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Upcoming Studio Times:
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Sunday, April 12th,1-4 pm
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Thursday, April 16th, 12:30-3 pm
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Sunday, April 26th, 1-4 pm
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Thursday, April 30th, 12:30-3 pm
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Join us most Thursday afternoons from 12:30-3 pm, and 2nd and 4th Sundays from 1-4 pm for studio time. Come with your creative project, ideas, or just come to play. There is no fee for studio time. 730 29th St. in Oakland. When you arrive, call 510-593-4221 to be let in. RSVP and questions to kim@braidedbridge.org.
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Exceptions: There is no workshop on Thursday April 23rd. Stay tuned for an update about adjusting May's schedule around Mother's Day.
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Members Happenings
Dee is being honored by the National Lawyers Guild and SF Bar Association Gala at their Annual Testimonial Dinner Gala with keynote speaker Mahmoud Khalil. We're so proud of you Dee!
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Michelle & Luz showed their book arts work at the International Biennial Codex Book Fair & Symposium held here in Oakland in February. Michelle's ghostly watermark work falls within Braided Bridge attention to justice. It addresses the extinction of birds once drawn by James Audubon, whose belief in dominance was antithetical to conservation. Watch for a future article showcasing this work.
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Jared moved into permanent housing after years of living unhoused and we joined him for his housewarming party! Jared once lived at Wood St. and tried hard to do his part to keep the community together there, even being arrested for laying on the ground, blocking a police car during a sweep. While the Wood St. community remains connected, the loss of their shared living space, along with the later loss of his cat who was a support kitten for the community during the eviction, remain deeply painful. It's little known in the general public that the transition of moving back into housing is often very difficult. While we celebrate this move, it doesn't mean the challenges are done.
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Kim was invited to join the Special Projects Committee of Alameda County St. Vincent de Paul, which advises on the shelter program, among others. She began serving on the Board of Trustees in October. She is bringing the knowledge of working beside and learning from people with lived experiences of homelessness, and looking for ways that lived experience voices can directly inform leaders at SVdP.
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Thank you to all who join us for the Winter Tea in February!
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Would You Like to Help with Outreach?
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If you would like to help with outreach to unhoused people and communties in Alameda county, we can connect you with many opportunities fitting into different schedules. Some of our members go out on Sundays at 1 pm to camps in San Leandro, Castro Valley and Hayward. Some go out on Tuesdays in West Oakland. We can also connect you with the Wood Street Outreach which is on Sundays from 1-4 at various sites in Oakland. If you like to cook, food, including prepared meals to share, is needed for all of these. Come out and join us!
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On Tuesday, two Bishop O'Dowd High School students made burritos and sandwiches and joined us for water distribution in West Oakland. One of them took this picture.
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Mandela House, HCEB Closures &
Encampment Management Policy
This week Kim joined a press conference as a supporter for the nearly 100 people scheduled to be evicted from transitional housing at Mandela House at the end of this month. This is the third site run by Housing Consortium of the East Bay (HCEB) that is being closed in a month. A safe parking RV lot and a tiny home site have already been closed, the people living there threatened with arrest if they try to stay. At the same time the City Council is once again bringing up the prospect of confiscating RVs and vehicles in which people are living, without even the guise of offering an alternative place to live. I've known of situations where people lost access to their cancer treatment, and where children were left to sleep on sidewalks due to volatility of sweeps and confiscation of vehicles. People may not realize that most shelters will not accept anyone under 18, so an unhoused family who loses their vehicle is really stranded. Someone in an RV who is not under threat of being towed is able to work if they can, but it's not possible when destabilized. Someone with a disability who is living in an RV may be receiving too little in SSI payments to be able to afford rent. Taking the vehicle means we leave a person with a disability in a threatening and unstable situation. The cruelty astounds. It is on par or worse than the cruelty reported at ICE detention centers. Yet many Oakland citizens are supporting the policy.
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It has been published in the Journal of American Medicine among other places that such harsh policies cause increased deaths. In the case of the Mandela House, people were moved there from three unhoused communities that were closed by the City. During these evictions, at least one person was found dead as his vehicle was being towed with him inside. For the people who received placements at Mandela House (a number of people were turned away, even though some rooms were reported to never have been filled) the refrigerators, stoves, and microwaves were removed from the rooms by the staff. No one could cook anything themselves. They were provided with very little food, and one microwave in the lobby was shared by all the residents. Residents were contractually supposed to receive housing navigation and other supports, but the only person placed into housing is about to lose it because their landlord was supposed to receive money from the program but didn't. Multiple people died in Mandela House over the course of the year.
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Some who aren't knowledgeable of the experiences unhoused people face, are tempted to say that this just shows that putting money into helping the unhoused isn't working, and instead things like the Encampment Management Policy should be embraced. This couldn't be further from the solution. In certain cases, in certain programs that have received large sums, there is wide speculation that the money has not gone to helping the unhoused. Just recently has attention at the County level been put on learning the grievances of people trying to navigate these systems. Up to this point, when allegations of abuse happened, whether verbal, physical, sexual, or fraud, it had to be reported to the agency, which often protected the staff. In this way abuse was being reported to the abuser. This constituted an "acceptable grievance policy." Frequently, unhoused people are treated as criminals or children. They are not believed. Had they been heard, and their claims investigated, the bad actors would have been rooted out earlier. And that's the opportunity we have now. Not to defund help and take steps that drive people in poverty into further chaos until their bodies are ashes. But rather to offer assistance with accountability and care, working together in mutual relationships of respect. Those offering help must love the people they serve, and that love brings justice.
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Poster Printing at the Studio
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Tena used plates on hand at the studio to print posters for her first time using the letterpress.
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A week later, Joel did the same, and had a chance to combine plates from past studio projects with wood type.
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The next day, Kim made an additional poster using past plates and wood type.
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The Mechanism of Abuse:
How the Systems Exploit Resilience
This is the testimony of Money Starr-DeLuca who writes about his personal experience.
When a person survives prolonged, systemic neglect — when they continue to function, to advocate, to write emails, to seek help despite repeated failure — the system interprets that survival not as evidence of extraordinary effort, but as proof that the person does not need support.
The reasoning is circular and insidious:
If you are still alive, you cannot be in crisis.· If you can still write an email, you cannot be drowning.· If you can still name the pattern, you cannot be a victim of it.
Your clarity is used against you. Your articulation becomes grounds for denial. Your ability to describe your own suffering is treated as evidence that the suffering is not real, or not severe, or not worthy of intervention.
This is not incompetence. It is a functional feature of systems designed to ration care by disqualifying those who most need it — but who have not yet collapsed into the kind of visible, undeniable crisis that triggers mandatory intervention.
The message, whether stated or implied, is:
"You are too aware to be helped. You are too coherent to be in need. You are still standing, so we will not catch you when you fall."
This is a form of psychological violence. It punishes resilience. It trains disabled and vulnerable people to perform worse, to appear more broken, to hide their clarity in order to receive care.
And when the person finally does collapse — when the emails stop, when the articulation fails, when survival gives way to crisis — the system points to the collapse as evidence that the person was always too far gone.
You cannot win. You can only outlast. And that is not a strategy. That is a sentence.
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Active Love: The Foundation of Justice
Harm Damages Relationships
Whether criminal, civil, or social, harm damages or destroys the ability to be in open, safe, or productive relationships with others. This concept can be applied at an individual level, to social groups, and on a macro level to nations and the largest conflicts in our world.
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On an individual level, an injured person’s pain and disability change their role and relationships in the home, workplace and community. On a larger scale, a group targeted by hate is cut off from a relationship of dignity and respect with others in the society. Economic injustice causes refugees to separate from their homelands, and move to a new place or culture where they may live in tension with their new neighbors and have to build all new relationships.
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Worldwide Prayer for Peace
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Pope Leo has called for a worldwide prayer for peace, Saturday April 11th at 9 am Pacific Time. What if even people who are not Catholic pray in their own way, in accordance with their faith, at the same time for peace? How powerful would it be if millions upon millions joined in prayer for peace? For those who wish to follow along with the Vatican vigil, it can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/live/03pYP2Nmreo
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Studio Use
Extended studio time is available. Reply to this email to make arrangements with Kim.
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Joining and Supporting
Join us in this work! We are a 501c3 organization. We welcome donations and we welcome YOU into closer involvement with our community. This month, donations have been used for:
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- Assisting a newly housed person with groceries.
- Providing a car seat, stroller, and other newborn essentials for an unhoused new mom so she can leave the hospital. (She and the baby are receiving other support through other agencies, and she has a loving, committed case manager.)
- Food for distribution to local unhoused communities.
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To those who have contributed, please receive our deep gratitude. Thank you for being here.
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