Women's Shelter Needs Immediate Reform

NEOCH has put together a group of pages on the website dedicated to changing the Community Women's Shelter (which has been named after a previous client who passed away).  The shelter is in such a state of disarray that we choose not to disrespect the legacy of this older woman by having her name tied to a shelter which mistreats its residents. We have set up a web page called "House of Payne" to document all the problems identified by the women and recommended solutions.  This is a list of the problems that have come up over the past year.  We provide a separate page on the state of the food at the shelter.  Finally, to be fair we have offered the shelter staff a page to respond to the concerns. 

This must be getting to the staff who work in this oppressive environment, because they went through the pictures on the site and found the women pictured and asked her to call NEOCH to have her picture removed.  Read the page and see all the problems that need to be addressed, and then realize the absurdity that they spent time attempting to protect the privacy of one person from the 200 in the shelter.  Imagine all the people that they have improperly discharged and threatened with retribution for speaking up, and yet staff took the time to prompt this woman to demand we remove her picture.  She had given her permission at the Hand Up Gala (a public event) for a posed shot, but now wanted to revoke her permission at the urging of staff.  The staff was kind enough to go through the entire website and find the other picture of her from 2014.  Thanks for the help with our website and lack of help in finding housing for this woman who has been in the shelter since at least October 2014.   We removed the offending picture entirely from the site.  Now, Mr. Staff person, you can get back to changing the rules without warning and searching the women so that they do not commit the high crime of bringing food into the cafeteria because they did not get enough food at night.

We have included a photo with this blog post that we hope no one will find offensive and we know that the flower will not revoke the permission granted over the summer even at the urging of the shelter staff.  Check out the House of Payne website and let us know what you think in the discussion section or by leaving a comment in the moderated comments section. We hope that a County Councilman or County Executive will see the page and do something about the shelter. All the complaining that we and the women have done has not changed the culture over at the shelter.  It is still an unhealthy environment with regular violations of the rights of the residents.

Brian Davis

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