Rethink Resources

Good news from DC as Congress lifted the restriction on funding for needle exchange programs in the Capitol.

To follow up from a previous news link, in Tennessee a woman pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution and other charges involving pimping at least one teen and involving another in her efforts.

A teen girl testified in a trial of a man accused of pimping her in Wichita and Dallas.

A report from NYC determined almost 4,000 teens and young adults are homeless in the city.

On that issue, a news report from northern Wisconsin talked about a middle school effort to bring blankets and books to homeless youth. I have mixed feelings about it, in part because of a book I’m reading now Sweet Charity? which is a deep analysis of our response to hunger and food insecurity in the U.S.

The book examines how great mostly volunteer forces of caring people are mobilized to maintain food banks and other efforts to provide food for hungry people while efforts to make serious systemic change to address why people are hungry and how to stop that are left without significant support. So back to the article about the middle schoolers in Wisconsin:

Compassion looks like a soft fleece blanket. It sounds like the voices of Northwestern Middle School sixth graders as they tucked books into the blankets Wednesday….“They’re going to a shelter for kids who are homeless,” Jordan said. “Because people who don’t have anything or that are homeless need something too.”

Compassion is wonderful and I like the peer to peer connection. But I look forward to more schools addressing questions of why youth are homeless. And what we could be doing in our communities to make it so we didn’t have to rely on donations but created structural change so far less youth were homeless or having to stay in shelters.