Mary’s Place hosts in-shelter vet clinic

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Articles by Mason Bryan

Alexes Harris was the keynote speaker at 2015's Real Change annual breakfast fundraiser.

Flesh Wounds

By Mason Bryan | August 24, 2016

Alexes Harris' 'A Pound of Flesh' explores the damaging practice of legal financial obligations

In August of 2014, while unrest gripped Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of Michael Brown’s death by local police, University of Washington sociologist Alexes Harris was writing her new book. When a Department of Justice investigation discovered racial disparities in Ferguson’s law enforcement practices and concluded that those practices were “shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” it shed a national spotlight on a disturbing pattern of extractive and exploitative policing in the midwestern American city. ...

MAPS clinic in Redmond. Photo by Andrew Waits.

Breadth of community and scope of ambition

By Mason Bryan | August 4, 2016

23-year-old Nehath Sheriff’s passion for helping the marginalized inspires her to open a health clinic at the Muslim Association of Puget Sound in Redmond

The region’s homelessness crisis no doubt evokes sympathy. But for Nehath Sheriff, a young humanitarian and leader in the Muslim community, the despair in our midst inspired a different reaction, a more useful one. Marshaling resources from her different worlds — her family, faith and intellectual passions — Sheriff has set in motion the first mosque-based community health clinic in Washington state, a nonprofit that provides free or subsidized care to people lacking access to basic health services. ...

SHA to link housing to education at Bailey Gatzert Elementary

By Mason Bryan | August 3, 2016

Bailey Gatzert Elementary School, nestled on 12th Avenue, between Yesler Way and Jackson Street, is a diverse school where most of its students depend on free and reduced-price lunch. Market rate housing in the school’s surrounding neighborhoods is beyond reach for many of its families, just one other reason it’s been difficult keeping Gatzert’s little ones in the classroom. ...

Students and homeless advocates tour the UW campus in October 2015 before the site was chosen.

University of Washington preps classes on homlessness, curriculum for Tent City 3 stay

By Mason Bryan | July 27, 2016

Come winter, the ever-rotating homeless community known as Tent City 3 (TC3), a unique shelter concept and a rare roof in the city’s desolate landscape of affordable housing, will pack up shop and head to the University of Washington. The move will usher in an unlikely convergence of cultures: an august public institution committed to higher learning meets TC3, a democratically governed homeless encampment meant to ensure the safety and relative comfort of 90 to 100 people to whom society has dealt a difficult blow. ...

Mackenzie, a new resident at Phoenix Rising

Out of the ashes

By Mason Bryan | July 6, 2016

Phoenix Rising offers housing and wrap-around services to teens and young adults in Auburn

It has been a short life, but already too many demons have knocked on Mackenzie’s door. When she was 5 years old, a police officer entered her Puyallup home to confront her mom, who was high. The pounding is what she remembers most.

“Loud noises for kids, it’s fucking scary,” Mackenzie said, “Next thing I know, I’m being ripped from my mother.” ...