This is a special episode of Voices of the Community featuring the voices of Meghan Freebeck, and Carla Praglin of Project Homeless Connect. 

Since my mom died back in the fall of 2016 I have used some of the monies I inherited from her to support the work of Project Homeless Connect through an annual holiday crowdfunding campaign. Over the past two years together with friends, family, and listeners like you, we have raised over Ten Thousand Dollars to provide dental, vision, hearing and housing support services to hundreds of our fellow community members who are experiencing homelessness. 

Every two years the City of San Francisco conducts a Point in Time Count of every homeless person both sheltered and unsheltered. The 2017 count was 7,499 persons experiencing homelessness. The 2019 count was 9,784 persons experiencing homelessness, a 30 percent increase with 1,145 of them being unaccompanied children and transitional age youth.  According to Bay Area Community Services, for every one person housed, three people fall into homelessness. Additionally, the San Francisco Foundation has found that 20% of unhoused bay area residents were housed just two years ago. 

I hope that you will join us in supporting the Project Homeless Connect holiday crowdfunding campaign by visiting https://handup.org/campaigns/cdos to make your donation. You can also find out more about Meghan, Carla, Project Homeless Connect services, their team, and of course how to volunteer for the next Community Day of Service 

Please listen to my three-part Homeless in San Francisco episodes https://georgekoster.com/vocstories-homelessness These episodes provide more information on other wonderful nonprofit organizations providing support services to our fellow unhoused community members.

If you enjoyed this episode, dive deeper into our 4-part legacy of impact:

• Where Art Meets Impact: How creativity drives systemic change. Season 1 and Season 2
• From Bankruptcy to Reinvention: The story of Stockton’s resilience.
• COVID-19’s Impact Series: Navigating the pandemic's effect on our community.
• Making the Invisible Visible: Discover the untold stories of finding home.

In the process of producing the documentary series, "From Bankruptcy to Reinvention The City of Stockton California", I wanted to provide our listeners with an update on the work of the community members featured in the documentary series. I decided to host a Townhall Meeting and bring together as many of the voices featured in the radio documentary series to update the community and listeners on their work as well as engage with the community on issues and solutions.

Nicholas Hatten, founder of San Joaquin Pride Center and Michael Tubbs campaign manager for City of Stockton Council person seat who is featured in episode two of the documentary series and I also wanted to bring together the Nonprofit Social Justice All-Star Collaborative and the Collaborative's San Joaquin County Youth Council to develop the Townhall meeting into the State of Our Youth: A Stockton Townhall Meeting.

The Townhall Meeting provides both our voices of youth and adult community leaders an opportunity to share their work in the community, issues they want to see addressed and actions that community members can engage in to reinvent the City of Stockton.

The Nonprofit Social Justice All-Star Collaborative and the San Joaquin County Youth Council proudly announced their Youth Manifesto, a collective groundbreaking pledge towards equity and resilience for Stockton area youth.

Longtime Stockton Record newspaper columnist Michael Fitzgerald emceed the three-hour event, which featured, two-panel discussions and spoken word performances at Franklin High School’s auditorium in the City of Stockton.

Stockton native spoken word artist Brandon Leake performed the opening and closing of the Townhall event. Michael Fitzgerald delivered remarks on Stockton, present, and future. Fitzgerald then moderated a panel of Youth Council members. The young leaders related what they are doing to better the city and further efforts needed.

The second panel features the activists who appear in the radio documentary “From Bankruptcy to Reinvention – The City of Stockton California:” Included are Lange Luntao, president of Stockton Unified Board of Trustees, Jasmine Dellafosse, senior regional organizer for The Gathering for Justice,founding member of RSSC and the Stockton School Initiative, Sammy Nunez, executive director of Fathers and Families of San Joaquin, Fred Sheil, administrator of STAND, Dillon Delvo of Little Manila Rising and others.

Stockton poet laureate Tamma Brisbane, Rhodesia Ransom and Sammy Nunez with Youth Council members presented the youth manifesto.

The goal of producing the Townhall event was to identify the issues facing Stockton, the solutions that people have been working on, as well as new solutions that people can come together with -- and most importantly for people in the community to step up and participate.

If you enjoyed this episode, dive deeper into our 4-part legacy of impact:

• Where Art Meets Impact: How creativity drives systemic change. Season 1 and Season 2
• From Bankruptcy to Reinvention: The story of Stockton’s resilience.
• COVID-19’s Impact Series: Navigating the pandemic's effect on our community.
• Making the Invisible Visible: Discover the untold stories of finding home.

In this episode, we feature the voice of Michael Tubbs. We have broken the episode down into two parts.

Part one takes place back in the summer of 2016 when I caught up with Michael Tubbs who was at that time the youngest City Council member in Stockton history and one of the youngest elected officials in the United States. Michael was as you heard in Episode 11 from Tama Brisbane working to change Stockton’s history by making history. Michael was making a run to become the youngest and first African American Mayor of his hometown.

In Part two of our episode, we wanted to sit down with now Mayor Michael Tubbs and revisit all of the work he was doing in 2016, his campaign promises, his vision for the City of Stockton, and find out what have been the outcomes of these efforts.

If you enjoyed this episode, dive deeper into our 4-part legacy of impact:

• Where Art Meets Impact: How creativity drives systemic change. Season 1 and Season 2
• From Bankruptcy to Reinvention: The story of Stockton’s resilience.
• COVID-19’s Impact Series: Navigating the pandemic's effect on our community.
• Making the Invisible Visible: Discover the untold stories of finding home.

In episode one my associate producer Nick (MaClindon) spoke with Rebekah Fenton about Michael Tubb’s love of the power of the Spoken Word and the metaphor of Stockton’s rise from the ashes of Bankruptcy through Tupac Shakur's monumental poem The Rose That Grew From Concrete.

Tama with her husband Aaron founded With Our Words a nonprofit, slam poetry collective that has created safe spaces for young people to express themselves through written and spoken word and provided opportunities for at-risk youth to connect the dots between literacy, critical thinking, social action, and community results. With Our Words trains young writers and creates performance opportunities for youth poets in Stockton, and the Central Valley such as their All-City Poetry Slam, Poetry Book Camp and Dream Out Loud.

Brandon is a spoken word poet who grew up in what Brandon calls the ghettos of South Stockton in a single parent household with his mother Carla Leake-Gibson. Brandon shares his passion for helping youth to find their voice and tell their story through the expression of poetry and spoken word. Brandon has created Called To Move which works with school-age students between the grades of 7th-12th through spoken word poetry workshops, and spoken word poetry performances

If you enjoyed this episode, dive deeper into our 4-part legacy of impact:

• Where Art Meets Impact: How creativity drives systemic change. Season 1 and Season 2
• From Bankruptcy to Reinvention: The story of Stockton’s resilience.
• COVID-19’s Impact Series: Navigating the pandemic's effect on our community.
• Making the Invisible Visible: Discover the untold stories of finding home.

Multiple generations of South, East, and downtown Stockton residents have suffered the impacts of the City's policies of economic apartheid and corruption. This, in turn, created the deadly outcomes of abject poverty, crime, institutionalized racism, and the community narrative that residents do not feel like they belong in Stockton and are not welcome in the city in which they live.

Through Hector’s work in empowering community members to have both a choice and voice, he identified that there are many different organizations providing services in the community but that they were not working together to maximize their impacts.

If you enjoyed this episode, dive deeper into our 4-part legacy of impact:

• Where Art Meets Impact: How creativity drives systemic change. Season 1 and Season 2
• From Bankruptcy to Reinvention: The story of Stockton’s resilience.
• COVID-19’s Impact Series: Navigating the pandemic's effect on our community.
• Making the Invisible Visible: Discover the untold stories of finding home.

In this episode, we feature the voices of Barb Alberson, Benita Ortez, as well as Horacio Viramontes along with students from the Franklin High School Spanish Club.

The first voice is Barb Alberson, the Senior Deputy Director for Policy and Planning at San Joaquin County Public Health Services who shares her insights into the impact of poverty on health outcomes. The second set of voices are Horacio Viramontes IB Spanish Teacher and the Spanish Club Advisor along with his Franklin High Spanish Club Students who share their community service work at the second annual Reinvent South Stockton Coalition Resident Summit. The third voice Benita Ortez, community activist, and grandmother who shared both her and her grandkids experience living in South Stockton as well as her efforts to secure more resources and in turn, provide a safer community for kids and families.

If you enjoyed this episode, dive deeper into our 4-part legacy of impact:

• Where Art Meets Impact: How creativity drives systemic change. Season 1 and Season 2
• From Bankruptcy to Reinvention: The story of Stockton’s resilience.
• COVID-19’s Impact Series: Navigating the pandemic's effect on our community.
• Making the Invisible Visible: Discover the untold stories of finding home.