Four Candles on My Blog’s Birthday Cake

Today is my blog’s fourth birthday. So I’m going to indulge in a few reflections.

Things I’m Grateful For

I’m grateful for the many organizations whose research and advocacy make my posts possible. I’m awed by the quantity and quality of what they produce.

I’m also grateful for the inspiration they provide. Huge challenges. Disappointing results sometimes. Partial victories more often than total wins. So much effort to preserve what’s been won.

I’m sometimes inclined to feel that advocacy is a hopeless labor — forever rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down again.

But then I see how the advocates I admire draw strength from their core values and keep on keepin’ on, while always looking for ways to do more and better. I’m uplifted by their unquenchable spirit.

I’m grateful to the issue experts who take time to answer my questions — and sometimes to send me even more information.

They’ve enabled me to avoid blunders and to tackle points I’d otherwise evade, knowing I’d be likely to blunder. Not claiming I’ve made no blunders, however.

I’m very grateful to the organizations that have sort of taken me into the fold, even though I’m just a lone blogger. The feeling that I’m in some manner part of a like-minded community has become a sustaining part of an otherwise rather solitary life.

I’m grateful to the people who read my posts. I do write for you, not for myself.

Lastly, I’m grateful for the blog itself –and not only because it’s a precondition for the other things I’ve named.

For me, the blog provides a discipline for learning. Scads of interesting things I might dip in and out of — and often do. But I’ve got posts to publish on a regular schedule. So I’ve got to fix on an issue and try to get my mind around a manageable piece.

And then follow it because even issues I think I’ve got a handle on keep evolving — or surfacing again in different forms.

I’m by choice the hedgehog who knows many things rather than the fox who knows one thing well.

Thanks to the blog, I know more things than I did four years ago — and feel I’m getting to know some of them closer to well over time.

Things I Hope For

I hope to put a fifth candle on my blog’s cake. By then,  I hope I’ll feel that it’s better than the four year old I’m reflecting on now.

I don’t know quite what “better” should be — except posts that are more interesting and useful for the people who read them.

I’d be extremely grateful for feedback of any sort — now or whenever the spirit moves.

Holiday Gifts To The Givers

I’ve given up sending “thing gifts” to my brothers and their families. As I said last year, they’re well enough off to buy what they want — or at least, to buy what they want that I could afford.

For awhile, I sent things they wouldn’t know they wanted. But I knew this was a crapshoot — as would anyone who’d gotten some of the gifts I have. (No, brothers and sisters-in-law, I’m not referring to yours.)

About five years ago, I decided to instead donate in my family’s names to nonprofits whose work means a lot to me. And now, like other last-minute shoppers, I’ve got to choose.

My e-mail box has been full of holiday appeals from nonprofits whose mailing lists I’ve gotten onto in various ways. So all I need to do is click. But for which?

On the one hand, I feel impoverished. There’s no way I could give to all the nonprofits that I know are doing worthy work in this world.

On the other hand, the plethora of choices makes me feel rich — not, of course, monetarily, but in hope. And, frankly, that’s a commodity I need these days.

I’m continually buoyed up by the sheer number of organizations that are addressing the critical needs of low-income people here in the U.S. — as direct service providers, advocates and both.

I’m buoyed up by how they stay buoyed up enough to keep at it. So many dreadful personal situations the service providers encounter every day. So many defeats on so many policy fronts.

And I’m buoyed up when these organizations work together — both through formal coalitions and through linkages formed for some specific cause. I’ve seen these collaborations overcome high odds.

We’ve got networks stretching across the country — and within some states and cities as well. They can — and do — reach out to engage communities most directly affected by the policies we have and might have, for better or worse.

There’s a wealth of energy, compassion, intelligence and just plain true grit in these organizations and the struggling people they represent. I’m constantly impressed by what they do — and how much they do with what are in many cases quite limited resources.

So as I mull over my gift list, I think how the people who staff and volunteer for these organizations are giving every day. And how they are a gift to us all and to me personally.

Because they’re inspiration and a ray of hope in what we all, I think, agree are very difficult times.

Federal Emergency Food Program Helps Feed Hungry DC Area Residents

As I recently wrote, the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) is said to need a supplemental appropriation because it can’t otherwise provide enough food commodities to meet the increasing pressures on food banks.

Still on my learning curve, I contacted Marian Peele, the Director of Agency Relations at the Capital Area Food Bank, to find out what the situation is there.

CAFB is the Feeding America network partner for the greater Washington D.C. area. It uses federal funds channeled through the D.C. and Virginia state governments to purchase TEFAP food commodities. It also gets free TEFAP bonus commodities when they’re available and suitable to its needs.

All told, CAFB distributes about 23 million pounds of food a year. Nearly 14% of this comes through TEFAP. The rest is donated by various food industry sources and food collected by a vast number of organizations and individuals.

CAFB distributes the food it gets to more than 700 partner agencies, i.e., local nonprofits that either prepare and serve them or give them to low-income people to take home. Organizations I’ve written about before, including Bread for the City, Miriam’s Kitchen and So Others Might Eat are all partner agencies and thus, in part, dependent on TEFAP. CAFB also distributes some food directly to local low-income residents.

Peele says that TEFAP foods are “an enormous help to [their] agencies and thus the community members who receive them.” She says they’re often healthier choices than foods donated from other sources, except for the fresh produce CAFB gets from local farmers.

As we know, the recession has vastly increased the number of people needing emergency food assistance. The newspapers are full of stories about people going to food pantries who never sought help before. Feeding America reports that its food bank network is serving one in eight Americans–46% more than in 2006.

Calls to the CAFB Hunger Lifeline, an emergency food referral, have increased 91%. Peele says that partner agencies report increases in food distributions ranging from 85% to 200%. They’re dealing with longer lines, cutting back on portions and still running out of food faster than ever before.

The organizations that are calling for a supplemental appropriation say that it’s needed to avert a drop of 50% or more in the dollar value of this year’s bonus commodity donations. This doesn’t mean that CAFB would receive that much less. But it does show what the food bank may be up against as it tries to keep up with the rising tide of hunger in our nation’s capital.

Low-Income DC Residents Face More Legal Problems, Fewer Services

I wrote awhile ago about the gap between low-income people’s needs for legal services and the capacities of legal aid programs to provide them. Now a report by the DC Access to Justice Commission and the DC Consortium of Legal Services Providers brings it all home.

It’s one of the most depressing reports I’ve read in a long time. And that’s saying a lot.

Last year, the DC Access to Justice Commission reported in detail on the range and types of civil legal services needed by low-income people in the District. It concluded that, even with the D.C. government funding approved for Fiscal Years 2007-8, “the needs of those who cannot afford a lawyer substantially outweigh the available services.” And that was before the recession set in.

As the new report says, low-income residents now face more severe hardships–and more legal problems. Legal services attorneys estimate a 20% increase in requests for help. Increased needs are probably greater.

Meanwhile, local legal assistance organizations are grappling with drastic funding reductions. In 2009:

• The D.C. Bar Foundation had to cut its grant-giving in half because revenues from its usual source of funds–the Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts program–plummeted due to the Federal Reserve Board’s cuts in interest rates.
• Law firms and individual practitioners cut their contributions by as much as 20% due to declines in their business.
• Firms also laid off associates and deferred hiring, thus reducing the availability of pro bono services.

Faces with less income, the organizations cut back on staff–both full-time attorneys and other staff whose work supports the quality and quantity of legal services provided. The network as a whole has lost the capacity to represent 1,050 clients and to provide less resource-intensive forms of help to an additional 2,100.

The organizations have adopted various strategies to cope with staff shortages. Many limit access or the types of services provided. By and large, cases involving complex issues, long-term representation and/or substantial resource commitments seem to have fallen victim to the need to provide some assistance to as many people as possible.

Resource constraints have also forced the organizations to limit efforts that can most effectively address the needs of large groups of clients–advocacy, systemic litigation and test cases. This is obviously a vicious circle, since resources committed to broad-based change would tend to limit the individual emergency needs that are now consuming all the resources.

Prospects for next year look even worse:

• The District’s grant to the D.C. Bar Foundation, which channels funds to providers, has been cut by 20%.
• Budgets for the DC Office for Victim Services and other agencies that provide grants for legal services have also been cut. Reported losses to providers exceed a total of $100,000.
• Foundations that have struggled to sustain their funding for legal services will have to cut back due to significant declines in their assets.

Thus, the report says, the crisis in civil legal services representation will get worse before it gets better–unless there is substantial change.

How do we get there? First, I think, we need a much broader and deeper appreciation of why our community as a whole needs a robust legal services network.

The epigraph to the report, by Justice Learned Hand, puts it well: “If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one fundamental commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.” That’s what we’re doing now–economizing at the expense of fairness, inclusiveness and shared prosperity.

Say what you will about tough economic times. I say it doesn’t have to be this way.