert measurements, considering how many cups were in a quart. A GED bus ferried students to the test itself later that day. When students pass, Jackson said, they get their fees back.

Seventy-five percent of the people who pass the GED go on to junior college, Jackson said. And most of the people in the class arrived there under from juvenile detention under a court order.

“They see an elevation in their own human possibility,” Jackson said.

That sense of potential is continually reinforced at the center. Back in her office, Jackson stacks small teddy bears dressed in caps and gowns into a cabinet. The bears are gifts to graduates, whether they are finishing grade school or master’s programs.

Once they finish their education, Jackson said, the center matches participants with real-world opportunities. A recent job fair put 200 people to work, and young people have gone onto internships both local and far from home – one teen went on to intern at NASA, Jackson said.

These long-term successes are important, but the small everyday interactions matter just as much, according to Jackson.

“I believe that true leadership is what you do when no one else is watching,” Jackson said. That’s why she was running in the gym, Jackson explained. “I’m like OK, Ms. Regina is 48 years old. Win or lose, I’m gonna give it 100 percent. It’s amazing what the impact is.”

By Rosa Ramirez

The women stood in a large circle. With their eyes shut and heads titled toward the floor, each prayed to God to keep each other and Richmond safe. At the navel of the circle was a container with fresh flowers—a type of gift for the occasion.

The occasion— the gathering of more than 40 Latinas and African American women to heal Richmond’s racial wounds —was something that had been in the works for nearly two years, says Amahra Hicks, a board member of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and co-organizers of the meet up.

“Building Bridges Between Black and Brown Communities: Healing Racial Wounds,” was held at the Brooke T. Washington Community Center in Richmond on June 25. The Human Rights Human Relations Commission sponsored the program.

Kathleen Sullivan, chairwoman of the Commission and president of the Black Women Organized for Political Action, said the idea to come together was born after a group of women, including herself, Hicks, Barbara Becnel of the Neighborhood House of North Richmond and Miriam Wong of The Latina Center, met during the San Francisco Mayor’s Summit for Women. The women talked about the influence women have inside their home and in their communities.

“Let’s do a roundtable discussion,” Sullivan recalled saying.

The women were there to mend the relationship between the city’s black and Latino residents so they can together tackle larger issues that disproportionally affect both communities, such as violence, immigration, limited access to jobs and quality public education.

Since the gathering at least three people have been shot and killed in Richmond and North Richmond. Overall violent and property crime rate is down by 9 % citywide, according to the city’s recent COMPSTAT data, which do not include recent homicides that happened over the Fourth of July weekend.

At the event were local politicians, housewives, mothers, businesswomen, health workers, retirees, students and community leaders.

“Black and brown are like mother and father. We’re so much alike and fight all the time,” said one participant.

Richmond’s black population is at 28 percent, according to the latest data from the American Community Survey. Latinos make up 35 percent of the city’s population.

The women spoke candidly about the underlying cause of racial tension and the paths to possible solutions. One woman said Latino men are taking the jobs that were once held by black men. Another woman said there’s a perception that soccer leagues made up of Latino youth aren’t open to black children, which is creating resentment among some residents.

Katherine Webster said she remembers growing up in Richmond. When she played at the park, black and white adults, regardless of whether they talked to one another, always made sure she was safe. They often invited her to join their games or birthday festivities. But Latino families aren’t doing the same for children outside their own community even though both Latino and black youth are being killed by street violence.

“Our children weren’t invited to join in your soccer games,” said an emotional Webster. “We are losing our children and we need help.”

During the half-day program, the women broke into smaller groups. The mini sessions were to break down myths, misconceptions and start building trust among the women. In one session, the women were asked to share an intimate experience of a time when someone hurt them. The exercise was to teach the women to forgive. It was also an exercise in trust. At the end of the session, some women cried and held each other.

In another session, the facilitator asked women to share something they value. The answers ranged from working hard and being bicultural to honoring their word and valuing their families.

“How many of you value family?” the facilitator asked the women in the room.

Everyone one of them raised her hand.

When it was time to share something they had learned from someone in the group, one woman said, “Despite appearance there’s no separation between me and you.”

By Heather Tirado Gilligan

LGBT seniors came of age in a culture hostile to gay people. While the days of considering homosexuality a disease and a crime may be over for good, homophobia still affects the health of older gay people.

The three biggest issues affecting the health of LGBT seniors are isolation, a lack of traditional family structures and economic insecurity, issues that are often intertwined, advocates say.

Past discrimination can have a real affect on the lives of today’s seniors, said Jan Couvillion, former outreach to elders activities manager at New Leaf, a San Francisco healthcare center for LGBT people that closed in 2009 after 35 years of operation.

Overall, LGBT elders are half as likely as their straight peers to have a close relative to rely on for help, and elderly lesbian couples are twice as likely as heterosexual couples to live below the poverty line, according to a report by SAGE, an advocacy group for LGBT seniors, “Improving the Lives of LGBT Older Adults.” These are significant risk factors for poor health outcomes, the report noted.

“Most lesbians, at least the ones I know, spent their lives walking the fence,” said Couvillion, who is 70 years old and a member of the activist group Older Lesbians Organizing for Change.

Peers who came out at work were often discriminated against and lost their jobs, Couvillion said. The jobs they took to replace their positions often were at much lower pay, she added, which had a long lasting effect on their economic security and on their wellbeing. “There is the stress and the loss of dignity,” Couvillion said.

The traditional family structures that people rely on for care in old age are often broken for elderly LGBT people too, creating an isolation Couvillion sees today in her work as a senior peer advocate for the Tenderloin Self-Help Center. She described an 84-year-old lesbian client who lives in an SRO alone and manages her own incontinence by sleeping on a plastic sheet with no blankets. Coming out often meant severing family bonds for this generation of seniors, and lesbians who didn’t have children are often left to fend for themselves, Couvillion said.

Healthcare providers’ lack of knowledge about the needs of LGBT patients, combined with a lack of resources, make these issues all the more difficult to address, said Dan Ashbrook, the director of Lavender Seniors of the East Bay, an organization devoted to improving the lives of LGBT senior citizens. In addition to organizing lunches and visits to cut down on the isolation of LGBT seniors, Lavender Seniors conducts trainings to help nursing home staff offer better care to older gay people.

“Only three percent of healthcare workers have human sexuality training,” Ashbrook said. A lack of statistics and other data on LGBT seniors only compounds the challenges of determining how to get this population the services that they need, he added.

“Usually LGBT specific organizations do this kind of work,” Ashbrook said of training nursing home staff about human sexuality and the challenges faced by gay seniors. “We just don’t have the resources to do it,” he added.

The additional education is needed, according to the Center for Elders Independence in Berkeley, one of the two nursing homes where Lavender Seniors is training staff with a grant from Alameda County. Though the center has a diverse population, and has other types of cultural sensitivity training, Lavender Seniors was providing them with their first training about LGBT issues.

“The staff aren’t always comfortable, and older participants don’t always approve of LGBT staff,” said Elinor Davis, communications specialist for the center.

The challenges for LGBT staff were highlighted at the training. Staff members recalled an openly gay nurse who was harassed by participants. Patients demanded that the nurse wear gloves when he touched their food trays, the staff said, because they feared that he was infected with HIV and could pass it onto them through causal contact. The nurse left the center after one day of work there.

Changing the institutional culture could prevent such incidents, which create a challenging atmosphere for LGBT seniors as well as the staff, Ashbrook said. Ashbrook began by the training by reviewing the history of discrimination against LGBTs. He showed clips from the documentary “On These Shoulders We Stand,” where interviewees recalled the institutional harassment from police that was an accepted part of life for gay people before the 1970s.

LGBT seniors remember this history all too well. “Attitudes were very negative,” Couvillion recalled of her childhood in Texas in the 1940s and 50s. “They used the word ‘faggot’ or ‘fairy.’ I didn’t hear the word lesbian until I was much older.”

Frank Howell, 73, said his parents “called in an whole army of psychologists” when they discovered he was gay in his teenage years in the 1950s. Howell’s parents went so far as to take him to the state mental hospital, but balked at having him committed. “We just said to hell with it and we went home and buried it” after the state hospital suggested a 30-day confinement, recalled Howell, who is active in Lavender Seniors.

Such a history is why institutions should make LGBT people feel explicitly welcome, Ashbrook said. “When our policies are don’t ask don’t tell, we are creating a stigmatized population,” Ashbrook said, “creating one big problem – seniors don’t get care.”

LGBT adults are more likely to delay seeking medical care, to seek medical care in emergency rooms, and to delay or not get needed prescription medicine, according to the SAGE report. They are more likely to have their emotional problems treated with medication, more likely to smoke, to have cancer and to have abused drugs or alcohol when they were younger, the report also noted.

Making LGBT people feel welcomed means making them feel visible in materials like brochures and intake forms, Ashbrook said. He also encouraged staff to actively seek out information about the family lives of center participants because LGBT seniors might be reluctant to volunteer information about their same-sex partners. Knowing about anti-discrimination laws and policy and making other seniors aware of these policies is also an essential step in creating a welcoming environment, Ashbrook said.

The world is changing at a rapid pace for LGBT people, Ashbrook said. When Lavender Seniors started 16 years ago, few organizations existed to advocate for older LGBT people. Now, he said, care providers are starting to expect LGBT clients. Ashbrook sees that kind of change as a sign of the increasing acceptance of LGBT people.

Couvillion, however, is more cautious. Discrimination still exists, even in places like San Francisco thought of as gay meccas, Couvillion said. LGBT seniors came to places like New Leaf, the center that closed in 2009, because they didn’t feel welcome in other senior centers, she said.

“LGBT organizations are being pushed to mainstream,” she said. “I’m not sure that it’s good to put gay seniors in mainstream care.”

Ashbrook thinks LGBT organizations will be increasingly called on to provide training, rather than direct assistance. The movements of the last 10-20 years have been successful, he said, in creating a new climate for LGBT seniors.

By Michelle Santos

Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Memphis are cities that dwarf Salinas in almost every measure – except high levels of crime and violence. When the Summit on Preventing Youth Violence took place in Washington D.C. in April, Salinas was one of six cities with officials in attendance. The summit aimed to develop a multi-faceted approach to dealing with violence in America’s most crime-ridden communities.

Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP), a collaborative of more than thirty Salinas organizations, which represented Salinas at the Washington summit, is working to implement new strategies for reducing violence in the city. Through CASP, the group of representatives from the city, county, schools, and nonprofits share resources with the goals of building, supporting and sustaining peace in Salinas.

Salinas ranked fourth nationally in 2008 for homicides when compared to cities of similar size. More than 90 percent of those killings were gang-related, and according to officer Dale Fors of the Salinas Police Department. Salinas’ exclusively Latino gang population is unique. According to Fors. In most cities with gang violence issues, ethnic tensions are usually involved.

In 2010, 19 rapes, 365 robberies, 1,358 burglaries, 2,437 larcenies and 853 stolen vehicles were reported in Salinas. The actual numbers are much higher, Fors said, but many crimes go unreported due to fear of gang retaliation.

Deputy chief Kelly McMillin and deputy city attorney and community safety director Georgina Mendoza presented Salinas’ anti-violence strategy at the summit. Their strategy outlines six broad areas that need addressing: social and economic conditions; engaging and supervising youth; environmental design and urban planning; education and schools; law enforcement; and impact of drugs and alcohol.

For each identified issue, the committee has established goals and objectives. To counter the impact of drugs and alcohol, for example, the goal is to “create an environment that reduces the supply and demand of drugs and alcohol.” Objectives toward reaching that goal include decreasing the access, use and abuse of drugs and alcohol among youth and families.

The summit gave Mendoza some valuable tools, she said. The importance of incorporating faith-based organizations in efforts to reduce violent crime was one such new concept, she said. The ability of churches and other faith-based organizations to get the word out and influence the community is exceptional.

“I learned to think outside the box, things like appealing to the business community more,” said Mendoza. “When there’s a crime in the city, it affects the entire community. People aren’t going outside and playing with their kids. The bottom line is that it affects economic growth, and the city as a whole.”

Braiding a multitude of community resources together, and asking everyone from taxpayers to business owners for input, dedication and involvement, has improved the city’s efforts to reduce youth violence, Mendoza said. The community is stepping up to the challenge, she added, and starting to recognize that it’s their problem and they can do things to make it better.

“I feel like there is engagement and mobilization at the level of community,” she said. “There’s been a change in tolerance and acceptance and more of a transformational thinking.”

Criminal recidivism is perhaps the most important issue in discussions of violent crime prevention. There aren’t effective off-ramps to the criminal justice system once people have been in prison. “It’s too late for most young men who are that far down the trail,” McMillin said.

McMillin is relieved to see state and national recognition that the problem of violent crime must be addressed at its root level.

“You’ve got to get ahead of it before the violence occurs,” said McMillin, “before there’s an outbreak. You’re not going to get to prevention through law enforcement.”

Suppression used to be seen as the main approach to gang violence, but the focus has shifted to prevention. People saw police as the agency that should deal with the problems of ensuring community safety, but communities are starting to take more responsibility because of the realization that prevention is essential to the equation.

McMillin and Mendoza see investing in early prevention as a key way to making a difference. Taxpayers are footing the bill for a spectrum of costs, including everything from the cost of imprisonment to helicopter rides for victims. The more investment that can be made in advance, the lower these costs will be. It’s preventative medicine.

“We’ve got to vaccinate against violence rather than treating it in the emergency room,” said McMillin. “Salinas makes a good example in terms of early prevention. Look around the country, there are a lot more Salinases than there are Chicagos. If we can successfully push out a model for a Salinas-sized city, that can be leveraged to many places.”

While those involved in mitigating Salinas’ violence problem are hopeful, a problem that has been in existence since the 1940s can’t be tackled overnight.

“People are always looking for a quick fix to any problem. We can document street gangs for approximately 70 years in Salinas. It’s a multi-generational problem that developed over many years, so it’s going to take many years to undo,” said McMillin.

Though change will inevitably require time, Mendoza is optimistic about the future of Salinas, especially since attending the summit. “If we make these changes through time, we will see significant change, so we are very hopeful,” she said.

The next phase is implementation of the strategic two-year plan, but that will require funding—a challenge of its own. McMillin said there’s no guarantee of money, but attendance at the summit does put Salinas on the map. Joining forces with other agencies to face the problem of violence in Salinas is also a better, more strategic use of federal and state funding.

By Julia Landau

Deshawn Lamar Clark was released from San Quentin State Prison and returned to where he grew up, near Richmond, Calif., in December of 2005. He was 30 years old.

He returned to Richmond a homeless, jobless man. He owed child support to the mothers of his twelve children. The fine print under his freedom was getting larger. He was staying out of the drug business, but he still lived on the fringes and drove without the blessing of the DMV.

By the time he met Tracy Reed, a caseworker at GRIP, Richmond’s go-to multi-service center and homeless shelter, he had 19 citations totaling over $21,000. In May of 2011, Clark owed more than he’d ever earned, and more than he could ever pay. He’d stayed out of jail, but he’d failed to register his car or acquire a driver’s license.

Last month, Clark and many others had their tickets fixed—legally, by a judge. Contra Costa County’s Homeless Court is for people who have unpaid tickets usually relating to not having a stable address. Once they complete 30 days in a program—whether it’s community service in a shelter (“life skills”), a drug or alcohol rehab program, or job training—they can get their unpaid tickets cleared.

“At first blush it sounds like, ‘you’re clearing up old tickets for some guy sleeping under a freeway?’ said Judge Steve Austin, who started the Homeless Court here and has presided over its monthly sessions since 2006. “But these are all people who’ve been through treatment, who’ve made serious changes to get off the street. At that point, removing the tickets is just us getting out of their way.”

“These people are ready,” said Reed. “People who get off at homeless court don’t get a free ride. They have shown they want to be active participants in society.”

The homeless court model

Homeless Court was created after the veterans group Stand Down conducted a survey among homeless Vietnam veterans. Their most pressing issue turned out to be unresolved criminal or civil cases. Typically, these penalties—like fines for “public nuisance” violations like sleeping, drinking alcohol, or urinating in public—became more daunting to them than accessing food or shelter.

The first session of Homeless Court took place in 1989 at the handball courts behind a gym in San Diego, where homeless veterans tended to gather. Now it has sprouted up in roughly a third of California’s 58 counties, and has yielded savings in court costs. An added benefit to lawmakers, court officials, and taxpayers lies in “alternative sentencing,” said Steve Binder, the San Diego Deputy Public Defender who created the program. Binder said the punitive approach—where unmet citations and fines lead to lockup—makes no sense for people who simply cannot pay.

“The thing is that [regular] courts, while promoting order in our communities, often complicate that order,” he said. “By issuing fines and custody, courts can push people further outside the margins.”

Binder said that Homeless Court is based on the recognition that tickets were never really going to translate into revenue. In fact, he said, penalizing the homeless costs the system far more than it makes.

“These people don’t have the money to pay fines, so they serve time and are literally released back to the streets and it just builds up again,” said Binder. “Nobody’s interests are getting served by that cycle, not prosecutors, not judges, not the defendant. It frustrates everyone.”

In a 2001 study of the Homeless Court program in San Diego, participants said that they would not have resolved these cases on their own and would have “waited until arrested” to go to court. Steve Austin, the arbiter of Homeless Court in Richmond, agrees that punishing people who are living precariously is wasteful.

“Those tickets end up going to warrant, going to jail; that costs a ton of a money to the system,” he said. “The number of public employees who have to touch it is astronomical.”

Plus, he said, people in Homeless Court have already clocked significant hours of community service. “They have been through job training or drug or alcohol programs. They are different from how they were when they got these tickets. We’re just giving them credit for what they’ve done.”

Suspended licenses keep homeless on the street

In Richmond and surrounding towns, the majority of offenses by homeless are transportation related, whether BART or bus fare evasion or driving with an invalid license.

County Public Defender Robin Lipetsky, who supports the Homeless Court and wants to expand it to cover misdemeanors, said the definition of homelessness is broad enough to include people at risk of being homeless, and “couch surfers” like Clark. Homeless advocates called them “precariously housed,” often people who’ve been in the criminal justice system and are trying to get housing, but face steep fines and a public opinion that people who commit crimes don’t deserve support services.

“There’s a whole subculture in society—a number of people who never had a license to begin with or it gets suspended,” said Austin. “They don’t have a place to live, but they’ll get a car somehow, often without a title.”

Mr. Clark’s exorbitant bill, the judge said, is not unusual. “A $100 ticket can turn into a $1000 ticket pretty fast,” he said. “You have an automatic 170 percent penalty, plus $300 if you miss a court date.”

“An enormous barrier that comes up [for homeless people] is these infractions—whether moving or parking violations,” said Kelly Dunn, director of Rubicon Legal Services, a pro bono legal assistance group in the East Bay. “If they don’t get it paid it can easily escalate to $1500, and it comes back to, ‘I don’t have any money anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it, so why bother going to court?’”

Austin said that he’d been aware of this problem—that unpaid tickets often posed the most intractable hurdle to overcoming homelessness—but didn’t know if anything could be done about it.

“Generally judges cannot waive those fines,” said Dunn, the legal adviser. “Judge Austin gets it—he understands how folks can’t get jobs, and all the barriers not having a license creates.”

“People were being prevented from getting a job, housing, and benefits because of these outstanding tickets. And if you’re able to get yourself off the street –then you have this $10,000 fine?” He heard about Homeless Courts at a conference and approached the county’s homeless program director to start one in Contra Costa County.

Tracy Reed is responsible for getting her clients on the Homeless Court docket. She estimates that last month, Homeless Court cleared $75,000 in tickets for her clients.

“When [Clark] came into the GRIP office and we calculated his amount I was astounded,” wrote Reed on her referral letter for her client’s entry into Homeless Court. “He himself was quite embarrassed, and I thought that was a good thing. It showed me he is now caring for himself and willing to make the necessary changes for his life.”

Clark said he spent his twenties “messing up,” but his first detention was at ten years old, when he and an older cousin were busted for stealing gloves in a Montgomery Ward. He grew up touring California’s boys ranches, group homes, county jails, and eventually prisons—Pelican Bay, San Quentin, Folsom—for selling drugs.

“I got out [of San Quentin] with no source of income, no nothing. No information,” Clark said. “When I was growing up, they didn’t just pull you over and check your license.”

“Besides, he said, “I didn’t even have a permanent address.”

“Maybe it’s not knowing how the process works, or not having role models,” said Lipetsky, the public defender. “But I do know once you start getting tickets and fall behind and owe money, you can’t even begin to get a license.”

Reed said people regularly show up at GRIP with similar scenarios—tickets not necessarily related to homelessness per se, but connected to their upbringing in poverty. “Maybe their parents didn’t have a license, so how are they going to know?” said Reed. “Not having a license creates a lack of responsibility, a lack of accountability.”

Her clients at GRIP, like the veterans in San Diego, do get picked out by police for “public nuisance” tickets like loitering and jaywalking. But, she says, increasingly they are young, African-American males, and these fines are par for the course.

“It’s kinda sorta a way of life,” she said. “It has to do with lack of resources, lack of education, and that creates this ripple effect.” Enormous tickets—for driving unregistered cars, with a suspended license or no license—are common.

“Young, African-American people, primarily males—so many young people destroy their license and don’t see any way out,” she said. “Tickets build up and they just say, ‘forget it.’ And they’re driving without a license.”

Without support, she said, they stay on the margins. “Certain populations get left out” of the support system for needy people, said Reed. “They dig a hole and it gets worse and worse.”

After about a year of working at GRIP, Mr. Clark walked out of the small, makeshift Homeless Court in Richmond’s Memorial Auditorium, which was hosting a massive homeless outreach called Homeless Connect 7. He walked straight across the auditorium to the DMV booth and applied for a license. When the sun set that night, he didn’t owe anything—at least not to Contra Costa County.

“I felt so good when I left that courtroom,” he said. “It was almost better than having a newborn. I just wanted to jump for joy. I just wanted to tell everybody.”

A new generation at risk

Clark in fact is telling others about Homeless Court. He does intake at GRIP, explaining to newcomers how they qualify for the Homeless Court program and what documents they need.

Clark has unique assets as a mentor to an emerging population of needy people in Richmond, Reed said —the younger men coming to GRIP, who have started down a bad road but want to turn back.

“We’re used to an older, chronically homeless population,” she said. “People with mental illnesses, substance abuse. We are seeing a lot more young people in here now.” She thinks the phenomenon can be traced to the beginning of the “tough on crime” era, the harsh punitive approaches to law enforcement born in the 1980s. As social services and rehabilitation programs were depleted, people in the criminal justice system upon release have had an increasingly hard time staying out.

The young men he sees “run the streets like I did,” said Clark. “I see a lot of jaywalking tickets.”

He has the credibility needed to reach young people on the street, said Reed. “We need people like Deshawn [Clark] talking to the younger crowd; they don’t always relate to staff.”

“People know him,” she said. “Now he’s the catalyst for people to deal with these kinds of problems. Being legit on the road.”

People like Deshawn Clark are the focus of public safety changes coming to California. Governor Jerry Brown’s County Realignment plan intersects with the Supreme Court decision ordering California to reduce prison populations, in order to provide a constitutional level of health care for its inmates.

As state prisons scramble to reduce their populations, cities and counties will have more of a role in rehabilitation.

If Richmond is really having a renaissance, Reed says some people are being left in the dark. “Richmond needs the human services to keep up with the city’s other renovations,” she said. “Right now there is no housing for the re-entry population,” said Reed. “That’s why we have such a revolving door.”

Clark said that Homeless Court was the first program that ever delivered what it promised. Still, he has not had a home address in his adult life.

Richmond’s housing for the poor, homeless, and mental is at maximum capacity, says Reed, and services for parolees are woefully inadequate.

“They are gearing up for the July reentry of San Quentin’s released,” said Reed, tapping the calendar on her office wall. “Where will they go?”