Author Archives: Rachel Gross
A year after fire, Berkeley animal shelter lands on its feet
Against the back wall of the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society’s adoption room is a maze of cages, containing one lone cat. Magdalene, as she is called, is a black feline with patches of tan. She lies curled on a towel. When approached, she promptly rolls onto her back and paws the air, revealing a white underbelly.
Magdalene was found by a woman and brought to Berkeley Animal Services, the city’s animal shelter, two weeks ago, according to Valerie Mizuhara, the Humane Society’s Shelter Manager. At the time, the cat was extremely pregnant. Now, two faint blue lines on her stomach attest to the spay and surgery the Humane Society gave her to prevent “just one more unwanted litter,” from entering the world.
Magdalene sits up and emits a guttural purr. She is behaving so affectionately, Mizuhara says, because of residual pregnancy hormones in her system.
That Magdalene is the only cat in the room is a telling sign. It has been almost one year since a fire ravaged the nonprofit East Bay Humane Society nonprofit on May 20, 2010, killing 15 cats and wreaking $1.5 million worth of damage on the building. Most of the facilities remain condemned by the city, and the room that housed the cats is sealed with plastic and still smells eerily of smoke.
Since the fire, the shelter has spent $200,000 on rent and construction, according to interim Director Stephanie Erickson. It will be at least two years and potentially millions of dollars before the fire-damaged areas are completely rebuilt. … Continue reading »
Death of UC student prompts friends to fight for change
Last Friday, UC Berkeley junior Jasmine Jahanshahi, who had been studying in France, died in a tragic fire in Paris that spread to her room in through the Labyrinth Estate apartments in the Menilmontant neighborhood in the 20th arrondissement. She was 20. Her friend and fellow exchange student, Louise Brown, also perished. Rachel Gross, a Cal senior and frequent Berkeleyside contributor, remembers Jahanshahi and joins her friends in calling for Parisian authorities to make changes.
Weaning off the bottle: UC Berkeley tests the waters
Being a college student means starting to make tough decisions. But here’s one you might not expect: bottled water or tap?
Students at UC Berkeley are poised to vote next week on whether they want to be sold plastic water bottles on their own campus. On the April 5-7 student election ballot, they can check off an initiative to support phasing out the sale of bottled water and improving access to public water, including campus drinking fountains.
UC Berkeley would join an eco-trend that has swept colleges nationwide. Washington University and the University of Seattle jumped on the bandwagon last fall and the University of Portland was the first West Coast campus to start a ban in 2010. And it’s not just universities: in 2007, former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom prohibited all city departments from purchasing bottled water.
Student leaders of the movement say it’s a way for them to take charge over their consumption of a wasteful product. By reducing plastic waste on campus, a bottle ban would help the campus reach its goal of trimming waste by 75% by 2012, says UC Berkeley senior Rose Whitson, who is spearheading the effort with student senator Elliot Goldstein. … Continue reading »
UC students to see fees — and aid — increase
Wednesday may have been the more eventful day of the University of California’s Board of Regents Meeting — marked by several hundred student protesters, arrests and pepper-spraying by police — but the meat of the meeting’s decisions came on Thursday.
The Regents, meeting at UC’s Mission Bay campus in San Francisco, increased student fees for the fourth time in three years. On UC President Mark Yudof’s recommendation, the Regents raised student fees 8%. Starting next fall, students will pay $11,124 … Continue reading »
After 40 years, Berkeley homeless group looks ahead
Margaret, a 52-year-old Bay Area native and a current resident of the North County Women’s Shelter in Berkeley, says she’s “new to being homeless.”
After divorcing an abusive husband, she has spent the past two years without a permanent home, sleeping at motels, on friends’ couches, in her car, on benches, and now, at the women’s shelter. But it’s a situation she would like to think of as temporary.
Margaret counts herself lucky. The shelter, part of the Berkeley Food and Housing Project, has enough beds to accommodate 32 women, but has more than a hundred on its waiting list. She can stay there for one month while she works with a consultant to secure more permanent housing.
“I’m grateful to have this little bit of heaven,” she said.
Though she has previously stayed in another homeless shelter in San Leandro while employed as a U.S. census worker, Margaret said the Berkeley location was the first to show her individual attention, “mutual respect, and mutual vulnerability.”
They’ve also coordinated visits with a doctor to help her monitor her high blood pressure. In fact, Margaret says she’s noticed a dramatic improvement in her health, though she credits it to the three meals a day — including fresh fruit and vegetables — that the shelter provides.
Homeward Bound
The Berkeley Food and Housing Project is the largest homeless care provider in the East Bay, and includes the women’s shelter, a men’s shelter, a low-income housing residence on Russell Street and a daily meals program operating out of Trinity Church on Bancroft Way. Though one of its aims is to address its clients’ immediate needs for food and shelter, the main goal is to find them permanent homes, said the project’s associate director, Geoffrey Green.
“Everyone who walks in this door, we’re going to ask them, ‘How can we help you get off the streets and into a house?’” he said.
Over the past three years, the project has helped more than 500 individuals like Margaret transition to permanent housing, including the 21 who live at the Russell Street residence — more than any other program in the county. Of course, it still has a long way to go.
“We’re pretty pleased with ourselves, but it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of thing,” Green said.
The city has supported Berkeley Food and Housing’s mission both financially and philosophically almost since its inception, according to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates. For 2009-10, the city selected the program to distribute an $850,000 federal grant for rapid re-housing.
Thanks to the grant, when Margaret secures housing, the project will cover her first security deposit and one month’s rent. A consultant will also help her search for employment and create a monthly budget so she can live stably without having to return to the shelter — or worse, the streets.
“I don’t want to let them down. I don’t,” she said.
Unlikely Origins
The program got its start serving a very different population — in true Berkeley fashion.
During the first “Summer of Love” in 1969, the First Baptist Church of Berkeley started offering up impromptu meals out of its basement to traveling youths drawn to the Telegraph Avenue scene and the growing Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. The program was solidified when the University Lutheran Chapel joined the effort the following year.
Dale Edmunson, a nearby pastor in Pleasant Hill who later came to the First Baptist Church, said the first meals program was an immediate reaction to the wave of hungry new Berkeley dwellers.
“Neither was thinking of this as the beginning of anything permanent,” he said. “It was just responding to a need.”
Dr. Edmunson led the church from 1979 to 1990. By 1979, the clientele had changed into largely what it is now — older, often chronically homeless, many with a history of mental illness. The program began serving its signature ”Quarter Meal,” charging 25 cents for a hot meal to those who could afford it.
In 1990, Dr. Edmunson left to preach in Minneapolis. By the time he returned to the Bay and the Berkeley Food and Housing Project in 1999, the program had shifted its focus from meals to housing, and in 2002, it acquired the Russell Street residence.
“It had gone from a band-aid, addressing the symptoms of homelessness — namely seeing that people were fed — to addressing the basic issues which had caused this need,” Dr. Edmunson, now retired, said.
Changing Times
The program celebrates its 40th anniversary this year (ABC7 News aired a shout-out last month). But with their success come new challenges.
Out of its $3 million annual budget, the project’s largest funding source is the city of Berkeley, which contributes about $800,000 according to Green. But their city funding was reduced by 3 per cent — part of an across-the-board cut – in the 2010 budget. … Continue reading »
Riding for a dream
25-year-old Thien “Lolly” Tran, an undocumented Vietnamese student who goes to community college in Santa Ana, isn’t a big biker. He doesn’t even own one.
But that won’t stop him from biking more than 500 miles from UC Berkeley to UCLA over the next nine days as part of a student demonstration for immigrant rights, called the “Tour de Dream.” He’s one of 26 students participating in the event, meant to raise awareness and support for the federal Dream Act, a contentious bill currently … Continue reading »
Follow-up: State Dept limits DNA testing at Cal
UC Berkeley will go ahead with its controversial DNA testing program for freshmen, but with one key change: students won’t receive personal analyses of the three genes being tested. Instead, professors will lecture on the politics of personalized medicine and the results of the data as a whole.
The change was necessitated by a California Department of Health decision today mandating that the testing be done only in specific state-certified laboratories. But it’s too late in the game for … Continue reading »
UC Berkeley DNA testing goes before state committee
Before they could start to test students’ DNA, leaders of UC Berkeley’s “On the Same Page: Bring Your Genes to Cal” program were put to the test at a legislative hearing in Sacramento on Tuesday.
The program asks for voluntary DNA samples from incoming freshmen, which will then be analyzed as part of an orientation program meant to unite students under a shared academic experience. But the plan has been polarizing from the outset, drawing fire from bioethicists and watchdog groups. Controversy surrounding the program … Continue reading »
Newsweek jumps on Twain bandwagon
America’s irreverent literary sweetheart Mark Twain graced the cover of Newsweek magazine Monday, adding to a flurry of press hype surrounding the publication of his uncensored autobiography this fall.
The Newsweek article, which includes a never-before-published excerpt, is not the first to add to the anticipation of the release. Last month, The New York Times ran an article on Twain’s political pointedness in the manuscript, while the London newspaper The Independent published a steamy piece in June (We wrote about it in May).
The … Continue reading »
Romers to roam no longer: professors return to Cal
After guiding the president for two years as his chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer will once again be guiding students as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Romer announced last Thursday that she would be stepping down from the post on Sept. 3 to return to California, where her son is starting high school. Her husband, David Romer, will also be returning as a professor in the economics department after working in Washington, D.C. with … Continue reading »
