Founded in Spring, 2005, the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) is a coalition of west coast social justice-based homelessness organizations determined to make ending homelessness a national priority. Check out their Blog - Click here.  More below.

Report - Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures

November 14, 2006, WRAP released a report that documents how more than 25 years of federal funding cuts to affordable housing have created the contemporary crisis of homelessness and near-homelessness.  The report documents the correlation between radical cuts to programs administered by the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA), and the emergence of the massive episode of homelessness in the 1980s which continues today.  It also demonstrates why federal responses to this nationwide crisis have consistently failed.

Click here to download the report.

Click here to read the local Press Release.

Click here to download the national press packet.

WRAP Blog:

http://wraphome.blogspot.com/ This blog is a forum in which WRAP’s members and allies -­ all social justice based organizations working on homeless and poverty issues on the west coast and at the national level -­ can publicize the connections between their local work and the national systemic issues that have created and sustained mass homelessness.

WRAP’s goals are to counter the federal government’s media monopoly on the issues of homelessness and poverty, to show that their characterization of homelessness as a result of the dysfunctions of individuals is false, and to show that the real issues are systemic and societal.  We are all in this together, and we can only solve this if we work together.

More about WRAP

From a perspective that is grounded on the experiences of those who live with and work on homelessness issues every day, WRAP strives to influence the shaping of public policies that address the systemic causes of poverty. WRAP was formed to hold the federal government accountable to the needs of homeless and poor people in our communities. Sisters joined WRAP’s efforts in 2006 and is very excited to partner with them.

WRAP’s positions

What keeps this country from ending homelessness?

• Federal funding for affordable housing and for health care, education and employment initiatives that would prevent and eliminate homelessness have been drastically cut
• The number of homeless people has risen to over 3.5 million, including 1.3 million children
• The time to organize and demand protection of our human rights and dignity has surely come.

We are immersed in a national dialogue that uses medical terminology like “chronic” to describe persons trapped in long-term poverty.  This “victim” blaming and deficit language undermines, and underestimates, the health, power and vibrancy of the grassroots movements to end poverty and homelessness.

WRAP Coalition members

Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency - Berkeley, CA. www.self-sufficiency.org Coalition on Homelessness San Francisco, CA Los Angeles Community Action Network - Los Angeles, CA. www.cangress.org Real Change - Seattle, WA. www.realchangenews.org Sisters Of The Road - Portland, OR.  www.sistersoftheroad.org Street Spirit American Friends Service Committee - Oakland, CA. www.thestreetspirit.org  Coalition on Homelessness - San Francisco. www.cohsf.org

Click the ‘read more’ link below to learn more about WRAP . . .

WRAP will:

• Serve as a conduit between local communities on the west coast and policy makers in Washington DC. and provide a consistent strategic message to legislators and policy makers regarding ending homelessness
• Support outreach workers at each member site and train outreach workers on human rights issues
• Identify training needs and assist in the development of a collective west coast advocacy agenda.
• Collect feedback on federal legislation.
• Partner with the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights to translate proposed legislation into talking points for outreach workers to take into their communities.
• Create a regional network to document the criminalization of homeless people, and build an information clearinghouse to share successful defense strategies and campaign tactics to overturn local and state anti-homeless laws.
• Collaborate with criminal justice agencies to ensure that critiques of the country’s growing jail population includes examination of anti-homeless enforcement practices.
• Create a Freedom of Information Act assistance center.
• Support greater public understanding of poverty and homelessness as a human rights issue by documenting our experience and progress through our own media (5 of the 6 WRAP sites are involved in producing street papers) as well as through video, spoken word, and street theater.
• Introduce established national organizations to a model of advocacy that is rooted in the daily experiences of homeless people. Congress will be forced to give greater credibility to advocates who are tooled up with broad-based and in-depth public education materials, and who can document the voices of thousands of people.

Why is WRAP necessary?

America, very clearly, has the resources to house, to educate, and to provide health care and employment opportunities for all of her citizens. This fact isn’t in dispute. What is disputed is that people have a right to these basic necessities.

As long as we continue to allow basic human necessities to be treated as issues of individual failures or charity, we will continue to see the pain and suffering of homelessness increase, just as we will continue to see local governments using their police forces to remove homeless people from public view.

WRAP is creating an organizational infrastructure that allows our members and national partners to reframe the poverty debate into the more appropriate context of equality and human rights. Please join us!

What you can do?

Support WRAP with a tax-exempt donation. Send to:
WRAP
2940 16th Street, Suite 200-2
San Francisco CA 94103

Call (415) 621-2533.  Mobilize - say “NO” to human and basic rights violations for people experiencing homelessness and support common sense solutions.