February 22, 2006

SHORT TAKES

PIPE’s Dream

Partners in Prevention Education, a coalition of Olympia homeless youth, students, and service professionals, is hoping that a recently produced documentary will shed some light on the plight of homeless young people living in our state’s capitol city.

Entitled Downtowners, the 50-minute documentary — created by a pair of student filmmakers from Evergreen State College, Jessica Eskelson and Nichole Ketcherside — is to be screened on Jan. 13 and 14. The duo worked for a year interviewing advocates and service providers, along with youth, who talked about what it means to be under 18 and living on the streets. PIPE program coordinator Rosalinda Noriega says that when people in the community view the film, she’s banking on an outcome. “We just want to create more legitimate spaces for youth to congregate,” says Noriega.

Legitimate youth spaces are of importance in Olympia, notes Noriega. With few places for young people to go, many homeless youth have taken to gathering at the Intercity Transit Center. But that didn’t go over so well with some neighboring business owners, some of whom, Noriega says, may have been unsettled by the growing youth presence. As a result, she says, music — classical, it seems — was blared from speakers to drive them away. That deeply affected homeless youth, she says, who have only one shelter, Haven House. Noriega says according to a One Night count conducted last year, 249 young people live on the streets. PIPE’s main focus, says Noriega, is working to raise awareness of connections between sexual violence and youth homelessness. While Downtowners doesn’t deal solely with sexual violence, it is one of the conditions discussed. Also addressed is the dearth of sufficient shelter. Safety issues are touched upon, as well as the causes that lead to young people leaving home. For many, she says, it amounts to violence—sexual, physical, and/or emotional.

Listening to young people tell their stories, Noriega believes, may very well accomplish another, difficult goal. “We’re hoping that the film can humanize the youth in the eyes of our community.”

Downtowners will be screened Jan. 13 at the Capitol Theater, 206 Fifth Ave., Olympia, at 7 p.m. The following day, the film will be shown at First Christian Church, 701 Franklin St. SE, Koinonia Hall, at 2:30 p.m. Open forums follow both showings.

— Rosette Royale

Safeguard

The federal government’s effort to gather personal information about homeless people got a mid-December tweaking in Congress.

A tiny section of a House-Senate conference bill prohibits publicly funded domestic violence shelters from sharing personal information about their clients with the federal government’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). The bill is now awaiting President Bush’s signature.

Under HMIS, agencies that serve the homeless enter the name, last permanent address, Social Security number, and phone number of every client into a computer database — which hasn’t been proven invulnerable to a hacker searching for his victim’s whereabouts, advocates for battered women say.

Lois Lujens of New Beginnings women’s shelter has not yet begun entering clients’ information into the local version of HMIS, dubbed Safe Harbors. In talks with HMIS staff, she says she has been trying to ensure the confidentially of clients whose lives may be endangered by a breach of privacy.

“ We’ve been trying to work with Safe Harbors to find a way to get the kind of protections that we think are critical.”

Lujens says the new privacy protection is a good thing. HMIS requirements violated protections mandated by the Department of Justice, she says: “On the federal level, the various agencies don’t seem to be in line with each other.”

Backed by the National Network to End Domestic Violence, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) pushed the new restriction into law. But the original bill was actually much more far-reaching. It would have flipped the data-gathering protocol, having all clients, whether or not they’d experienced abuse, provide “informed, reasonably time-limited, written consent” to share their personal information.

It also would have barred all agencies, not just abuse shelters, from gathering personal data on domestic violence victims. Because of the long wait for confidential, secure places to stay, victims of abuse often wind up in mainstream shelters — where even after the new law takes effect, staff will still be charged with gathering personal information.

— Adam Hyla