It is important that the Public knows that those celebrating the opening of the 21c Boutique Hotel are also celebrating the forced removal of 208 people from their homes- young people, old people, black people, white people, men, women, veterans, people with disabilities, conservatives, liberals, etc. All of these people were displaced.  The celebrations today celebrates discrimination- the belief that only certain people with lots of money should live in the Central Business District and that if we forcibly remove everyone with low-incomes, the downtown will thrive.  This is not only a wrong belief, it is immoral and hateful.

We should not praise discrimination, bullying or disrespect.  We should not praise public and private dollars going into the forced removal of People. We should not praise the economic cleansing of our Central Business District.  Can you imagine a company buying your homes and over 200 homes around you and then telling you and all of your neighbors you must leave, because they want to bring people with more money in?

We must remember that this is the same fight the Women of the Anna Louise Inn are involved in.  western and southern would like to own the Anna Louise Inn in order to remove all of the Women and open new condos or a luxury hotel.  western and southern, like 3cdc did with Metropole, is working to displace People with low-incomes from the Central Business District.

By Mimi Rook

Mary Julia (Julie) Hanser moved to Cincinnati in 1993 and in her 10 years of life in the city, she built Mercy Healthcare into a profitable, regional healthcare system. More importantly, she was also a compassionate individual who, according to her brother, Father Forest Patrick, “…was dedicated to the service of the poor.” In her obituary, he is quoted as saying, “She was quite concerned for individuals who were poor and without health insurance and women, battered women.”

Before her death in 2003, she impacted her adopted community in many ways. In that short decade, she served as a campaign leader for the United Way, on the cabinet for the Fine Arts Fund, as a president of the Great Rivers Girl Scout Council, on the board of trustees at the Work Resource Center and as an active member of the greater Cincinnati Health Council Board. She received a YMCA Character Award for demonstrating positive character values and she was also honored by Leading Women, a consortium of more than 40 Cincinnati Women’s organizations, for her contributions to healthcare. She also worked with another group here in Cincinnati, Healing Connections. It was from this work that perhaps her best, most lasting legacy sprang — a garden on Stanton Avenue in Walnut Hills, named after her in 2006 to honor her memory.

The garden started its early life in 2000, known as the “SEEDS” children’s garden, started by the Morning Star Baptist Church, which still owns the property. For two years, the children from the Morning Star Daycare grew vegetables and flowers in the raised beds of the garden, but the project was abandoned in 2002 as was the garden until 2006. That year, Healing Connections, now merged with two other local organizations into Mercy Neighborhood Ministries, approached the Civic Garden Center for help in restoring and using the former SEEDS garden, for the purpose of growing fresh vegetables for seniors on limited incomes and/or homebound by physical infirmities. The goal was to promote healthy eating and healthy behaviors for residents in Walnut Hills. The garden at 2627 Stanton Avenue began its new life and mission, summarized by Sue Plummer, its present coordinator, as a “garden designed for people who cannot garden themselves.”

Kathy Durkee, Program Director, Senior Services, coordinates assistance for Walnut Hill’s seniors living on limited budgets, which also means limited access to fresh food. From April to October, she says the seniors look forward to the inclusion of freshly grown food from the Hanser garden, picked and packed into 1 gallon bags along with the canned and frozen food provided to them by the Freestore Foodbank. Sometimes it is also a learning experience when they receive vegetables they have never seen before.

When that happens, citing this year’s addition of saucer shaped pattypan squash, she tries to tuck a recipe into the bag so that the seniors can try cooking the unfamiliar vegetable. The garden provides enough weekly fresh produce during the growing season for about 100 seniors. About 25 of the bags are delivered directly to homebound seniors, while the remainders are picked up as seniors stop by for their weekly supplement of groceries.

Besides the garden, Sue Plummer’s main job at Mercy Neighborhood Ministries is as an evening GED instructor helping local residents complete the schooling necessary to continue their education, leading to better jobs with better pay. Everything that MNM does for the residents of Walnut Hills is about bettering their lives and the garden plays a subtle part in this effort.

Not only does it serve to feed neighborhood residents, the Hanser garden also is a creative outlet for those involved in its care and upkeep. While the garden’s main purpose is growing fresh, healthy food, Plummer also sees the Hanser garden as a vehicle for fostering community relations, both socially and visually. When she comes to work in the garden on the weekends she likes to concentrate on the flower beds up front. She strives to create a place where residents walking or driving by will see flowers and color.

It was the flower beds that first drew the eye of Jocelyn Coulter. A friend of Plummer’s since their time as Americorps workers, she first noticed the garden as she passed by it from her nearby home going to work. Her first response she says, was, “What’s that?” as she noticed the colorful flowers, Coulter began work at the Hanser garden as a volunteer, before taking over this year as a paid worker overseeing its weekly upkeep. She made efforts to expand her garden knowledge through attending the Community Garden Development Training at the nearby Civic Garden Center. Coulter also uses the garden as a volunteer opportunity for members of Starfire, a local organization encouraging positive community activities between people with disabilities and those without. Starfire volunteers join Coulter weekly in the garden during the growing season.

Coulter recently completed a master’s degree in environmental education, reflecting her love for nature and sharing that love with others at her other jobs — an event coordinator at the Cincinnati Zoo and also in her weekly afternoon employment at Seven Hills/ Doherty School where she works with younger children as an afternoon extended care coordinator. She says she uses her time outside in the Hanser garden to balance out her indoor responsibilities at her other jobs.

She loves both the garden and the residents who live around it, mentioning in particular, Solomon, who bought one of the properties flanking one side of the garden back in 2009. A little over two years ago, he allowed the Hanser gardeners to begin harvesting rainwater from his roof using rain barrels on two sides of his property. Solomon says that the gardeners are the only people his dog, a very protective Akita, will allow to enter his yard as they access the water from the rain barrels. He is also pleased with the social benefits of the garden, particularly the relationships that he sees developing between the young children of an upstairs tenant, whom he considers as his “2nd grandchildren” and the gardeners. He likes the special bond Coulter has developed with the children. They look forward to their time in the garden, especially with Coulter, and as a result, they too, have begun to take a proprietary interest in the garden. Solomon observed that the 6 year old enjoys working in the garden and picking the fresh produce with Jocelyn, but, chuckled as he said, “not so much eating it:”

Perry Patton, the Hanser garden neighbor on the other side freely provides water for the garden when the rain barrels run dry. While the gardeners have offered money for the water received from both homes, Plummer says the only payment that either Patton or Solomon has accepted is the offerings of fresh picked greens and vegetables, which Coulter and Plummer leave tucked in their mailboxes. Both neighbors also keep a close and protective eye on the garden after its caretakers depart.

This month the Hanser garden is being put to rest for the winter. Mercy Neighborhood Ministries is always looking for volunteers to help with their services and the garden is no exception. Coulter encourages anyone interested in volunteering help with the Hanser garden to call Sue Plummer at 513-487-6192.

By Dan La Botz

Dr. Herbert Shapiro, a Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, died earlier this month. Shapiro, the author of ten books and more than fifty academic articles, was an important scholar in the area of African American history.

Professor Shapiro was also a civil rights activist, a founder of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at the University of Cincinnati, and an anti-Vietnam War activist who was arrested for his role in a protest in the late 1960s. He is survived by his wife Judith Shapiro, son Mark and daughter Nina. Shapiro (Dominic Gates),

At the memorial service held at the faculty club on campus on October 28, his long time friend, fellow activist and colleague Martha Stephens, a retired English professor commented, “Herb’s death seems like the end of an era.” In many ways that is true.

A Son of Immigrants

Shapiro, born June 14, 1929, was the son of Jewish parents who like so many others at the time who faced anti-Semitic persecution in the Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia. They left their village in Byelorussia (White Russia) to migrate to the United States. They settled in the New York area where they became part of the Jewish working class and became involved with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Herb Shapiro attended the City College of New York (CCNY), the virtually free university that made it possible for many from the city’s immigrant working class children to get a higher education.

Like many other Jews, who had themselves suffered pogroms in Russia and faced discrimination in the United States, Shapiro was sensitive to issues of social justice and sympathetic to the plight of African Americans and their struggle against racism. It was only natural that he should gravitate toward the left. At CCNY left politics had thrived since the 1930s: Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, and anarchists activists could be found among the faculty and students and political discussion thrived on campus. After earning his bachelor’s degree at CCNY’s Queens College, his master’s from Columbia University he took his doctorate in history from the University of Rochester.

A Scholar on the Left

Shapiro who had become part of the milieu of the Communist Party fell under the influence of one of the country’s leading Communist Party intellectuals and African American historians. Herbert Aptheker, the author of American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a book that represented a turning point in the study of African American history in the United States, became Shapiro’s mentor, colleague, comrade and friend. (Many years later Shapiro would edit a Festschrift for his mentor entitled African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker which was published as a special double issue of Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, Jan. and April, 1997 and is available online at: http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/ApthekerFestschrift.pdf). Aptheker supported the Soviet Union from the 1930s until its fall in 1991, apologizing for the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian workers’ revolution and the Soviet smashing of the Czechoslovakian democratic Spring of 1968. Throughout the McCarthy era from the early 1950s until the late 1960s, Aptheker was persona non grata with the U.S. government and most academic institutions, though at the same time the U.S. government and sometimes U.S. colleges and universities welcomed as professors or trained anti-democratic academics from countries in the U.S.

Having come of age during the McCarthy period, and having seen the price paid by his mentor Aptheker, Herb never talked about the Communist Party or its politics in public, though to anyone who listened carefully his allegiances and views were quite clear.

After marrying Judy, Herb and his new wife moved in 1962 to Atlanta, where he began his teaching career at More­house College, an all-male African-American school where Martin Luther King Jr. had studied. During the time they lived there, the couple took part in sit-ins, rallies and marches against segregation, sometimes with KKK members on the other side of the street. In 1966 he came to teach at the University of Cincinnati where he became the first professor of African American history and wrote his book White Violence and Black Response.  (http://www.amazon.com/White-Violence-Reponse-Herbert-Shapiro/dp/0870235788/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1351554151&sr=1-1&keywords=white+violence+and+black+response) He also helped to found the African American Studies Program. Hardly had he arrived at the University of Cincinnati, then he threw himself into the campaign to organize the AAUP chapter, later serving as the union president.

A Personal Recollection

When, at the age of 45, I entered the graduate program of the University of Cincinnati in the early 1990s, I took courses in African American history from Professor Shapiro. Already somewhat familiar with black history, his courses helped me put my earlier reading and the reading we did in his class into a broader context. I also occasionally walked labor union picket lines with Herb and his friend Dr. David Sterling, showing our solidarity with one or another group of striking workers. By the time we met in the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed, so differences over the nature of the Communist state never came up. Over the 25 years that I have lived here in Cincinnati, I frequently found myself, so to speak, on same side of the barricades on many issues.

I liked Herb.Yet, we did not share the same political point of view. I am a democratic socialist and had been throughout my adult life an opponent of both capitalism and bureaucratic Communism. As a believer in independent political action, I was a Ralph Nader and Green Party supporter in the 1990s. Like others shaped by American Communism, Professor Shapiro believed that it was necessary to work within the Democratic Party. Throughout his adult life he was a supporter of the Democrats and their presidential candidates, believing that movements for African American liberation and labor union power would have to be constructed within that context. Certainly if he were alive today, he would be voting for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party candidates..

Yet, though we disagreed, Professor Shapiro and I, we did so cordially. When in November of 2010 I was the Socialist Party USA candidate in Ohio for the U.S. Senate, Herb and Judy invited me to their home to the meeting of The Nation readers’ group to present myself and my campaign. I appreciated the courtesy and the respect it showed.

Martha Stephens was right, the death of Herb Shapiro does represent the end of an era. Today’s immigrant activist professors are more likely to be Latin American than they are to be Eastern European Jews. The Communist Party’s influence over intellectual life has faded, almost disappeared, and today’s academic activists are more likely to be independent socialists or perhaps anarchists. Still, just as when Shapiro began his career, the institutional and individual racism against African Americans remains, if not as violent as it once was, still it is disturbingly present. Shapiro’s contribution to African American history and his own engagement in civil rights issues represented an important contribution to attempting to enlighten and fight this most virulent of American social pathologies. We will miss him in the classroom and on the picketlines.

By Jason Happ

My mother says I inherited “spastic colon” from her.  That probably sounds rather personal, even unsavory, but it’s true. Sometimes, certain foods trigger a rather explosive need for me to find a toilet. These food triggers can often be unpredictable, and the time between eating and needing a toilet can vary, from just a few minutes to a couple of hours. In other words, I know how important it can be to find public facilities.

I understand why some advocate for restricting access to restrooms. It was awkward, one afternoon years ago, when I took my son into a public restroom downtown and the homeless guy with his shirt off was scrubbing his armpits with hand soap. I know that sometimes drug addicts will hide in a stall to shoot heroin, and sex addicts can use stalls for engaging in business with prostitutes.

All of that, however, seems rather trivial if I have a bout of “spastic colon.” Or if I have a three year old who needs to pee. Or if I am a pregnant woman. Or even if I am a homeless person who needs to use the toilet. And, though some of us have more means than others, that doesn’t mean we are always prepared or capable to go buy something just for the privilege of using a toilet at a private business.

That’s why, for years, I have been talking about the Portland Loo. If you have access to the internet, go ahead and Google it. The Portland Loo is a universally accessible public toilet designed to be easy to clean, and to frustrate things like bathing, drug use, and prostitution — all those things people use as excuses to restrict access. In short, the Portland Loo is an elegant solution for the problem of easy access to clean and safe public facilities.

A few weeks ago, I sent an inquiry to members of Cincinnati City Council, asking their thoughts about having such a concept here. At the time, I intended to write a standard news story, but then I learned Councilmember Chris Seelbach had submitted a motion on this matter.

If my ability to read scribbled signatures is any indication, the motion has been signed by Seelbach, Roxanne Qualls, Yvette Simpson, Laure Quinlivan, Wendell Young, PG Sittenfeld, and Christopher Smitherman. Here is what it reads: “WE MOVE that the Administration report on the feasibility and costs related to the installation of several 24-hour public restroom facilities in and around Downtown Cincinnati similar to the ‘Portland Loo’ for the purpose of providing environmentally friendly, clean and safe restroom facilities for the betterment of public health in our City. The Administration should also look at other ways to increase options for restrooms in the downtown area including expanded hours at various City-owned facilities (Fountain Square, etc.).”

It feels as if private interests like 3CDC have been restricting access to toilets for years — ever since they started closing the Fountain Square restrooms (apparently to drive away patrons they deemed unworthy of their upgraded outdoor space). But the Portland Loo is a solution that can meet everyone’s needs.  I really encourage you to Google it and learn more on your own — and if, like me, you think access to toilets is somewhat taboo, but still a basic human right, then consider sending an email to the members of City Council, telling them you support the Portland Loo.

You can send a message to the entire council at this address: citycouncil@cincinnati-oh.gov.  And, if the somewhat obscure notion of toilet advocacy interests you, check out http://www.phlush.org, an organization which “believes that toilet availability is a human right and that well-designed sanitation systems restore health to our cities, our waters, and

Why is the United States still in Afghanistan eleven years later? What has the war accomplished? What can it accomplish? After eleven years, the Taliban are resurgent and though Osama Bin Laden was assassinated by the U.S. military, al-Qaeda is still a threat to the United States. Two major wars against Islamic peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan have not brought peace, democracy, or economic improve to the region.

The U.S. War on Afghanistan has been going on now for eleven years this month, making it officially the longest war in U.S. history, though in reality the U.S. has made war on other peoples for far longer. The U.S. war against the Apache lasted from the 1840s to 1886. The United States spent virtually an entire century from 1890 to 1990 involved in a series of wars in the Caribbean and Central America. Some countries were repeatedly invaded and then occupied by the U.S. Marines to protect American economic interests, such as Nicaragua from 1909 to 1933 and Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Vietnam was also a long war. One could argue that the U.S. was at war against the Vietnamese for thirty years, from 1945 to 1975. Democrat Harry Truman provided aid to the French from 1945 to 1954 and then the government of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower provided assistance and training to the troops of the corrupt U.S. creation, the government of South Vietnam, from 1956 until 1960. Democrat John F. Kennedy took public responsibility for the war and began sending the U.S. Air Force to spray the forests with Agent Orange and sent 21,000 troops. After Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, eventually 537,000 U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam. During the period from 1955 to 1975, some 58,000 U.S. troops died, over 300,000 were wounded in action, and two million Vietnamese were killed. But Congress never declared war on Vietnam, it just financed it.

War of Revenge or War Against Islam?

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001in what was called Operation Enduring Freedom with the goal of removing the Taliban government which had provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that launched the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States resulting in nearly 3,000 American deaths. While the War on Afghanistan had the character of a war of revenge against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, it was also an expression of an evolving conservative ideology that justified U.S. wars against Islamic cultures and peoples.

In a 1992 lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Samuel P. Huntington argued that following the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and other Western nations would find themselves involved not in economic or ideological wars but rather in cultural or religious wars. Conflicts between the West and a resurgent Islam, he suggested, should be expected. His lecture, which became first a Foreign Affairs article and later a book published in 1996 with the title The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order provided part of the ideological basis for changing American political attitudes toward the Islamic world.

The Influence of the Neo-Cons

Meanwhile, another think-tank, the Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 by Irving Kristol and Robert Kagan, began to argue that the United States had to struggle to retain its position of world political and military dominance. Simply put: the United State should run the world, and the peoples of the world be damned. These neo-conservatives or Neocons as they came to be called, pressed for increasing the military budget, and for removing the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The George W. Bush administration, particularly Vice-President Richard Cheney, opened the door to the PNAC Neocons; Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense and Paul Wolfowitz his Under-Secretary. They eventually succeeded in 2003—by lying about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction—in achieving their goal of getting the United States to invade Iraq, occupy the country, and put in place a new government.

While the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq, the Taliban made a comeback in Afghanistan, leading recently elected President Barack Obama to send a new “surge” of troops into Afghanistan in 2009, yet there was no decisive turnaround. Two years later, President Obama began his promised withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, completed in late 2011. The Iraq War had taken the lives of 4,477 U.S. service men and women, left 32,226 wounded in action, certainly over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed and probably many more. Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired U.S. career military officer who lost a son in Iraq, wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece, “Undertaken to demonstrate our supremacy, the war has instead revealed the stark limits of American power.”

With the Taliban still a significant force in Afghanistan, the United States government under President Barack Obama expanded the use of drone missiles to attack Taliban targets in Northwest Pakistan that had been begun under President Bush in 2004. While the Obama administration claims that the drones carry out “surgically precise” attacks, a report by Stanford University and the New York University titled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan,” found that the drones killed many civilians and that few if any of the victims—only 2%—were Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists. The report cited the figures of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent organization based at City University in London, that found that “from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 – 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 – 881 were civilians, including 176 children.” The TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228 – 1,362 individuals.

President Obama has talked about withdrawing some U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014, but there is no promise to withdraw all U.S. troops and the Pentagon wants to keep 25,000 troops there until 2024. Nor is there any end in sight for the drone missiles. Meanwhile you can be sure, other wars will come along. If we want to end the Afghanistan War and the drone attacks on Pakistan, it will take the same sort of movement we built to end the war in Vietnam.

The Beehive Design Collective from Machias, Maine drew a crowd of 60+ to discuss king coal at Roh’s Street Cafe. Community members sipped coffee and discoursed about the powerful imagery provided by their small team of visionary radicals. Representation from other grassroots and environmental groups such as 350.org, the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless and Greenpeace were also in attendance to support the educational process and learn themselves about the price that we all pay for dependency on dirty energy sources.

An 8 by 16 foot cloth poster was draped across the center of the gathering place. A spectrum of personified animals depicted the struggle of people in various stages of dealing with the alliance of King Coal and government. Throughout the transition of graphical storytelling, the characters illustrate various forms of oppression and resistance that have taken place since before the industrial revolution.

In addition to the human perspective, a story is told about the resources themselves as clean water is polluted and breathable air is turned into poisonous fumes. The process was cleverly demonstrated as the story made its way from distant past to present circumstances. Not to be left on a negative note, a potential of future generations are shown having found intelligent solutions to the energy and pollution crisis by shifting focus from greed and excessive consumption to sustainability and cooperation.

As the evening unfolded, Molly, Ug and Tyler, the representative worker bees, explained the purpose and vision of the Beehive Collective. They do much of their work from a local community building where they promote education of sustainable practice and creatively solving world problems. They do this through creative collaboration of ideas and resources and education through art and storytelling.

Many of the members of the collective share a large house that was once inhabited by a log baron that amassed his fortune from clear cutting all of the trees in the area. Their restoration and recovery efforts are a living testament to their belief that even symbols of short sighted destruction can be converted back to something that is useful and beneficial to all of us.

Their art is a powerful tool used to proclaim their message. Animals are used in their depictions to eliminate categorical separation created by skin color, gender or other surface details that humans use to separate themselves from other humans. Animals have been used to tell stories and communicate powerful messages for as long as people have sat around a campfire. The artists travel to the center of the issue to gather inspiration and inspire a realistic angle to the beauty of biodiversity and the destructive nature of resource collection methods such as mountain top removal.

As the story unfolds the artwork comes alive. The metaphors became images and images were woven together into parables. The bees explained that they work closely with those most affected. One of their most important goals is to empower and encourage people to tell their own stories. Usually the communities that face the harshest of conditions are poor and removed from the attention of the national media. Across Appalachia is spread one of the poorest communities in the country. These people desperately need a voice, and they have it through the artwork of the Beehive Collective.

“To date over 500 mountains and 2,000 miles of streams and valleys have been buried” Tyler informed a crowd as he flashed images of the devastated countryside. “Coal has been called the liver of the earth,” he says as he shows pictures of the toxic waste water produced by the careless processes that negatively impacts the land and all of those that inhabit it. In turn, they warn the audience of ‘greenwashing’, a new trend that seeks to make the endless consumption of slightly ‘improved’ or more ‘efficient’ versions of the same products – a thinly veiled attempt to ease the conscience of the consumer by justifying the endless continuation of the cycle of consumption.

Part history lesson, part grassroots organizing effort, the presentation was a truthful account of the struggle, conditions and battles fought by the workers, the unions and King Coal. All in attendance learned about the slow destruction of jobs due to mechanization, the respiratory heath issues caused by the burning of a toxic fuel and importance of spreading the word about sustainable energy sources and lifestyles.

Although there is a lot of harsh truth in the message, there is still a silver lining, but the happy ending is an option that we must come together to achieve. Change is always difficult, but it is inevitable. A system that is not sustainable will be removed by choice or by natural selection. Each one of us can take a step in the right direction by having a conversation about our habits and making personal changes. If we can make changes on a personal level then we can demand them on a community level and eventually on a scale that will change the way we look at history and the way future generations will look at us.

October 1st was the kick off date for the beginning of Domestic Violence Awareness Month in Ohio; it calls for a Day of Unity. The Day of Unity has been celebrated since 1981 making a powerful statement uniting survivors of domestic violence and their children. 1987 was the year the first hotline was established. Every year since 1989 legislation has passed a commemorative law honoring victims of Domestic Violence in Ohio. October was filled with events state wide to mourn lost victims, celebrate success stories and encourage the growth of awareness in our communities, and to create a connection for advocates and survivors of domestic violence.

So what are the actual numbers like? One in four of us has or will experience domestic violence in our lifetimes. That is 25% of your friends, neighbors, church friends and relatives! It’s horrifying and degrading and costs our state millions of dollars in mental health recovery.

One third of reported victims are eventually killed by their domestic partner. In 70-80 % of homicides of either the male or female partner, the man typically physically abused the female partner. Less than 20% seek medical treatment for their injuries and boys who have witnessed violence are more likely to abuse their future partners.

So what can we do? You can support your local organization; help with donations both monetary and otherwise. Get involved, speak out, and write letters and most of all CARE!

Below are some resources for victims and for more facts on the growing problem of abuse.

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-SAFE, National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE, Stopviolencegivehope.org, National Coalition against Domestic Violence, Partnershipfoa.com and Ohio Domestic Violence Nettwork.com

On October 23, 2012, the Homeless Coalition bought the building in which we have been renting the first floor for most of a decade. This is a necessary and important step for us as an organization. We hear the streetcar is supposed to plow past our front door and as many know social justice organizations in Over-the-Rhine have recently felt the political push to move. So, it was high time for us to take ownership. This means we will have a fort to work from for years to come.

This purchase has not come easy, however. Because of the work we do and the stances we take raising money is difficult. We were fortunate to be joined by a few very good people over the last year that assisted us in raising much of the needed money. In addition, another social justice-minded organization loaned with no interest the remaining dollars needed to complete the purchase. So, soon we will own our fort.

Our building has three floors, our need and plan is to expand into the second floor. Our first floor is over-crowded and the lobby especially is not welcoming to people. Our entire first floor has zero natural light. The lobby is very small and causes the increasing number of people using it to often have to squeeze in like sardines. We desire to be welcoming to those that enter our doors, especially our primary constituency; people experiencing homelessness.

We also plan to open up the lobby in addition to enlarging it. We hope to put windows back on the street, to let folks know we are here and open. We are a transparent organization and plan to be that in a literal sense. We want people to be able to see in. Furthermore, as a coalition, we work to bring many people and organizations together to work for an end to homelessness. Currently we do not have a room adequate to hold the numbers at many of our meetings. This limits our work.

The problem is we barely have enough money to get by as it is. So we have to raise money to do this much needed work to make our organization stronger. Over the next several months we will be not only raising operations dollars, but also renovation dollars. We will work hard to leverage every penny and do as much as possible with little money, but we will have to continue to raise more funds. In the end, with the assistance of people, we will be even stronger. Thank you for your support!