Inside Homelessness
Is Sacramento Dying?
When I heard about the hourlong documentary film “Seattle Is Dying,” I felt a certain dread. Listening to a radio interview about the film, I was struck by the bleakness of Seattle’s homeless situation. It took me a week to make time to watch the film. After viewing it, “bleak” wasn’t strong enough to describe the problem.
The film was produced by television station KOMO in Seattle. It was the third part of an informal series developed a few years earlier as the homeless situation grew worse in that city. The film opens with a bold statement: This is about an idea. For a city that has run out of them. What if Seattle is dying? Can it ever recover?
Share The Pain
It’s a clever maneuver to help solve a problem that has bedeviled Sacramento politicians for decades. Struggling to make good on a 2016 campaign promise to end the scourge of homelessness, Mayor Darrell Steinberg has widened the field and press-ganged the Sacramento City Council into action.
Heart of (Girl Scout) Gold
When Rio Americano High School senior Anna Chriss received the Girl Scout Gold Award this year for The Anna Chriss Homeless Care Package Project, it was not only an acknowledgment of a job well done in the eyes of the Girl Scouts of America—less than 5 percent of Girl Scouts receive the award—but also a celebration of years of hard work that started when Chriss was only 11 years old.
By Bike or Trike
Michael Saeltzer has done plenty of volunteer work in his time. He’s helped out at his kids’ school, and he founded East Sac Give Back, which raised money to rebuild the McKinley Park playground when it burned to the ground in 2012. But he didn’t feel satisfied.
“I wanted to go out there and do something more profound and intimate—to give back in a tangible, meaningful way that nourished me at the same time,” he says.
Helping the Forgotten
Marlene von Friederichs-Fitzwater was no stranger to the repercussions of a cancer diagnosis—nor to the feeling of isolation that comes along with it. But when she met Anna, a homeless woman who had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, she realized that the sense of isolation dug even more deeply into terminally ill people who had no home or family.