Operation (Deprived of) Dignity

Kim Nemirow has currently been homeless for 10 months and is the only female client currently staying in the Albany Temporary Shelter, currently staffed by employees of Operation Dignity. Prior to her life being turned upsidedown by her sudden homelessness, she was a Berkeley Mental Health Commissioner for 9 years. She went to law school with Osha Neumann and is an intelligent, coherent and polite person. Unfortunately Kim has an autoimmune disease and has suffered gender discrimination in the past.

Kim also currently has a Shelter Plus Care voucher which is in danger of expiring unused, despite the fact that she has been using my computer every day to search (by herself) for potential places to live.She has been unable to contact BFHP, despite repeated attempts.
I received the following information from Kim, who has been staying there for roughly two weeks (despite the treatment she receives there). As a result, her and I have become friends. I have been hearing her accounts of what it is like for her, staying at the shelter, and decided that SOMEBODY has GOT to let the public know this, before the City allows it to go on any longer.

Dignity is FAR from what these people are actually offering anybody who utilizes their services. If "dignity" was part of what the City actually paid them for, Albany should demand it's money back.
There is a rule stating that staff can require clients to shower. Yet, there is no laundry facilities. With no laundry facilities, and no clean clothes for anybody to change into, what is the point of requiring a client to shower only to have them have to change back into the same dirty clothes that they were wearing when they got there?What would happen if a client stays in the shelter who has bed bugs? How would they deal with the bedding in the facility? Would they keep the shelter shut down until they were able to get it inspected and get a clean bill of health?

There is apparently a problem with the generator. It gets overloaded very easily (as evidenced by the fact that the shelter was closed for three days, about a week ago, due to the generator not working properly). The heater control panel is separated from the staff area and is on the wall next to the client's beds (on the women's side). A client could easily, accidentally overload the generator (causing it to turn off) by pressing buttons in an attempt to get the inside temperature at a level they are comfortable with.(It should be noted that the temperature inside the shelter is kept, at all times l, at one of two temperatures: freezing cold or way too hot. The staff have complained about this, too. Obviously, the thermostat has some problems.However, this is hardly the way to discourage clients from touching the control panel for the heater).

There is no living person whose job it is to monitor the men's side of the shelter. When the shelter's video surveillance is being used, the staff have stated that they are only under orders to check the monitor once an hour. Kim stated that she has never actually seen any staff person ever even glance at the monitor. This leaves the city open to all kinds of liability issues. A person can do a lot in a room in an hour, unattended. Let alone the whole night.

The shelter staff have made no effort to verify the TB status of clients.

The water in both the sink and showers is extremely cold (to a prohibitive degree). As far as she can tell: there is no hot water.

The rules are not strictly enforced. Which could be good, in some cases.Thankfully, the client who was seen cleaning his nails with a "large pocket knife", as one of the staff members was walking past him) didn't use it in a way that was hazardous to anyone's health.

The treatment that clients receive at the hands of the shelter staff is deplorable. The environment created by Operation Dignity's employees is so hostile, that survivors of trauma (as most of the residents of the Albany Bulb are) are actually very likely to suffer further trauma, as a result of their stay there. We can now see that the incident that caused a Bulb resident (who is pregnant) and her partner to choose to stay in their own bed (on the Bulb) rather than tolerate the "extremely rude" treatment that they suffered at the hands of Operation Dignity's employees, is most definitely NOT isolated:

In late January, Kim (who took the notes from which I got all of this information) submitted (in person, to the City Clerk) a request for accommodation of her diet (she suffers from an autoimmune disease and should not be eating foods that can trigger reactions in her body). To her knowledge, she has yet to hear back from the city in response to her request. The food that is served at the shelter consists of foods like white bread, white rice and other foods which can cause negative health effects for someone with her condition.This is exacerbated by the fact that clients are not allowed to bring outside food into the shelters. So, rather than eat only foods that can exacerbate her illness, she sneaks her own food in anyway. She has to hide in the corner once the lights are off, while staff are not looking, and quietly eat her food so she doesn't get "busted" doing so. (She once accidentally made a brief crackling noise, when trying to sneak some nutrition in. One of the shelter staff immediately barked at her "What the hell is going on over there?!?!?"

Another time, when she was already in bed, a staff member came in and asked her if she knew whose olives were outside. She told the staff member that they were hers and the staff member ordered her to get up out of bed and to go throw them away. Kim said "No. If you're just going to throw them out anyway, do it yourself." To which the staff person responded (in a tone of voice thick with disgust and attitude) "Really!?..."

The shelter staff enjoy watching extremely violent TV shows all night long, while the clients are trying to sleep. When my friend asked them if they could please reduce the volume of the TV, so that she could sleep, they told her "You're just trying to control things."

The treatment that this client receives at the hands of Operation Dignity's shelter staff is indicative of the fact that the staff are (self-admittedly) "not trained in anything."

Occasionally, when the Operation Dignity staff members believe that Kim is asleep (despite the loud TV) the staff sometimes talk about her. She can hear this clearly, as the staff sit very near to where the beds are, on the women's side. Once, when the staff thought she was sleeping, one of them told another one, about her: "... well she can kiss my black ass."

Wednesday night, when the staff again thought she was sleeping, a new staff member arrived and was told by a staff member by the name of Ewy (who has been there for awhile): "... We have one male client... and we have... well, you know what we have."(This is no way to talk about a human being! How would any of you feel if, after experiencing gender discrimination for much of your life, you got referred to as a "what" as opposed to a "whom"?...)
This same staff member (Ewy) once stopped Kim when she was on her way out the door and it was raining outside. She had stopped to grab one of the two ponchos that another member of the staff had set on a table by the door (one for her and one for the only male client that they had at the time). Ewy confronted her and ask her "What's that in your hand? That's not yours. Put that down!" She said "You don't accuse me of stealing. I don't steal." She said "Look, this was meant for me. It was obviously put there for me." To which he responded "No. Its not yours, put it back!" So she did, and went out into the rain without protection.

The same staff member, Ewy, once told her "You've complained about this more than once, I'm going to *report* this to my supervisor" With the emphasis on the word "report", as if a client expressing concerns was something that required punitive action against the reporting party.

The staff have also been heard making reference to "mental people", in personal phone conversations that they have had while on the job. Exactly what was meant by "mental people", we can only guess. It was apparently a conversation about running a board and care facility, wherein the Operation Dignity staff member said that the person on the other end of the line would "get more money" if they made their program one that was for "mental people". (I remember on the first day that the shelter was open, I stopped by and asked the staff what a person would need to do to request special accommodations for someone with a mental disability. And that the staff's response to hearing  about my partner's disability (which requires him to not be confined in situations with groups of people) was "Well, we don't have a special box he could sleep in, or anything...". It's no wonder that they would be overheard talking about "mental people".

More than once, when Operation Dignity's staff opened the door to the shelter, they are rude (like when the pregnant Bulb resident and her partner knocked on the door and the woman who answered it asked them "What the fuck do you want?").

Once, one of the female staff members told Kim "If you're gonna take your time, maybe you haven't been out here long enough. Maybe we should have just left you out here..." This same staff member once told Kim "If I didn't want you here, I just wouldn't answer the door."

Another time, that same Operation Dignity employee told Kim that she really ought to do something with her life, some day. To which, Kim replied "Well, I went to law school." The woman's response: "See where that got you?..."

But, in my opinion, the most egregious remark made by the staff, that the City of Albany is paying to run the "shelter" (alongside referring to Kim as a "what"), was in response to Kim asking what the woman thought of her:"It's not easy to love the unlovable."

This is no "shelter". A shelter is somewhere that a person is supposed to feel welcome to stay at, in their time of need. Somewhere that someone is supposed to be able to sleep, free from abuse and discrimination.

The hostile environment that the city has set up out in the parking lot of the Albany Bulb is hardly a "better" alternative to staying in our homes on the Bulb. Where (with the exception of the occasional anti-homeless hate crime) we are free from discrimination and are able to better accommodate the needs of disabled individuals FAR better than Albany's Temporary Shelter. As evidenced by many things, not least of them being that, after a long and sleepless night in the "shelter", Kim has to come out to the Bulb to actually get any sleep. Which subsequently subtracts from the time that she needs to be house-hunting.

What a fine mess Albany has bought and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

What a waste.