The Fence is Up!

In 2011 the Giving Circle granted Cumberland Interfaith Hospitality Network $15,000 to help build a security fence around their transitional housing area at Ashton Woods.  It took awhile to secure matching funds and the best fence company for the job but they did it. By the end of this month the fence will be complete and residents will feel more secure in their homes because of the generosity of our members in supporting this grant.  Here are some pics of the fence taken just last week. It is sturdy, strong and rather stately too!

Patty Collie, Jean Harrison and Lucy Jones, our leadership team, outline the needs of women and children in Cumberland County in todays op/ed piece in the Observer. Read, learn and smile because you as a member of the giving circle are having a positive impact on these startling statistics about homeless women and children in our area. Click below to read the article on-line.
The facts as presents by our leadership team.

A great time was had by all AND we added several new members to our growing circle of giving! If you missed it here are some pictures which can hardly express the glowing camaraderie of women on a mission to change Cumberland County.
Mark your calendars for our next big member recruitment event:
Sunday December 16, Holiday Progressive Party, stay tuned for details coming to an in-box near you!

Editorial: The Cold - Homeless need more than city's charities can provide

You could call it an "Ouch!" moment - and credit it to Sue Byrd, director of Operation Inasmuch in Fayetteville: "Every year, we know the cold is coming, and every year, we seem to still be talking when it arrives."

That's the nature of working with the homeless - for those who are serious about working with the homeless. There's never enough of anything.

Most of those involved in the effort to reduce homelessness, or the effort merely to keep the homeless alive through the winter, know the score. But what do the rest of us know? Who are the homeless? Where are they? How many? Why do their numbers routinely exceed the capacity of shelter set aside for them? And why do their numbers increase despite the work of Byrd's organization and the Salvation Army?

This year the two are innovating. On nights when the temperature nears freezing, white flags will be posted outside the Salvation Army homeless shelter on Alexander Street, the Salvation Army Corps Community Center gym on South Russell and at Operation Inasmuch on Hillsboro. On the worst nights, a few hundred homeless, many of them mothers with children, will escape the cold from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

A thousand others will not. And that's just one of the things the public needs to understand if it wants to come to grips with this problem.

Here's another. Most people have a general understanding of hypothermia. It's a dangerous lowering of the core body temperature. But the air temperature doesn't have to reach 32 to induce it. With enough moisture and a strong wind, 40 can be low enough. Furthermore, hypothermia can't tell time. It doesn't know day from night, 6:01 a.m. from midnight.

Most distressing is the steady rise in the number of homeless, including roughly 750 schoolchildren.

This is not merely something that should leave us unsatisfied; it's something we should be unable to tolerate. But passing proclamations won't fix it. Neither will reciting mantras, like "Some of them like it out there."

What's needed to reverse the trend - this is what we want, agreed? - is exactly what the Women's Giving Circle has proposed: coordination to ensure assistance where and when it's needed, and transitional housing that provides not only shelter, but direction for those who want a better home than the street.

There's no way around it. That translates to public investment. The response to that need will speak more loudly about our commitment than all of our words.

2012 Community Scorecard

Did you miss the community breakfast and are curious about our annual scorecard? The marketing committee worked long and hard in researching the needs of Cumberland County so that we can make informed decisions as to where to best impact change. Numbers tell it all and numbers do not lie, so if you get a moment, please read the scorecard and see exactly this years statistics on the status of women and children in Cumberland County.

Community Scorecard

Want to help promote the Giving Circle? Download the brochure, print it out, carry it around and hand it to any and all who may be interested. Spread the word; increasing the size of the circle broadens our impact!
Giving Circle Brochure

Editorial: Losing - War on homelessness needs new troops and strategy

Six years ago, a coalition of city, county and nonprofit officials came together and declared war on homelessness. We will, they declared, eradicate the problem in 10 years.

With just four years to go, it's reasonable to conclude the effort will fail.
We have made little progress in finding ways to put people in good housing. In truth, we are going backward. The ranks of homeless are growing.

It was discouraging to see the numbers posted last week, as the Women's Giving Circle delivered its annual report on key indicators about the health and welfare of women and children in Fayetteville and Cumberland County. The young and fast-growing charitable nonprofit decided several years ago to monitor those trends, and especially to research the causes and cures for homelessness.

This year's one-day, "point in time" countywide homeless head count found that the number of sheltered or unsheltered homeless in this county had increased by 545 people over last year, rising to 1,606 from last year's 1,061. The number of homeless women rose from 190 last year to 396 this year - it more than doubled. And the number of homeless children and unaccompanied youth grew from 379 last year to 514 this year.
In a different count, the Cumberland County schools found even more homeless children - 748 of them in the school system.

For perspective's sake, consider these comparisons:
Fayetteville and Cumberland County have 1,606 homeless.
Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, with about the same population as Fayetteville and Cumberland, have 556 homeless - about a third as many.

Raleigh and Wake County, with three times our population, have 1,132 homeless - 474 fewer than we have.
Something is terribly wrong with that picture.

And it appears the biggest piece of the gone-wrong scenario is the same problem that has plagued our anti-homelessness army all along. It's an uncoordinated effort that is desperately short of the most fundamental building block that the homeless need - transitional housing and the assistance to help the homeless find a place in productive society.

We also know that we will never end homelessness altogether. Drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness are responsible for some of it, just as they are a key reason for our overflowing jail.
But we also know that most of those women - and all of the children - are not on the streets by choice. They want, need and deserve better.

A spinoff of the Giving Circle - Connections of Cumberland County - was formed to provide the missing coordination between agencies, and to create more emergency shelter space and transitional housing. We hope the new group succeeds where others have, so far, failed. We may never end homelessness here, or anywhere else, but we've got to do a better job for those who don't want to be homeless, especially our children.