Tag: United Council of Human Services

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.

The SF Black communities are coming together to demand that those they elect be more proactive in helping to create what’s necessary, with community-centered leadership, to build strength, safety, health and wellbeing within SF Black communities, with a focus on the roots and impact of increasing violence.

Huge love, Herculean accomplishments and eternal light burning bright in the Bayview Hunters Point Community and beyond as beloved Black Queen Yolanda Jones transitions to the Ancestors spreading her human spirit and ‘We gonna do this!’ along her journey into the Universe. Rest in peace Yolanda Jones.

Under contract with San Francisco, the historic Compton’s Cafeteria, now signed as 111 Taylor St. Apartments, has been operating as a private prison aka halfway house run by the multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation GEO Group, which like the ICE detention centers GEO runs, has been infested with COVID-19 due to deliberate indifference to the wellbeing of those under their thumb.

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.

The Curtis Family Cnotes and Mother Brown’s Dining Room are collaborating to bring healthy food and soulful music to communities in need, which are about all you need to nourish the human existence, even, and especially, during a pandemic.

“The End of Policing,” a new book by Alex Vitale, examines the histories and failures of policing policies and provides examples of alternatives that successfully divest from dependence on police while strengthening the community. Vitale’s chapters on criminalizing homelessness and gang suppression in particular can be a useful tool in revealing ineffective policies in effect today in San Francisco. Join the San Francisco No Injunctions Coalition on July 12, City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s last planned court hearing to remove names from the city’s gang injunctions.

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.

The Concerned Network of Women partnered with the United Council of Human Services, governed by Gwendolyn Westbrook and Dr. Betty McGee, to issue hand warmers and hot chili to homeless people. On New Year’s Eve, we visited the homeless living under the Cesar Chavez Freeway exit. While under the freeway, we witnessed an eviction notice dated Dec. 29, 2016. Evicting the homeless serves little purpose, other than further implying that homeless people have no human and/or civil rights. Here is one solution: Bring services to the encampment, not locks and chains.

NO PEACE UNTIL JUSTICE IS SERVED OVER THE POLICE KILLING OF 26-year-old MARIO WOODS, a HUMAN BEING, MASSACRED BY five SF POLICE officers on DEC 2, in the Bayview, on THIRD STREET, between Fitzgerald and Hollister, across from CORNERSTONE BAPTIST CHURCH, at Third and Paul, where funeral services were held days later. SHOCKING to see a video, aired on TV, taken at the scene, of the killing!!! HORRIBLE – UNTHINKABLE!!!

Five San Francisco groups that help provide Thanksgiving dinners to the homeless and less fortunate received more than 900 free turkeys this week from the Morongo Band of Mission Indians near Palm Springs. The turkeys will help feed nearly 14,000 people across San Francisco. Statewide, Morongo donated another 13,000 turkeys this month to mark the 30th anniversary of the tribe’s Thanksgiving Outreach program.

The evening of Friday, Feb. 20, honored to be the keynote speaker at the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society’s Black History Exhibit Opening and Reception. 2015 celebrates the Society’s 60th anniversary, that embraced the theme, “A Century of Black Life, History and Culture: 1915-2015.” BILL HOSKINS, Executive Director and Curator, AL WILLIAMS, President and Chair, Black History Committee.

The Morongo Band of Mission Indians near Palm Springs continues its tradition of giving as it provides another 11,000 turkeys statewide to help those in need. Five San Francisco groups that help provide the homeless and the less fortunate with a hot meal on Thanksgiving received 1,000 turkeys Friday donated by Morongo. The 1,000 turkeys will help feed an estimated 20,000 people in San Francisco.

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.

Most people say you should vote because people died for that right, but that doesn’t tell us what to vote about, the effect of it or why it’s important. Election time is a window for leveraging and positioning. It’s a time to politic for what you want in the city. We need to know who and what to take an orchestrated stance for or against and show our ass election time.