Care For the Homeless

Small Town, Big Heart From Left, Team Members Lexi Flick, Ashley Stewart, Captain Tina Flick,   CFH Development Associate Brian Myers, and Themla Stewart. Sixty-five miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania lies the small town of Rimersburg. Settled in 1829 and incorporated in 1853, the town is home to just a little under 900 residents. Small numbers haven’t prevented its population from making big, charitable impacts. Clarion County, where Rimersburg is located, hosts an annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s. This past year, the 20 teams and 147 participants managed to raise over $27,000 for their cause. Right at the top of the list of donors was Memory Lane’s Forget-Me-Nots, who raised nearly $4,000 of the total. The team is made up of captain Tina Flick and seven other members.  The biggest portion of that amazing total is raised in New York City. Flick and her team have been making the journey here for the past two years. This is a big feat in and of it...

By Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy At Care for the Homeless, New York City’s largest provider of healthcare exclusively to homeless people of all ages, we’re always watching public health statistics and city health policy. So we were pleased to see the city report a new record low infant mortality rate of 4.6 deaths per 1,000 live births (for calendar year 2013) – which the city reports is down 24.6% since 2004. New York City’s improved infant mortality rate is well better than the national average, as is New York City’s age average life expectancy both for men and women. Which is great. But the figures also show a great disparity by race. The mortality rate for black infants is 8.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, more than two-and-a-half times the rate for white infants. The same kin d of disparities exist by neighborhood with the city’s poorest areas (like East New York at 8.4) having far more troubling infant mortality rates than more affluent areas (like Park Slope at 1.9)...