An Exciting Week Leading Up to Homeless Memorial Day on Saturday.


Jeff Foreman, Policy Director
The client leaders of Care for the Homeless are working hard on their Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day program for this Saturday, December 21. We hope you’ll attend.

Homeless Persons' Memorial Day
Saturday, December 21, 2013 at 3:30 p.m.
New Song Church
2230 Frederick Douglass Boulevard (8th Avenue)
between 120th and 121st Streets in Harlem 

In the meantime the week leading up to the event has been exciting. Last week Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio appointed his Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, who  supervises the Department of Homeless Services among other agencies. The Mayor-elect and Deputy-Mayor designate Lilliam Barrios-Paoli immediately charted a course to radically reduce homelessness in New York City. If that wasn’t enough, de Blasio’s Chief Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris– his second in command – joined in calling the homeless situation in our city unacceptable and lamenting how we ever got in this kind of situation.

Mayor-Elect de Blasio and his Health and Human Services Deputy endorsed a series of policy changes, all of them included in the Care for the Homeless Agenda to End Homelessness. They pledged to reinstate targeting a portion of City public housing and Section 8 housing vouchers for families experiencing homelessness, more resources aimed to prevent homelessness, a push for more affordable housing specifically for very-low income New Yorkers and to establish a housing subsidy program to move people in shelters to permanent housing. 

You bet we’re excited about new, more aggressive city policy led by people committed to ending homelessness like Bill de Blasio, Tony Shorris and Lilliam Barrios-Paoli. If you want to hear more about our Agenda to End Homelessness, it’s certain to be discussed at our Homeless Memorial Day event this Saturday, December 21, the longest night of the year, between the food, entertainment and memorial remembrance for people who died in New York City this year without housing. 

We hope to see you there. 

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