HomeMy WebLinkAbout030424 email - Important meeting - zoom link and new location @ QUUFALERT: BE CAUTIOUS This email originated outside the organization. Do not open attachments or click on links if you are not expecting them.
Hi, Ben Casserd and I, Julia Cochrane, are writing to you as the people who are running the Winter Welcoming Center.
With the restructuring of the administration of Olycap, we the community have an opportunity to have our churches, civic organizations, and community collaborate to ensure that Jefferson
County will have a shelter for the homeless. We must quickly work together to make sure that these geriatric and disabled people who are in the American Legion, the people who are tenting
in our forests and living in vehicles will have the possibility of an Emergency Shelter after March 31. It is our moral responsibility not to lose the progress we have made in the
last couple of decades.
At the Winter Welcoming Center, we are seeing an average of 25 people a day. Some sheltered, some not. Many live in vehicles, tents, and shacks. We see people who are brand new to the
streets, who have moved here from other places on the Olympic Peninsula to escape violence, and people who have lived houseless for years.
We, the Winter Welcoming Center, will work with the government, nonprofits, and the faith community, as well as the larger community of advocates, to make sure that starting April 1st
there will continue to be somewhere for people to go every day to get warm, dry, fed and be able to find clothing and other resources, as well as wifi, electricity, and most importantly
- community.
Olycap's lease for the shelter runs through June but they are out of funding. Kathy Morgan and Olycap are working on putting together a temporary shelter for about 16 people which may
be online by July. But that means 3 months without any shelter. We need to find the funding as a community to keep the shelter open until a shelter of similar or greater capacity is
available.
On March 6th, 2:30 - 4:15 PM at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship - 2333 San Juan Ave, Port Townsend there will be a meeting of the non-profit, faith, government, advocates,
and those with lived experience to decide how we respond as a compassionate community to the loss of our only emergency shelter.
You can join via in-person or online at:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/91098454388
Webinar ID: 910 9845 4388
Phone: 1-253-215-8782
Sincerely,
Ben Casserd and Julia Cochrane
PS This is an official meeting of the Housing Fund Board and the Community Conversations Committee and will follow the laws and protocol of an open public meeting.
Julia Cochrane
Julia Cochrane
willowtree@olypen.com
PO Box 1654
Port Townsend, WA 98368
(360) 821-1926 cell
http://tinyurl.com/4mtex2tx for donations to the Winter Welcoming Center
https://www.jeffersoninterfaithaction.org/wwc
Territories of the nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ (Klallam), & t͡ʃə́mqəm (Chemakum) peoples
“ In order for the oppressed to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting
situation which they can transform.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed