Text of my comments to the City Council tonight
The Homeless Names Project, 1/28/2004
City Councilmembers and citizens of Santa Cruz… four years ago, the Homeless Persons Health Project began to keep a log of deaths among homeless people in Santa Cruz County. The resulting records are used in an annual community memorial service where each of the names of the dead are spoken (along with those other formerly homeless people who died in the preceding year). Their hope is that, by doing this, it will help the community remember who these people were, and assist them in their efforts to improve the health status of all those who are homeless in Santa Cruz County.
Today, we will be reading that list aloud to you during Oral Communications. Our goal in doing this, as activists and concerned citizens (not associated with the Homeless Persons Health Project), is similar: we hope this will help humanize the face of homelessness in this county, and raise public awareness of the issues surrounding it, including the impact of federal, state and local policy on the lives of homeless people.
Each person who steps up to the mike will read a portion of the list of 46 names (now 47, if you include the death of Bob Debolt, a longtime local community activist), along with their ages at death, and hold up a small sign so that the TV audience and viewers in chambers can see the names being read.
This activity is intended to be peaceful, non-violent, non-confrontational and respectful of those who have passed on. We thank the Mayor for arranging to have Oral Communications at a “time certain”, which makes this activity possible, and hope that this policy of holding Oral Communications at a fixed time, regardless of whether an evening session is held, continues, as we intend to return throughout the year to tell you more about those folks who have passed on, to update you on the progress of other Homeless Names Project activities, and to make respectful requests for policy changes that many in the community think will help lower the annual toll among unhoused folks in Santa Cruz County.
Before proceeding with the names, I’m going to read off some of the statistics gathered by the HPHP about the people who died last year; I want to emphasize two things:
a) this list is incomplete, it is very likely other deaths were not recorded
b) the causes of death are many and varied, and while homelessness is not in itself a fatal condition, it is certainly an aggravating factor
Regards,
Thomas Leavitt
[comments followed by partial reading of statistics from HPHP document]
[approximately twenty people participated in the reading of the names, along with several more attendees who stood in solidarity with us in the audience, after short notice and limited publicity; very satisfying. -Thomas]
