Tag Archives: homelessness

Green Party of Utah Joins Call to Greens for Collection Effort for Homeless

Posted on June 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

MEDIA RELEASE – GREEN PARTY OF UTAH

PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATING CONVENTION TO HIGHLIGHT HEALTH CARE, HOMELESSNESS, ENVIRONMENT, DRUG REFORM, IRAQ WAR

COLLECTION EFFORT FOR UTAH SHELTERS AND FOOD BANKS WILL BE HELD LOCALLY

Contact information: Deanna Taylor, 801.631.2998, gpu@gput.org

Green Party of Utah Delegate to Attend National Meeting in Chicago; Food and Clothing collection efforts will take place in Chicago and Utah; Presidential Candidate to be nominated

06.25.07 Salt Lake City – The Green Party of the United States Annual National Meeting, “Live Green Vote Green”, will be held in Chicago July 10 – 13, where the candidate for President for the GPUS will be chosen. The convention will serve as a public forum for discussion on a variety of major issues including nuclear power, single payer health insurance, homelessness, the war on drugs and the Iraq War.

Moab Green Party Local Member Harold Shepherd will be representing the Green Party of Utah at the Convention. “I am very excited to be a representative for the GPUT,” says Shepherd, a consultant for Red Rock Forests in Moab and Executive Director for the Center for Water Advocacy. “Utah is one of the states that is being hit most directly with climate change, energy development, water conflicts and other environmental and social justice issues and is far behind most other states in addressing these issues. I think the GPUT and the National Green party have a chance to be leaders in going beyond mere talk and actually reversing the tide of the social and environmental crises in the West.” Shepherd has over 25 years working with Indian Tribes, conservation organizations and activists on water and natural resources related topics.

Pat LaMarche of Maine, 2004 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate and 2006 Candidate for Governor of Maine is launching a collection effort for homeless shelters during the National Convention for Chicago shelters. Utah will join that effort locally.

“Political parties have a tendency to drop into a location for a gathering or convention, occupy some of the more affluent areas of the city and completely overlook the constituency in that area that most needs a better government. I’m proud that every time I’ve put out the call to my Green counterparts around this country to help others in need; they have responded quickly and generously. I can’t thank the Greens of Utah enough for answering this call,” says LaMarche, author of Left Out in America: The State of Homelessness in the United States, which tells the stories of many homeless Americans during her 14-day journey in homeless shelters throughout the country where she witnessed firsthand the condition of the homelessness crisis.

“Homelessness effects everyone,” states Deanna Taylor, Co-Coordinator of the GPUT. “The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates approximately 600,000 families and 1.35 million children experience homelessness in the U.S., making up about 50 % of the homeless population,” explains Taylor. “According to its 2007 report, The Road Home, Utah’s largest homeless shelter, all shelters served an unduplicated 3, 862 individuals for a total 222,581 nights of shelter last year. The total number of shelter nights is up by 8,207 from last year.” Taylor further adds, “There is no reason why anyone should be without food, clothing and shelter. This is not only a problem, it’s an epidemic that must be addressed by our leaders, our communities, and our citizens taking action to demand a system where homelessness becomes an issue of the past.”

The GPUT is joining the national collection effort to collect items for local shelters and food banks by asking Utahns to bring clothing, personal and food items in labeled bags or boxes during July to The Free Speech Zone, 411 South 800 East, Salt Lake City or The Utah Peace House Project, West Jordan (call ahead – 801.631.2998) or arrange a drop off/pick up by calling 801.209.0219 or 801.631.2998 or writing to gpu@gput.org

2008 Green National Convention: Live Green, Vote Green http://www.greenparty2008.org

Green Party News Center http://www.gp.org/newscenter.shtml

Green Party of Utah http://www.gput.org, http://www.desertgreens.org

Contact: Utah: Deanna Taylor, 801.631.2998, gpu@gput.org

Maine: Pat LaMarche, 207.671.0190, patlamarche@hotmail.com

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Bea Gaddy

Posted on July 23, 2006 | Leave a comment

Since I will be one of five featured speakers at a national press conference at the Green Party of the United States National Committee meeting in Tuscon (see media release), I’ve been thinking a lot about progressive women and the posts I’ve made about some of them.

I recently recalled a women I grew up hearing about in the news in Maryland – Bea Gaddy. I surprised myself by remembering her name because I have not thought about her for a very long time. Each Thanksgiving she would be plastered all over the Baltimre News stations for her work with the homeless. I remember thinking to myself, “I want to be like her.”    Despite a life of obstacles and poverty, Bea became an attorney and subsequently became an advocate for the homeless.  She became known as the “Mother Theresa of Baltimore” for her work.

Feeding the Hungry, Clothing the Naked

A Bea Gaddy Bio
   

In 1933, Beatrice Frankie Fowler was born in Wake Forest, North Carolina, outside Raleigh. Her family was dirt poor but didn’t have time to worry about the Great Depression. Her stepfather, violent and alcoholic, threw her and her brother out of the house when there was not enough food. “I know what’s its like to hunt for food in a garbage can and eat out of a dumpster. As a homeless person I did it for years. I was left to fend for myself as a child, raped before I was a teenager, and tormented by the bonds of poverty.”

By her mid-twenties, she was a high-school dropout and twice-divorced mother of five. For years, she went on and off welfare, working as a maid and a nurse’s assistant, trying to get her life on track. Desperate to escape her impoverishment, she moved to New New York and then, in 1964, to Baltimore, where she befriended an attorney in her neighborhood named Bernard Pitts. He did for her what she would alter do for so many: he saw her potential. 

With his support, she earned a college degree and became a social worker. Her passion, she realized, was helping others.

 “When I was in junior high,” says Cynthia Campbell, 42, Gaddy’s daughter, “I remember the house filling up with boots one week because she had organized everybody to donate winter boots for kids. Later, she collected toys at Christmas for poor children and arranged for kids in the community to attend summer camp.

The Thanksgiving event started in 1981. After federal funding cuts eliminated her job, Gaddy found herself back on food stamps. With $290 she won on a 50-cent lottery ticket — a longtime habit that became an unorthodox method of fund-raising for her organization — she bought enough food to feed 39 of her equally hungry neighbors. It was then that she decided to start a community kitchen for the needy run by the needy. She begged grocers fro donations and gave away whatever she collected.

In the early years, the Thanksgiving dinner took place on the sidewalk in front of her home, where Gaddy did much of the cooking herself. Eventually, she moved to a nearby middle school to accommodate thousands of diners. She even sent meals and used-winter clothing to shelters in North Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey. Ever resourceful and doggedly persistent, Gaddy relied on an expanding network of donors: Shady Brook Farms donated turkeys; local grocers, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green beans; and the Maryland Correctional facility in Hagerstown did the cooking. Without these and many other contributions, Gaddy estimated that the bill would be several hundred thousand dollars.

In addition to the food pantry, Gaddy operated a shelter for women and children, a furniture bank, and a program that refurbished abandoned rowhouses for impoverished families. A cancer victim’s center and a drug rehabilitation house were slated to be next. In August 2002 she became an ordained minister, so that she could marry and bury the poor at no cost.. her outreach work in the inner-city represented a very personal mission, because the broken lives that she encountered were often reminiscent of her own struggles. For she had been homeless, unemployed, and hungry. Once he had a home of her own, she thought nothing of sharing it with strangers living on the street.

Many of her admirers associated Gaddy with a single day of the year: Thanksgiving. Her holiday feast became legendary. It grew from an intimate gathering of a few dozen neighbors to a sprawling all-day affair, with as many as 20,000 people, on the grounds of a nearby middle school. The event made Gaddy, whom volunteers called “Shorty” (she was five feet three inches tall), almost larger than life.

Known as the Mother Teresa of Baltimore and Saint Bea, she was named one of former president George Bush’s “thousand points of light” and once selected Family Circle magazine’s woman of the year.

Died October 3, 2001 of complications from breast cancer. She was 68. Baltimore, for the first time in twenty years, did not have Bea Gaddy on Thanksgiving to feed and clothe the poor. People were relieved however that the Gaddy tradition will be carried on by her daughters and friends.

 

  

Bea was (and still is) and inspiration to women everywhere.  I hope to be like Bea when I grow up.

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