“On the street I saw a small girl cold and shivering in a thin dress, with little hope of a decent meal. I became angry and said to God; ‘Why did you permit this? Why don’t you do something about it?’ For a while God said nothing. That night he replied, quite suddenly: ‘I certainly did something about it. I made you.’”
Cyberbeg.com offers hope, by providing a way for homeless people to connect with potential donators. Think of it as a website dedicated to tangibly helping people. Before the emergence of “digital panhandling,” homeless people had no way of broadcasting their need for help to a large audience. After two years of posting cyber begs, the site has raised almost $23,000 for its members.
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Here’s a corresponding news segment from David Abel’s outstanding feature for Boston.com:
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Then…
Read Irked posts tagged “poverty”
Read Irked posts tagged “technology”
Read Irked posts tagged “creativity”
Read Irked posts tagged “campaign watch”
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You know how much homeless blogger Tony Clemens’ recently prescribed medications cost per month???
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In other news, Tony’s been “evicted” by the new guys in town >>
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Quoting Tiffiny’s October 5th column for disaboomlive.com:
I love hearing stories about sex doing more for humans [than] just helping them procreate. When sex is literally, as silly as this sounds, doing God’s work from making women feel beautiful again to helping men maintain healthy cardio health, I smile inside. When naughty “bad” things are actually good for you? Yeah, that makes life worth living. So when I read about a disabled man in a group home, paralyzed from the neck down and unable to talk, who was running over nurses and spilling trays, basically earning the title of “Official Group Home A**hole,” who was cured of his asshattery after getting some much needed manual stimulation (from one of the nurses no less) I thought, “Wow what a great nurse!” Obviously, it isn’t too surprising that after this 22 year old got some much needed release he was more pleasant to be around, but going from “belligerent” to “serene,” now that’s a big change. It exemplifies just how important sex is to the human psyche (and to overall mental health). But it makes you wonder how priests and nuns, and all the other celibates of the world, do it. Is it unnatural to abstain? A lot of people with disabilities are NOT getting laid. They’re not finding partners and for millions of them, it’s a frustrating daily predicament that never goes away. Try and finagle as they might, whether all they want is to masturbate, or find something even crazier like actual sex, it’s a disappointingly illusive endeavor. Can you imagine being shot down time and time again? This is why Belgium pays for it’s disabled citizens (if they want it) to have a sex worker visit on a monthly basis. The sad part about this story is that someone walked in on the nurse one day, she was swiftly fired, and the guy went back to being an insufferable a**hole. Life isn’t fair. It’s really too bad they weren’t more smart about it and did it off-site. What’s your opinion on all of this? As long as both adults are consenting (despite what the laws say), do you think it’s morally sound for a professional to provide sexual release for a person with a disability, in a group home environment?
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Huffington Post:
“After a whirlwind week that saw their family featured on the front page of The Huffington Post (and Irked!) and $30,000 raised to help them pay their overwhelming medical bills, the Stein family is back with a message of gratitude and hope for the HuffPost community. TampaBay.com visited the Steins at home on Sunday morning. They discuss how amazed they are that the [online community] came out in such strong numbers to support them. Gary Stein thinks of them as a symbol of the hardships faced by families across America.
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Quoting The Huffington Post:
On September 28, HuffPost featured the story of Monique Zimmerman-Stein, a mother who shares a rare genetic disorder with her children that causes blindness. Though Zimmerman and her family have health insurance, they are still saddled by astronomical debt from medical bills, which has forced this mother to save her daughters’ sight by sacrificing her own. Many readers, touched by the Stein family’s story, have asked for a way to help them. HuffPost Impact got in touch with Gary Stein, Monique Zimmerman-Stein’s husband, a Hillsborough County health department employee, who reported that the family’s medical bills have continued to amass. A few months ago, Stein had a heart attack scare and his daughter had a playground accident that sent her to the emergency room. After tests and scans came out clear, both hospital visits were deemed medically unnecessary and the family was charged additional co-pays, which have since gone into collection. A few weeks ago, Zimmerman-Stein had a minor stroke, known as a TIA, possibly caused by stress. She suffered no lasting side effects… other than the bill for the three-day hospital stay, which so far is $5,000—after insurance—and mounting. Despite this, Stein says “we find, every day, a reason to be brave because our system is difficult. I have a family to support and we make tough decisions every day on how to move forward and how to be normal.” Stein says they know they aren’t the only ones struggling to remain hopeful in the face of mounting health care debt. ”It just wrenches your gut to think that we live in such a great country but people can’t get the medical care they need and that they have to make decisions on what bills to pay, what things to forgo.” The Steins are acutely aware that their story is just one of hundreds of thousands, and Zimmerman-Stein is adamant in her belief that free clinics need to be supported and that our representatives need to be held accountable. “I don’t care who you are, everyone in this world gets sick,” she said. To help the Stein family, [The Huffington Post has] created a widget (see below) where readers can make a direct impact . . . You can give directly to the Stein family via their PayPal account by clicking on the widget below (the PayPal account should read “Just Dolphins”).
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UPDATE: Due to an “overwhelming response,” The HuffPost is extending the length of this fundraiser and have raised their goal to $30,000 (they were originally hoping to cover the latest round of the Stein’s medical bills—but, thanks to your generosity, they are able to help out with their other outstanding bills). Over 860 contributors have given more than $26,000 since last Tuesday afternoon. Quite an amazing accomplishment for the first day of the Impact section! Gary Stein, Monique’s husband, says the family is absolutely overwhelmed by the response from the online community. “We’ll do whatever we can to pay it forward,” he says. “I hope and pray that this amazing response can be repeated.”
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Quoting Julian Hattem, via The Huffington Post:
Monique Zimmerman-Stein has been nearly blind for the last two years from Stickler syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. She recently decided to forego her own treatment to save funds to treat her two daughters, who also suffer from the condition, reports Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times. The family is covered under husband Gary’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan, but that coverage only pays for 80 percent of medical expenses. She will no longer get treatment to preserve that last slice of light. The injections that might help cost $380 after insurance, and she needs one every six weeks. She could be spending that money on her daughters’ care. If forgoing treatment might help them see, she said, “That’s a choice any mom would make.”
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Tampabay.com put together an excellent video to accompany the story:
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According to examiner.com, if you would like to assist the Steins in their struggle, you may contact them at:
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Quoting Jane Armstrong, writing for The Globe and Mail:
A proposed provincial law that would give police the right to force homeless people into shelters during bad weather has angered civil libertarians, who claim the move is a back-door bid to clean up Vancouver’s streets in time for the Olympics. The proposed law, which is the first of its kind in Canada, won’t pass a Charter challenge, B.C. Civil Liberties Association president David Eby said Monday. “The proposal is absurd,” Mr. Eby said. “I’m picturing someone face down on the sidewalk in handcuffs for the crime of being homeless and refusing to report to the nearest homeless shelter. “And that is not something that is … permissible under the Constitution.” Housing advocates and outreach workers who work with Vancouver’s homeless population said the proposed law is fraught with logistical problems: What will police do if the homeless person refuses to go to the shelter? Can shelter staff force people to stay in a shelter if they don’t want to be there? Will the law force city police officers to become de facto social workers, coaxing reluctant people into shelters on rainy and snowy days?
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Read the rest of this article on theglobeandmail.com >>
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Remember Tony Clemens, the warmhearted homeless blogger we first profiled in March 2008 and then again in October ‘08?
Tony’s not doing so well.
Watch this great TV commercial—funded by Astral Media and the Mira Foundation; created by Publicis Agency—whose goal is to “inform the public about the work done by the Mira Foundation, helping the visually impaired, the physically handicapped as well as children with development problems, by supplying guide/assistance dogs free of charge.”
Even more uniquely, the world-renowned, Quebec-based Mira Foundation even provides guide dogs to blind teens who are younger than 15 years old.
Since its founding in 1981, MIRA has given away over 1700 guide dogs and service dogs.
The cost of a guide dog or a service dog is $20,000 and each of them are given free of charge. MIRA does not receive any government funds, its financing depends entirely on donations from the public, from charitable organizations and from private companies.
