Greater Good is a publication produced out of UC Berkeley that addresses critical social themes in its quarterly publication from Family to Play and in the current issue: POWER
I wrote a piece on the physical effects of stress and powerlessness, I used contemporary psychological research and focused on Bayview Hunters Point as an example. Enjoy!

Volume IV, Issue 3: Winter 2007-08
Power Sickness
Feeling powerless harms our health, reports Eve Ekman. What can we do about it?

The Bayview Child Health Center is set back from Third Street, the chief thoroughfare in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. The street is lined with weathered pawn shops, check cashing outlets, small liquor and grocery stores, and bars. People in janitorial or business attire wait for public transportation to jobs downtown, while young men and women in baggy hip-hop gear hang out on the corners. Bayview-Hunters Point has the highest concentration of families in San Francisco, but the Bayview Child Health Center is one of only a handful of pediatric clinics in this neighborhood.
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San Francisco’s shaggy-haired, political super hero Matt Gonzalez has stepped from the shadows and onto the national stage. Presidential canidate Ralph Nader has announced that Gonzalez will be his running mate for the 2008 campaign! I’m not exactly sure why I’m so excited about the news, because I’m still pretty torn on the whole threes-a-crowd opinion regarding this very important election….
But i’m glad that Matt has decided to change out of his paint-splattered jeans and step back into the political ring—even if he STILL refuses to get a haircut. Another political milestone: this will be the first vice-presidential canidate who I was convinced had a serious missed-connections crush on me (He’d stare a bit too long as I rode my bike down Valencia). And Matt, the feeling’s mutual.

Last year 25,000 people joined the not-so-exclusive ranks of the federally incarcerated. A recent study, reported by the New York Times, finds that more than 1 in every 100 American adults is now in prison, the highest ratio ever reported. Meaning that those folks who couldn’t make it to your last high school reunion—chances are good a handful of them are in permanent detention (and these numbers don’t even include the 723,000 folks in local jails). Especially, no shocker, if you grew up in neighborhood with a high percentage of black and Hispanic residents. Based on Justice Department figures for 2006, one in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, one in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34. And while violent crime rates have fallen by 25 percent over the past 20 years, the growing prison population has significantly eaten away at states’ budgets, and also thrown non-violent offenders in with the hardened general prison population, inadvertently creating a very different type of educational system. There are currently 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. Anyway, sorry for all the numbers, but I’m a little burnt out on making ill-informed judgment calls on why and how our governments are royally screwing up, so I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide.

The Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius seems to embody the love-hate relationship we San Franciscians have with our fair city. Today he touched my heart (yet again) with his diatribe on the abundance of liquor stores in the tenderloin and the spineless “Act” that is meant to calm our riled hearts for the moment. Have a peek:

People sometimes complain that there is a liquor store on every block in San Francisco.
That’s just ridiculous.
There are many more than that - at least in some parts of town.
“San Francisco has the highest concentration of liquor stores in the state,” said Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval. “The state guidelines are for 1 liquor store for every 1,250 people, and we’re nearly 50 percent over that.”
And, you will not be surprised to hear, a huge concentration of the city’s 867 liquor stores is in the Tenderloin, which also happens to be ground zero for the worst alcohol-related problems in the community.
Are you starting to see a trend? Too many liquor stores in a neighborhood where chronic alcohol abuse is a long-standing problem? Isn’t there something that can be done?
The answer is yes and no. At today’s Board of Supervisor’s meeting, Sandoval will introduce what he is calling the “Alcohol Reduction and Safer Neighborhoods Act.” The ordinance would prohibit new liquor stores from opening within 500 feet of established liquor stores or schools, libraries or recreation areas.
Sound good?
Sure. And that’s the problem. (more…)

So here’s the thing: I have the passion to be an investigative journalist, but not the… I dunno… motivation. I so badly want to be the kind of girl that could go undercover or rough it in the trenches with the troops, but I honestly don’t think I have it in me. I picked up the San Francisco Bay Guardian in Oakland waiting for BART last week and was amazed at the front page story: a piece by Amanda Witherell about the City’s decrepit housing system for the homeless, the inefficiency of the system and her personal experience spending nearly a week in the shelters. The statistics are staggering, and the story is incredibly compelling — especially in a place where all of us encounter the huge homeless population on a daily basis. But what surprised me most was not the fact that SF’s shelter system is ineffective (duh) but that Amanda opted to get out of her office, skip the research-and-interview-only writing method favored by most lazy journalists and see what all the fuss was about. In addition, she documented her experience in an online journal you can read here. So cool! I feel like I couldn’t step into a shelter without someone questioning my motives, so I’m impressed that she pulled this off… The story is exactly the kind of thing we’re hoping you’ll find in Ethsix’s issue #3.

Photo courtesy of Kaleb(Froggy) via Flickr.

Last week I attended my first meeting with the Homeless Outreach Team. The building sits on the corner of Mission and 15th at Walden House. I used to live a block from there and never knew what this place was except that people took a lot of smoke breaks out on the sidewalk. The meeting blew my mind for a various reasons. One being that I was allowed in. I suspected theses selfless folks would smell my rotting apathy from miles away and dead bolt the door. Sitting in the meeting listening to the discussions I learned two things very quickly. Our city, despite my prior assumptions that we were giving out gold bars to lure homeless from around the country, has put these people near the bottom of their priorities list (top of the list: free WiFi!!). (more…)

As I’ve stated dozens of times (on countless grant proposals, for one) this magazine is half about the finished product and half about the process. And as a writer in the thick of researching my story, I am in the midst of some serious processing. Despite my being editor-in-chief of a non-profit magazine focusing on the social work community, and despite that I was raised by a social worker and a theologist (who met and fell in love working a library for the deaf-blind), I am far from the bleeding heart one might suspect. I have lived my time in San Francisco between the Mission and the Tenderloin, sidestepping human feces and getting a daily tutorial in the buying, selling and utilizing of crack, stolen goods and sexual services. This has seriously affected my empathies and my opinions. Let me get this out in the open right away: I call the cops on folks sleeping in my doorway and I never give spare change. So when I decided that for my next story I would embed myself with San Francisco’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT), I knew it would provide some serious food for thought. My blog for the next few weeks will follow my train of honest-as-possible thoughts and experiences working along members of HOT and getting to know some of their clients. Because I envision my final story for the magazine as a more journalistic piece, I feel this is the perfect place to air the process. And isn’t the internet supposed to be slightly offensive? Next time: My First Time—Outreach in My Own Front Yard (or Expanse of Concrete).

Town hall meeting at Southern Exposure Gallery

A relatively un-rainy, yet bone chilling, Wednesday evening this week Southern Exposure hosted a trickling crowd of mission denizens to discuss a store front sized western wall on 1240 Valencia between past 23rd. This wall as pictured below, has been the home to a decade of wheat pastings ranging from political and social commentary to advertisements for San Francisco underground music and arts. The quality spans the spectrum from hand scrawled nonsense to archival posters from the mission print shop and local artist hand crafted originals. A ten year archive has been put online titled : de- appropriation projects.

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As I was waiting eagerly for the bus that would take me to Foreign Cinema last night for an amazing meal of seared sea scallops (thanks http://www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com/dineabouttown/!), I stumbled across the flier to the left. StreetWorthy, it seems, is a new ‘zine and art collective by “young, struggling and exhausted” artists and writers and other creative folks who are tired of getting submissions rejected… gee, sounds familiar *wink wink*. It’s rough to get a ‘zine off the ground, so I wish them the best of luck. I’ll be in attendance on the 2nd because really, I can always use an excuse for pints and fish ‘n’ chips at Edinburgh Castle.

The launch of “EL LIBRO DE LA SOMBRA O RECORTES DE LA MEMORIA” at the San Francisco Public library was an epicurean feast of images, words and music. The event, held entirely in Spanish, celebrated the publication of an epic labor of love between the essential artist Franz Fischer and distinguished wordsmith and educator Jose Antonio Galloso. Over the course of one year the two blended words and images with the slow discipline and pleasure of classic collage, cutting and pasting each work and image page by page. Fischer, from Chile, and Galloso of Peru undertook this cross-cultural artistic project with profound intention. Galloso elegantly explained the context and content of this publication in-between the debut performances of “del group experimental “PACHAR KACHAS” as self described latinoamericana, jazz, dub-reggae, funk fusion.

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