Low-income veterans in North Dakota, at risk of being unhoused, have options to turn to if a legal issue stands in their way, including a new partnership to help navigate situations in or out of the courtroom.

Legal Services of North Dakota has a new initiative with the Community Action Partnership of North Dakota (CAP-ND), which allows the two agencies to work closely with a client in need of resolving a legal matter, so they can secure or maintain housing.

Gale Coleman, director of compliance for Legal Services, said something like child-support payments might involve assisting an individual through court proceedings, but she said it goes beyond that.

"How do I get my Social Security card? How do I get my birth certificate?" Coleman outlined. "Those are all things that we may be able to help with, depending on the situation."

Another request might be help accessing military discharge paperwork. Members of both organizations say for veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or substance abuse, navigating such challenges can be overwhelming.

As for court settings, Coleman said it is intimidating for almost anyone, and those who have served face unique challenges if they are dealing with lingering effects post-deployment.

The partnership is funded through a Department of Veterans Affairs grant.

Diana Bjerke, programs manager for veterans housing and employment at Fargo VA Health Care System, said efforts like the program are critical in the broader effort to provide housing. She added separate programs can intervene before a problem grows into a legal nightmare.

"Someone who has PTSD, maybe got a DUI and came onto our radar," Bjerke suggested. "Instead of them ending up with a DUI, we can offer them treatment. We can offer them lots of things in lieu of incarceration, and help that veteran get stabilized in the community."

Bjerke added collectively, the initiatives help push North Dakota closer to "Functional Zero" status for homelessness among Veterans.

Coleman noted the stability arising from the partnership with CAP-ND can help ensure an individual's progress is not derailed.

"It's things that may not take a long time to do," Coleman acknowledged. "But it is a very important part of how to get that goal taken care of, of being able to get them transportation, and so on and so forth."

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By Caroline Tracey for High Country News.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

On a late August morning, the Echo Park Trash Club approached an underpass below Los Angeles' 101 Freeway. Months earlier, the city had dismantled a homeless encampment located there during one of its routine sweeps. It was the Trash Club's first return to the site since its residents had come back to and set up tents on the median between opposing lanes of traffic on Silver Lake Boulevard and in the alcoves where the bridge above intersected with the sloping hillside. Erin Fein, the club's founder, and the 20-some volunteers came to help clear the encampment of trash - a necessary hygiene service that also helps the community avoid another sweep. They approached the residents, introducing themselves and offering to take any trash they wanted to get rid of. One resident joined the cleanup, sweeping disintegrated pieces of Styrofoam and broken CDs into a dustpan. Two others joined the group photo at the end of the morning.

The environmental movement started with picking up trash. On April 22, 1970, schools and community groups held trash cleanups all across the U.S. Fifty years later, during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, the Echo Park Trash Club began bringing together neighbors for the very same activity - but with new significance in the midst of worsening housing and climate crises. The group uses cleanups not only to beautify their neighborhood but also to support its unhoused community, whose trash buildup can result in encampments being dispersed, or "swept."

Trash buildup is a key factor in the city's decision to sweep encampments, according to club volunteers, sanitation department workers and housing activists. While the city justifies sweeps on hygiene grounds, they also displace residents, pushing them out of the shelters they rely on to mitigate the effects of extreme heat and weather. The sudden dispersal leaves housing-insecure communities even more exposed to the effects of Southern California's increasingly hot, and increasingly unpredictable, climate.

Isolated in her studio apartment in spring 2020, Fein thought of the idea of a trash pick-up group to simultaneously address increasing trash in her neighborhood and build community in a socially-distant way. When she put an initial post on the social media network NextDoor, "it exploded with comments." Others in her community were also worried about the aesthetic aspect of trash-filled streets and its broader environmental impacts, such as the possibility of toxic trash like cigarette butts ending up in the ocean.

During the club's first pickups, Fein used her own car to bring the filled trash bags back to her apartment dumpster. Others started to help her ferry and unload the trash, but what Trash Club members really wanted was the city's support. They started, in Fein's words, "a heavy-duty campaign" of emailing the city to request a sanitation department truck at their cleanups. They went weeks without a response, but one day, a truck showed up. "We were like, huh, that garbage truck is just sitting there," said Fein. They approached the driver. "Is there any chance you're here for Echo Park Trash Club?" they asked. The driver said he was.

Once they had a truck regularly coming to the Sunday morning pickups, Fein expanded the club's efforts to collect trash at the neighborhood's homeless encampments.

Between 2018 and 2020, homelessness in Los Angeles climbed 32%. Other cities in the West saw similar increases, a symptom of rapidly increasing housing costs and the defunding of social services. Currently, there are an estimated 41,980 unhoused people in LA.

In Echo Park - as in many other neighborhoods - gentrification is part of the reason that many have ended up without housing. At the end of the 1990s, housing prices in the once working-class, majority-Latino neighborhood increased by 50% in three years Today, the neighborhood's median home value is $1.5 million.

"It's getting gentrified, so it's pushing people into corners - there are sometimes 50 or 100 people living in one place. That creates a massive amount of trash," said Joe Rodríguez, one of the garbage truck drivers who often takes a Trash Club shift. Rodríguez started his career in Los Angeles Sanitation and Environment's homeless cleanup branch, working as a maintenance laborer for five years before becoming a driver. He said that trash often built up so much at encampments that they had to use an excavator to remove it.

Tensions around Echo Park's unhoused community came to a head in March 2021, when the city of LA shut down a large encampment at Echo Park Lake, the neighborhood's central green space. The encampment had formed during the pandemic, when the city was not enforcing its anti-camping laws. As word of an impending sweep spread, protesters came to the community's defense. But on March 24, 400 police officers entered the park to evict the encampment's remaining residents, whose numbers had dwindled from around 200 to fewer than 20 as warnings circulated. In the process, they arrested 182 protesters - including some Echo Park Trash Club members - and detained at least 20 journalists.

Though it was uniquely high-profile, the Echo Park Lake sweep wasn't a singular event: The city of LA undertakes multiple sweeps daily throughout the city. These involve multiple city agencies, including the departments of sanitation, homeless services and police, and are hectic. The Los Angeles police department and the department of sanitation close the area with barrier tape, and "once they do that, you can't go back in, so people will be rushing to get their things," said UCLA sociology graduate student Sam Lutzker. "It's a big issue in terms of losing documents and medicines."

Just two weeks after the August pickup, Los Angeles experienced a record-breaking heat wave. Unhoused people were some of those most acutely affected by the extreme weather. Addressing housing and environmental crises most meaningfully requires addressing them in tandem. Reducing the urban heat island effect and providing cooling centers, for instance, helps all city residents mitigate and adapt to climate change - but especially those who are directly exposed to the ambient weather. And to keep encampment trash from building up, some cities have created initiatives to pay unhoused residents for trash collection, simultaneously employing those in need of work and keeping the city clean.

Now studying for a master's degree in psychology, Fein hopes that Echo Park Trash Club can be part of restructuring sweeps to center encampment residents' health, hygiene and sanitation needs, including trash pickup and mobile showers. "If they were led by gentle people with mental health-realm experience, they could do it in a helpful way: provide lunch, put belongings into tubs, clean the area and then set it back up together," she said.

Rodríguez said Fein has already made a difference. "Trash Club is a big accomplishment for the city," he said. "It's hard to do as much as Erin has done. I hope people piggyback on her work."

Caroline Tracey wrote this article for High Country News.


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CORRECTION: Updated to reflect that the research data used came from Child Trends. (11/18/2022, 10 a.m. MST)

A new study found progress made to reduce child poverty over the past 25 years in the U.S. is at risk of stalling or being reversed.

Child poverty is on the rise after falling by 59-percent between 1993 and 2019, according to the group, Child Trends. Policy expert Avenel Joseph with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health philanthropy organization says pandemic-related enhancement of Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit programs as well as food stamps lifted 3 million children out of poverty during the latter half of 2021. But Congress let those programs expire.

"As a result, child poverty began to pick back up and is now increased by more than 40%," Joseph pointed out. "So, we have undone all of the progress that we saw as a result of the temporary policies that were put in place."

U.S. Census Bureau data showed a slight drop in child poverty in New Mexico amid the coronavirus pandemic, largely attributed to the temporary relief payments and tax policies.

This is National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, and Joseph said there is no separating the two.

"Both hunger and homelessness are closely linked to poverty," Joseph noted. "People with lower income have a harder time affording rent or purchasing healthy food, especially during a time when prices and interest rates are continuing to rise."

Without new or expanded programs, she believes the generational cycle of poverty will continue.

"We have showed them what it's like to have consistent meals, a place to lay their head, some stability," Joseph observed. "And then, just with sort of a strike of the time of midnight, all that has gone away."

Joseph added the report also found Black and Latino children are approximately three times as likely as white children to live in poverty.

"For some in this country, there are so many barriers that have been put in place that it's impossible for them to achieve their healthiest self or to achieve even a state of well-being, much less thriving," Joseph contended.


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The number of veterans experiencing homelessness nationwide has decreased 11% since 2020, and a similar improvement has been observed in Nebraska.

The Department of Veterans Affairs said there's been a 55% decrease in the number of homeless veterans since 2010, and the VA is within reach of meeting its goal of rehousing 38,000 veterans this year.

Kerry Miller Loos, mental health specialty programs director for the Nebraska-Western Iowa VA Health Care System, said hundreds of millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan funds were directed to the need, which helped tremendously, including preventing people from becoming homeless.

"So, perhaps they were behind in rent or behind on utilities, but then we were also able to house veterans, using that money for deposits, first month's rent, things like that," Miller Loos outlined. "To help get veterans into their housing faster."

The VA works with homelessness coalitions and landlord engagement groups throughout the state. Miller Loos noted there are some great landlords, but the lack of affordable housing is still a significant problem.

Miller Loos pointed out the VA's program, Supportive Services for Veteran Families, has funds to help low-income veterans and their families. The money is distributed to community action agencies which cover every county in Nebraska.

"So they are able to provide case management and other supportive services to prevent imminent loss of a veteran's home, or identify a more suitable housing situation," Miller Loos explained.

Veterans make up around 7% of the general population, but around 13% of the homeless population.

Miller Loos added one reason is many veterans of all ages suffer from chronic health conditions, making it hard for them to find and maintain employment at wages sufficient to afford stable housing.

"Very low-income people have to make decisions about paying for food, clothing, transportation and a place to live," Miller Loos emphasized. "And sometimes, they can't do all of those things."

She added all social-service agencies are trained to refer veterans to Supportive Services for Veteran Families or other programs appropriate for them. Any vet at risk of becoming homeless can also call the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans at 877-424-3838 to be connected with resources in their area.

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