Thanks From Many, Grief From a Few – UPDATED

by robin on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009, Filed Under General, Rev Andy's Blog, The Latest | View Comments

There is no question that this has been a challenging year for Union Rescue Mission, as the number of families needing our help has risen 400 percent; the number of meals served per day nearly doubled; and the number of food boxes given out to local residents is up 7 times. This has been especially true for EIMAGO, our public benefits charity, who has been responsible for opening 4 Winter Shelters. We operate these shelters from December to March in LA and neighboring communities because we strongly believe that everyone deserves a roof overhead, especially during the rainy cool months of the year. We also believe that it is important to regionalize services, and localize the solutions to homelessness so that the incredible number of homeless persons on Skid Row does not continue to grow out of proportion to available services. Each region should be taking care of their own brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts who find themselves homeless and in an incredible situation of need.

Our operations in West LA, Culver City, and at our downtown facility have been praised by their communities. Each of these shelters has received an A+ rating! Our Burbank shelter has had incredible support from most of the community; hundreds of volunteers, including a member of the Academy and her friends have not only volunteered at the shelter several nights a week, but brought tremendous movies for our guests to watch each night. A number of Burbank area churches and agencies enhanced our hospitality by bringing special meals and gifts that had a huge positive impact on our homeless guests. We served several hundred Burbank residents who found themselves without a place to lay their heads from December 1^st until this coming March 15^th. Included in these several hundred people were 23 Burbank area families with children who arrived at the Burbank Armory with nowhere to turn for shelter. We assisted them with hotel vouchers and connected them with long term help thanks to our own Hope Gardens Family Center in Sylmar, the Door of Hope in Pasadena and other helpful partners.

We thought our biggest challenge at this point in the year would be connecting our guests with long term help between now and the day the Armories close on March 15^th, and this is a challenge. However our biggest challenge has come in the form of a blind side from a few neighbors in Burbank who happen to have the ear of some City Council members during an election year. They have made unfortunate and untrue statements about our guests, claiming that all of the guests are addicts, sex offenders and criminals. All of this has been complicated by the local press in Burbank and Glendale printing some of the neighbor’s misleading statements as if they were fact, and I have had to ask and get retractions for their mistakes.

I’ve decided to take this classic NIMBY (not in my backyard) struggle to the local and national media not because Union Rescue Mission will lose an opportunity to assist Burbank in housing their citizens in an Armory for 3 months, and not because this effort is actually costing URM in the areas of funding, time, effort, and now stress. I am going to take a stand because this Winter Shelter opportunity is the minimum that the people in Burbank facing the devastation of homelessness deserve. The discussion should not be about whether to continue to provide the Burbank Armory or even whether to have URM operate it. The discussion should be about what is the City of Burbank going to do to provide a year-round option, a place to live, for the hundreds of individuals and dozens of families who are losing their homes to foreclosure, eviction, and unemployment in what is becoming not only a local emergency, but a national emergency that some are describing as the Great Recession.

At a time when some leadership needs to emerge to deal with the tsunami of people in need (I was actually hoping the Governor would open the armories year round), not only is no one rising up with a plan, but it appears that some leaders in Burbank are readying to pull back on the few services that have been offered.

I am hoping and praying that the majority of citizens in Burbank, especially the ones who have volunteered and met their homeless brothers and sisters face-to-face, will speak up to their leaders and come out on Thursday, March 19^th to the Burbank Fire Training Center Meeting Room, 1845 N. Ontario Street, Burbank (1 block north of Victory Blvd., above Ralph Foy Park, 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. to speak up for a local solution to the homelessness faced by many in the Burbank area.

UPDATE

Notice from Burbank neighbors and one City Councilman.

I’m saddened that our guests are being generalized as criminals, addicts and sex offenders when the truth is that many are plumbers, carpenters and writers–out of work and homeless for the first time! We have also had 23 families from the Burbank area arrive at the Winter Shelter seeking refuge. Many of these families have recently become unemployed, foreclosed on or evicted. And nearly 50 percent are experiencing homelessness for the first time ever! After the devastating circumstance of losing a home, how painful to also be defaced by the destructive labels of “criminal”, “drug addict” and “sex offender.”

–Andy B.