70 of the marchers slept in the lot overnight. The event was covered by local media and attracted national media coverage by National Public Radio. To hear or read this NPR report click here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106226222

Prior to the march, World Shelters assisted the Safe Ground campaign, by providing shelters and equipment, and also information about SB2 zoning in Sacramento for emergency shelter.   CA Senate Bill 2 requires all CA cities and counties, in their Housing Element Updates after Jan 1, 2008, to provide at least one zoning category in which emergency shelters can be located by right, i.e. without discretionary approval from the local government. (For more information on SB2 please click here).

Under the “Safe Ground” proposal an achievable solution is framed for at least providing a place to be for a homeless population that now stands at over 1500 and is made more urgent by the County’s closure of the Cal Expo Overflow Shelter on July 1st. This closure forced 258 homeless people out of their shelter beds.  Many of these are refugees from the April 2009 Tent City closure, which has left hundreds more still unable to find even temporary housing.

The Safe Ground Coalition includes well established agencies in Sacramento that have provided extraordinary service, some for over 25 years, including Loaves & Fishes, Francis House, the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee, other entities, business leaders and community members.  World Shelters is honored to be actively engaged in this campaign.  We have every hope that our work can contribute towards provision of shelter as needed, along with security, showers and sanitary facilities, clean water, and centralized access to the kinds of services that enable each individual to progressively improve their situation.

For more media coverage on the July 1 march see these links:

http://www.kcra.com/news/19917413/detail.html

http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/1994529.html

]]> http://worldshelters.org/blog/safegroundmarch/feed http://worldshelters.org/blog/safe-groundsacramento http://worldshelters.org/blog/safe-groundsacramento#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:38:41 +0000 worldshelters http://worldshelters.org/?p=145

World Shelters is honored to be working with a collaboration of organizations in Sacramento to promote the “Safe Ground” model for ultra-low cost shelter with integrated complementary services. Loaves and Fishes, the lead agency, has provided services to the needy in Sacramento for over 20 years. On Friday and Saturday, June 19 and 20th World Shelters and a crew of currently homeless volunteers assembled two U-Domes at the headquarters of Loaves and Fishes. This step toward providing “shelter with dignity” was supported by private donations for the cost of the shelters.

World Shelters Executive Director, Bruce LeBel, and long-time World Shelters supporter, Steven Elias, coordinated the assembly and demonstrated a solar-powered evaporative cooler, solar fans and lights, and off-grid heating system.

Steven Elias and Lisa Elias-Berg in front of the U-Dome200 and solar-powered evaporative cooler

The U-Dome80 is 80ft2, for individuals, and the U-Dome200 is 200ft2, for couples or parent(s) with child. These fire-retardant shelters provide safe secure private space, and are intended for use in just the kind of program envisioned by the public-private partnership working to achieve the “Safe Ground” program.

A volunteer takes a rest in the U-Dome200

We’d like to acknowledge the many dedicated people working toward creating “emergence through emergency”, including: Sister Libby, Executive Director of Sacramento Loaves and Fishes, Greg Bunker from Francis House, Maureen Wilson and Mark Merin from the Safe Ground Coalition, and the generous donors and hard-working volunteers who made this possible.

With the impending closure of shelters in Sacramento at the end of June, Safe Ground is planning an event on July 1st to catalyze support for sheltering homeless. For more information on the Safe Ground initiative please visit www.SafeGroundSac.org.

We will keep you appraised of any further news and details as they become available.

On Saturday September 20, World Shelters participated in the national Day of Caring.  Sponsored by United Way and other community groups including Americorps, the HSU Service Learning Center and the Volunteer Center of the Redwoods, the Day of Caring is a way for local businesses and organizations to take a day to volunteer at a community agency. Assissted by private donors and the Humboldt All-Faith Partnership, we were able to purchase enough sheeting to build one large and two small Q-Shelters.  Although the sheeting was of different dimensions than the sheeting we had worked with in the past, Production Manager Rick Bend and his assistant Armand adapted the sheeting to fit the  patterns and organized the tasks before the Day of Caring began.Thirteen HSU students and community volunteers joined  five World Shelters staff and board members for this project. The volunteers were excited to learn about World Shelters and eager to work.  After an introduction from Ellen and a quick clip demonstration from Rick, volunteers were split up into teams for cutting, marking, and clipping.  It was impressive how quickly everybody became comfortable working with the clips and sheeting and it took less than 3 hours for all three shelters to be completely cut, marked, and clipped.

 It was great to have Michael Twombly, executive director of the Humboldt All-Faith Partnership, come by to see the end result of our volunteers’ efforts.  The shelters we constructed will be used locally by the HAFP Arcata Night Shelter, which provides emergency shelter and hot meals to individuals whose housing needs are currently unmet.  World Shelters is pleased to be working within our own community to alleviate homelessness in Humboldt County.

Pictures can be found here; check it out!

Many people helped World Shelters make this day a success.  Many thanks to Los Bagels & Ray’s Food Place for donating food and drinks; Michael Twombly & the Humboldt All-Faith Partnership for contributing to the cost of sheeting; all of our wonderful volunteers; and Dr. Nancy Vizenor of Humboldt State University, whose positive attitude, coordination with the student volunteers, strong organization, and bright & helpful children helped lift everyone’s spirits.  World Shelters looks forward to another great Day of Caring next year!

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World Shelters provides ‘a home for everyone’

By MELODY STONE, The Eureka Reporter

Published: Jul 12 2008, 12:23 AM · Updated: Jul 12 2008, 12:35 AM

When natural disasters strike, some people lose their homes. World Shelters wanted to find a solution to this.

The nonprofit organization based in Arcata designed a dome house that can be easily transported and built.

It’s called a U-Dome, and it’s made out of flame-retardant, corrugated, UV-resistant polypropylene. When the pieces are laid flat, 27,000 square feet of shelter can fit in a standard ocean-freight container.

The team that started World Shelters has been working on disaster relief for 30 years. World Shelters became incorporated as a nonprofit group four years ago.

World Shelters started making tents that were easy to assemble and transport, but after Hurricane Katrina, it decided to start working on a hard-panel structure.

It’s been working on the U-Dome for about two years, and is in the process of getting U-Domes to the areas in China most affected by the recent earthquake.

World Shelters Executive Director Bruce LeBel said, “Five million people are homeless in China”; World Shelters has a proposal for 10,000 shelters.

“With the tooling we’ve produced, we have the ability to produce an unlimited quantity.”

It has a manufacturing partner in Southern California and is putting together a partnership with a manufacturer in China.

World Shelters isn’t just looking at disasters, LeBel said. “Domestically, we are focusing on homeless issues.”

Its vision is “shelter with dignity and hot showers.” World Shelters can provide shelter (two people to a dome) and showers for $1.50 per person per day.

“We’re in dialogue with lead agencies in (several) municipalities,” said LeBel.

The U-Dome is also available for private purchase. A dome with a locking RV door, six vents and two windows costs $1,945. More information is available online at Worldshelters.org. World Shelters has started selling the shelters on eBay, with the profit margins used to support its mission.

Dottie Russell, of Southern Humboldt, bought two U-Domes from World Shelters.

She set one up in Southern Humboldt and has been serving one or two people. Russell said the U-Dome provides transitional housing for sleeping and reflecting.

Russell and her husband have been living in the second U-Dome and modifying it to be more like a home.

“They are nice and fresh and clean, they don’t smell, and they don’t have mold. A lot of the houses in Humboldt County have mold, so this is one step above that,” said Russell. She also enjoys the sunshine that comes in. “It’s really quite beautiful.”

The U-Dome will be featured in Triennale di Milano, an architecture and design museum in Milan, Italy. The exhibit is called “Una Casa per Tutti,” or “A House for All.”

“Last year we had a lot of people die (in Southern Humboldt) from not having housing. There’s no excuse for people to die when shelter can be provided for them,” said Russell. “Isn’t a human life worth more than a couple thousand dollars?”

Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

by Rachael King

Jesse Robbins had to get across U.S. Route 90 quickly. Hurricane Katrina had wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, and Robbins, who is an emergency medical technician, was on a mission for World Shelters, which provides temporary, secure shelters for emergency supplies. Robbins had been guided across the highway by American Red Cross workers using Google (GOOG) mapping tools in areas where street signs were washed away.

But Robbins quickly hit a dead end. The passage had been washed away by the storm; his route was based on dated images, rather than a live satellite feed. “Frequently, you’d be working with them and they’d give you directions over closed streets or places that didn’t exist any longer,” says Robbins, who also is co-chairman of O’Reilly Media’s Velocity conference on Web performance and operations.

Such are the pitfalls regularly encountered by emergency responders when disasters strike. They also explain what drives the companies hard at work developing mapping tools designed to help people find their way around in the aftermath of floods, earthquakes, and other cataclysms.

Collaborative Mapping

GeoCommons.com, for example, runs a Web site where users can explore a huge atlas of maps with various data and add their own information. “The advent of user-contributed data allows nontechnical people to publish their own maps,” says Sean Gorman, CEO and founder of FortiusOne, which runs GeoCommons. In the wake of devastating flooding in the Midwest in May, people created their own maps of everything from bridge closures to outlines of flood zones to Home Depot (HD) locations where people could get supplies. The maps in turn were made available to anyone.

OpenStreetMap is a freely available map that lets anyone with knowledge of a place contribute to the map from anywhere. Mikel Maron saw the potential for using collaborative mapping in the event of disasters and has taken the idea to the group in the U.N. Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC) responsible for making maps for first responders in a disaster. The U.N. is starting to test the idea, according to Maron, co-founder of Mapufacture, a Web service that lets people build their own maps and data sets.

Art vs. Practice

Other mapping tools place limits on who can make updates. “We may not want to rely on the crowd for data in an emergency, so there are tweaks to the model possible,” Maron said during a presentation about disaster tech at a conference in Burlingame, Calif., in May. “A smaller crowd of people who have some measure of responsibility in a situation should be able to pass along information.” After Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, the UNJLC used maps that collected information about the extent of flooding and the state of critical transportation and health infrastructure. The center asked the community to e-mail information about the state of roads, bridges, ports, and waterways, and then used that information to update the map, Maron explained.

His work in Louisiana after Katrina showed Robbins firsthand that some tools don’t work nearly as well on the ground as they do in a lab. “One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art [vs.] the state of the practice,” he says. He’s hoping that with each disaster, he sees less of a difference between the two.

The “Una Casa per Tutti” exhibit will continue until September 14^th. The curators’ intention of the exhibition is to present exemplary architectural and design ideas from the past along with those from contemporary, inventive organizations and designers. The invitation by the international architecture and design foundation Triennale di Milano recognizes World Shelters’ innovative design with a humanitarian focus.

“World Shelters’ U-Dome is simple, economical, and compact, but can do many things. From the European perspective, it is important that many domes can be gathered to make a community like a village,” said Fulvio Irace, the Scientific Curator for Architecture at the Trienalle. Within the “Casa Per Tutti” exhibit, the U-Dome is the only shelter shown in full scale that is currently in production and able to be manufactured and distributed in large quantities for effective disaster relief and other humanitarian shelter applications.

“We are thrilled to be chosen as one of the world’s most innovative disaster relief structures,” said World Shelters Executive Director, Bruce LeBel. “We will continue to produce functioning, affordable and masterfully designed structures to aid people who find themselves without shelter.”

Any seller can donate to World Shelters while listing an item on eBay. Sell anything from collectibles to cars and donate a portion through eBay Giving Works. Learn how.