Tag: Mother Brown’s

James Spingola and Dr. Catherine James successfully brought love, health care and other necessities to the Fillmore and Bayview Hunters Point communities during the COVID pandemic, and the future looks even brighter.

Juneteenth: Is it a celebration? Or is it a continuous fight for our freedom? Are we really free?

There are always forces afoot like the prison and criminal substance abuse to crush beautiful human lives. The beauty of our humanity is that there are also forces of love with relentless purpose to support our communities to heal, recover and live into successful and vital lives.

It’s winter and yet DA Chesa Boudin is making lemonade for the people from the lemons we’ve been puckering on for too long by immediately launching the new Community Liaisons program, a team for each district highlighting more emphasis on the voices of residents in the historically biased prosecutorial environment.

Light, hope, COVID-19 testing and new winter coats to warm cold community members are the Christmas version during a brutal pandemic of the ongoing love shared by Gwendolyn Westbrook, Mother Brown’s, the Curtis Family C-Notes and so many others from both in and outside the Bayview neighborhood.

While mainstream media wasn’t/isn’t looking – ever – Dr. Willie Ratcliff joined in love and gratitude at Mother Brown’s celebrating the Bayview community and Thanksgiving with the best homemade, healthy food laced with the usual warmth and good tidings to feed the spirit and body.

A spectacular simultaneously real and virtual party/fundraiser lifted the love and light on Nov. 20-21, 2020 in the Bayview community! The SF Bay View editor’s torch was passed by Mary and Willie Ratcliff to Malik Washington who, along with Wanda Sabir and new managing editor Nube Brown and so many others, remembered the ancestors and highlighted art, dance, music, food, interviews, homegrown business and voices from the community.

Voting in the Bayview community is being encouraged and supported with education, registration and myriad other day-to-day needs by SF Bay View Assistant Editor Malik Washington, Managing Editor Nube Brown, Mother Brown’s, Gwendolyn Westbrook of UCHS and so many others to lift Black voices for Black rights.

Code Tenderloin has been meeting the people where they are at for about seven years, providing day-to-day, real life, in the moment necessities to the community. Embodying a paradigm that at least emotionally eliminates the red tape, folks are receiving help without burden of shame and dehumanization. They’re getting love and compassion instead.

SF Bay View Editor, Mary Ratcliff, guides new Assistant and Managing Editors, Malik Washington and Nube Brown, and they have hit the ground running. Malik and Nube highlight the power and urgency of our vote, our Black vote, and their combined commitment to activate uplift, voice and change for people harmed by oppression.

DeBray “Fly Benzo” Carpenter, well-known community activist from Hunters Point, is helping people get their stimulus checks by signing them up with his pop-up help clinics happening every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Serving the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood for over 50 years, Mother Brown’s will at last provide beds for her clients in a new 200-bed facility that will be built by the community.

It’s Friday afternoon at the drop-in center known as Mother Brown’s on the corner of Jennings Street and Van Dyke Avenue. Despite the iron-gated door fronting the entrance, people drop in freely to check their mail, take a shower, do laundry or chill out in the reception area. For a nominal fee, Mother Brown’s rents out lockers. Gwendolyn Westbrook, the director of the United Council of Human Services – the official name of Mother Brown’s – as well as staff, describe the place as a community center. Client Johnny Scott likens Mother Brown’s to a family. “This here is a place where people get along,” he says.

As the CEO of United Council of Human Services, I am calling for full support of the homeless beds facility, which will benefit many working-class residents and other homeless citizens of Bayview Hunters Point. A homeless bed facility is essential in the neighborhood with the City’s second largest concentration of homelessness. We need your support in making the 100-bed facility a reality.