Activists wary of LR efforts for homeless
Food give-away questions lead to evictions, they say
An advocate for the homeless is cautioning service groups against sharing information with a Little Rock committee looking into best practices for mass feedings of homeless people.
The citizens committee wants to compile a list of all groups that feed the homeless, where and when those feedings take place, and how many people are served.
But Aaron Reddin with The Van fears city officials will use that information to target the homeless. The Van is a mobile outreach effort to assist unsheltered people with food, showers, moving and other services.
Reddin has long been upset with Little Rock officials’ treatment of the city’s homeless population.
Earlier this year, when the city ramped up efforts to evict people from known homeless camps that officials said were generating complaints from businesses and property owners, Reddin organized a protest on the City Hall steps. His efforts eventually led to the city changing its policy to give people more time to move from a camp. It also agreed to not post an eviction notice unless a property owner complained.
Earlier this month, City Manager Bruce Moore’s office proposed an ordinance to the city Board of Directors that would have created regulations making it substantially more difficult to feed groups of homeless people in city parks. Reddin’s organization organized another protest at City Hall where homeless people and advocates gave out food.
At the request of City Directors Kathy Webb and Dean Kumpuris, the board tabled Moore’s proposed ordinance in favor of a citizen committee to review best practices on such mass feedings from other cities. That committee met for the first time last week and is to make a recommendation to the board July 11.
At the committee’s first meeting, its members tasked themselves with compiling a comprehensive list of all organizations that feed the homeless in Little Rock.
Reddin is asking organizations not to cooperate.
“If you serve meals to people please do not offer up those locations to anyone,
especially if they are asking (unless they personally need a meal, of course). Please do not discuss these locations publicly or with anyone not directly involved with your work,” a post on The Van’s Facebook page says. “When the aggressors become familiar with the locations of homeless people, they will undoubtedly turn the heat up on those people.”
Reached for comment, Reddin said the post was directed toward the committee’s efforts but that he isn’t concerned with the individuals on the committee. He’s worried about what city departments will do with the information.
“We’ve seen it before when lists and locations were made on where people were. It was used to then come back and target them. With the amount of evictions and the city’s refusal to back off of camp evictions throughout the first part of this year, we are just trying to make sure they don’t get enough information to keep hounding people,” Reddin said. “It’s not the people on the committee. It’s about the list of locations getting into the hands of the people at City Hall who seem to be hell-bent on evicting every encampment and finding a way to restrict people’s access to food.”
Webb said Reddin is off
point.
“I think the city is going to use this to collaborate,” Webb said. “This is an issue where there’s not a one-sizefits-all [solution], but by collaborating you can do a better job of serving people. To say this would be used as a weapon, well [Reddin] has a right to his opinion, and I respect the work that he does, but I would strongly disagree.”
Webb has visited a group in Austin, Texas, that started and successfully runs a tiny-house community for formerly unsheltered people. Groups there have a website that lists every organization that will be serving food each day, where they will be and when.
Having the information centrally located helps the people who need food and keeps organizations from duplicating efforts. Webb said grant providers are looking for that type of collaboration between cities and nonprofits before donating funds to a project.
Jordan Johnson, a public relations consultant who was voted as chairman of the citizens committee looking into the feeding issue, said Reddin’s concerns are “completely unfounded, unwarranted and don’t have any merit.”
“Look, this committee came about out of concern over the city ordinance. We are supposed to be on the
same team and working toward the same goal. We are not trying to curtail feedings. We have to have an understanding of what groups feed and where to have a better scope,” Johnson said.
Reddin is co-chairman of the Arkansas Homeless Coalition. The coalition has two representatives on the citizens committee. One of them is the other co-chairman, Fred Ball. Ball did not return a message seeking comments on Reddin’s warning Thursday.
Sandra Wilson, founder and director of the Reach Out homeless advocacy group and a member of the Homeless Coalition, joined Reddin in his concern.
She said there’s reason to believe a list could be misused to hurt those in need, and she also took to Facebook to caution people about sharing information.
Look at past events, she said.
“We trusted and worked in partnership with police when we did the first homeless count. They went with us to the camps, then shared the locations with code enforcement to go back in and destroy the camps,” Wilson wrote.
“People in power will lie to reach their objective. They will use people you trust, who have the best intentions, to get the information they need,” she said in the post.