ATTENDANCE
Coordinators: Facilitator: Vince; Notes: Alan
Attendees: Bud, Cindy Carter, Cheryl, Vince, Alan, Brenda Bacon, Neal. Tom Tufte, Matt D, Sarge. (We also had a guest, Matt Driscoll, who is a political columnist and commentator at the Tacoma News Tribune. Matt has a special interest in social justice issues).
BUSINESS OF MEETING:
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS: We welcomed new attendees and briefly introduced ourselves.
NEAL’S PRESENTATION: Neal gave a PowerPoint presentation of the history and goals of the Tent City Tacoma project. He and others answered questions afterwards. This presentation is designed to help educate community members about Tent City Tacoma and how it can have a positive impact on the community, as well as help the homeless.
GENERAL DISCUSSION OF OUR GOALS AND PURPOSE: Vince had invited a number of clergy to attend from around Puget Sound, some of whom have had experience hosting tent cities. Only a few came. Vince and others described a bit of our history, how we came to be. Our next step in implementation will be to line up at least 3 potential host sites. For legal and permitting reasons, those potential host sites must be churches. The camps must rotate out of each site every 90 days to be in compliance with the city use permit.
We then discussed where we are and answered questions for the new attendees and for the newspaper columnist. This is the gist of that discussion:
So far, we have one potential host site, but they don’t want to commit until we’ve lined up other host sites. For the best of reasons, they don’t want to host a site for 90 days and then find they have to close the site and there’s no place for the camp to go. Thus, we really need to find a 2nd, and optionally, a 3rd host site. That is our main obstacle at the present time.
We discussed several new approaches. Several attendees pointed out that there are several churches in the area with missions to help the homeless. They felt we could approach those who already were doing something, as they may be more willing to commit to hosting. Even if some weren’t able to host for one reason or another, we could ask for help with other resources, such as money or in-kind services.
Another thing we discussed was getting personal stories of how homelessness impacts various individuals. We could put their stories on the website.
ADJOURNMENT : We adjourned at 5:54 PM.
NEXT MEETING: The next meeting will be on Monday, May 4, 2015, at 4 PM at FUMC, room 207. The address is 621 Tacoma Ave S.
Respectfully submitted: Alan OldStudent