SF Shelter Standards of Care Hearing - Investment vs. Class Action Suit

So, we are 'down to the wire'.   Its time for this City of San Francisco to 'come clean' with it.  

Either we invest money that should have been put in place 15 years ago,  to make Standards of Care to enable and protect our homeless, as a meager investment to 'get them onto their next steps' by keeping them safe and free from abuse and allowing them to have clean clothes and plug their cell phones (to maintain family, work and program committments) because it will result in ending their homeless condition faster and keep us all safe, as one community.

If not, then start setting money aside for class action law suits because if the City is unwilling to 'do right' to help our fellow residents, then why should they wait any longer to file for the 15 years of known abuse, neglect and criminal negligence that has caused predictable and preventable harm and suffering to tens of thousands of homeless residents over all of this time.

It's cheaper and better to invest in these people so they can live safely, in clean, sanitary, abuse free environments, so they can move on.  How can they move on if they are abused by staff,  not allowed to plug in cell phones,  eat slop food that is not fresh or nutritious ?  

End the captive shelter system by supporting these Minimum Standards of Care that will require dignity and respect along with hygiene standards and a nutritionist.   Keeping homeless residents cleaner and germ free helps our entire community.  Helping them now, with these basics will save us tons of money every year that will not have to be spent in very costly emergency and 'crisis' related services.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Let's prevent the abuse.  Prevent disease.  Prevent food poisioning and help these people 'stay in touch' with access to local calls, so we can all save money and lives.

To LEARN MORE FACTS about San Francisco's residents' experience in tax funded shelters, and to see photos of the current conditions and meals, visit:

SFHomeless Yahoo! Group:

  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sfhomeless/


SFHomeless Yahoo! Group Blog:

  http://sfhomelessyahoogroup.blogspot.com/
 
GET THE FACTS FROM SHELTER INSPECTIONS.  

Visit the SF Shelter Monitoring Committee's website for their Quartely Reports submitted to our City's Board of Supervisors and Mayor. 

  http://www.sfgov.org/site/sheltermonitoring_index.asp?id=39795

[ Send them an email to get the latest 2007 reports shelter.monitoring@sfgov.org  ]

These reports contain data, photos and results of their 'eyewitness' accounts from announced and unannounced shelter inspections of our tax funded shelters.  

Caution!  The reports are graphic and disgusting, to see at times,  how bad our fellow human beings are being treated by 'church' run and other non-profit shelter providers.

Gross criminal negligence, on the highest order.

Some of the homeless residents have no more patience for lies by some City Officials, Agencies and corrupted Shelter Providers.   They want to pursue multi-million dollar class action law suits against the City and The Non-Profit Providers in order to stop the systematic negligence and abuse.  

They plan to use money from any such class action suit to start their own shelter system (off-line from the City's shelter grid) and with the demographics of 'today's homeless population' they have plenty of qualified talent because we now have former doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, entreprenuers and even former shelter directors, organizers that are now among San Francisco's homeless population.

So, it's 'totally do-able' for them to actually start their own homeless and housing systems and do it right, minus the lying, cheating, stealing and abuse that have hurt so many of our San Francisco residents, for 15 years, now.

Basically,  at the simplest level,  these providers and the City have been getting paid off of Claims filed with Local, State and Federal Goverment Programs and Grants for money and resources that have been systematically pilfered from the homeless community (shelters) for 15 years now.   We're talking criminal negligence, tampering with witnesses, embezzlement, fraud and use of city facilities for illegal drug sales and manufacture.

It's time to put an end to all of that.  We can do this the right way or the legal way.  Makes no difference any more to the homeless and former homeless residents because 'enough is enough'.