Los Angeles, U.S.A. — The Home For Good Funders Collaborative announced an unprecedented commitment of over $105 million in resources allocated in coordination across public and private systems to help end chronic homelessness.

These resources will provide permanent supportive housing to over 1,000 chronically homeless individuals throughout the Los Angeles region, including veterans, individuals, youth, and families. The $105 million in resources include housing vouchers (calculated over 15 years), capital funds and health, mental health and substance abuse services.

“This is the Home For Good blueprint come to life,” says Jerry Neuman, Co-Chair of the Home For Good Task Force. “Foundations and businesses provided new funds, those funds were leveraged with new and existing public resources and the combined resources are carefully focused on the greatest need, moving chronically homeless people from streets to homes. And the process will generate significant savings for our systems.”

Research has demonstrated substantial cost savings permanent supportive housing yields. Studies consistently find that placing chronically homeless people in permanent supportive housing creates a cost savings of over 40%. The 2012 Los Angeles County evaluation of Project 50 concluded that for each chronically homeless person placed in permanent supportive housing, there are savings of $4,774 over two years measured against the costs of leaving those people on the streets.

The awarded funds will provide housing and services for chronically homeless people using existing permanent supportive units as current tenants move on to other housing, working with landlords to use Section 8 vouchers in market-rate housing, and developing new units of permanent supportive housing. The awards will generate this housing across the Los Angeles region, including the San Fernando and Antelope Valleys, Hollywood, South Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, Pasadena, Santa Monica, and Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

Elise Buik, President & CEO of United Way of Greater Los Angeles, which leads the Collaborative and with the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce created the Business Leaders Task Force on Homelessness, says, “The Collaborative reaches dozens of communities throughout the region working to end homelessness because its members exercised extraordinary diligence and focused on measureable results.

Their work is a clear signal to the Los Angeles community that investing in an end to chronic and veteran homelessness is good for our communities in every respect – it not only reduces the strain on severely limited government resources, it makes our metropolitan area significantly more desirable as a place to live and work and spend.

“The remarkable partnership between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors created through this Collaborative is exactly the kind of innovation and collaboration we need to realize this goal. We look forward to broadening the Collaborative to welcome additional corporate, public and private funders in years to come.”

The Home For Good Funders Collaborative is the first of its kind in Los Angeles. A partnership of 24 public and private funders, the Collaborative began with a seed grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. In this, its first year, the Collaborative pooled and aligned $5 million in donated philanthropic and business funds. These $5 million in private funds leveraged public sector commitments of over $55 million, with an additional $45 million in public funds from the City and County of Los Angeles and the City of Pasadena.

All the funds were made available through an innovative new application process. The Collaborative enabled dozens of organizations addressing homelessness to submit a single application rather than several. Where multiple applications to create housing with services often result in agency-by-agency waiting periods which can extend to years, the Collaborative award process took just over 7 months.

Steven M. Hilton, President and CEO of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, says, “We applaud our partners from the private and public sectors for coming together to combine our collective resources and efforts to help those most in need. Homelessness is a problem too big for each of us to solve on our own; only together can we hope to improve the situation in Los Angeles.

“The remarkable partnership between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors created through this Collaborative is exactly the kind of innovation and collaboration we need to realize this goal. We look forward to broadening the Collaborative to welcome additional corporate, public and private funders in years to come.”

Collaborative partners from both City and County agencies praise the coordinated approach the Home For Good enterprise has taken.

Doug Guthrie, President & CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, says, “The Home For Good collaborative represents the best public-private partnership around our common goal of housing the chronically homeless. It takes careful alignment of all of our resources – Housing Authority subsidies, County health services and private foundation funding for critical gaps – to successfully house this population, and Home For Good provides Los Angeles with a common framework to get the job done.”

Mitch Katz, Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, says, “Through participation in the Collaborative the health department has been able to align resources with other funders and greatly expand access to permanent supportive housing for patients who have a chronic illness or disability and are homeless. Housing these patients has been shown to reduce public costs, especially in health care.”

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Los Angeles, U.S.A. — California egg producers, through the Association of California Egg Farmers (ACEF), are filing a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit which challenges the legal validity of Proposition 2 – a law regulating egg-laying hen enclosures. The suit was filed by William Cramer, a Riverside County egg farmer who is not a member of ACEF.

While Cramer sets forth several grounds for his dispute with the law, ACEF’s challenge to Proposition 2 is focused on the claim that it is unconstitutionally vague and does not inform egg farmers how to confine their hens so as to avoid the criminal penalties that are part of the law.

The decision to enter this lawsuit was not made lightly but time has become a major issue for California egg farmers who need to know now the requirements for the enclosures they must build prior to the law taking effect on January 1, 2015 when compliance with Proposition 2 becomes mandatory. The lack of clarity regarding hen enclosure standards has become dire because it will require an investment of $400 million from the state’s egg farmers and three years to construct new facilities in California.

While California egg farmers struggle to deal with Proposition 2, the recent passage of the “King Amendment” to the 2012 Farm Bill by the House Agriculture Committee has only made matters worse. The King Amendment would exempt out-of-state egg farmers selling eggs into California from complying with Proposition 2, something which would threaten the interests of California consumers as well as place California egg farmers at a severe economic and competitive disadvantage.

“Passage of the King Amendment will devastate California’s fresh egg industry by removing all quality and safety standards and enable out-of-state egg producers to avoid having to comply with Proposition 2,” said Arnie Riebli, President of ACEF. He added, “Consumers need to realize that the availability of safe, fresh California eggs they have come to expect may no longer exist. Given the risk of criminal prosecution for violating Proposition 2 and the risks created by the King Amendment, we have no choice but file this motion to enable our industry to survive.”

In 2010, California enacted Assembly Bill 1437 to protect California consumers by requiring all eggs sold in California, including those from out of state, to meet the requirements of Proposition 2. California imports approximately 40% of the eggs consumed in the state.

While the meaning of Proposition 2 is unclear in most respects, it is clear that it would ban the sort of battery cages currently used in California and most other states. California consumers have the right to expect that all eggs bought in California are produced under the same conditions as eggs produced within the state. And, California producers have the right to expect that their out of state competitors must meet the same production requirements. The King Amendment seeks to remove these protections.

ACEF supports the goal of providing appropriate space to egg laying hens. ACEF has joined with the Humane Society of United States (HSUS) and the United Egg Producers (UEP) to support Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Egg Products Inspection Act amendments which would establish preemptive national standards on egg laying hen enclosures, including dimensions and other key elements that are not found in Proposition 2.

ACEF also joined HSUS and UEP in supporting the House counterpart, HR 3798, which is co-sponsored by California Representatives Jeff Denham (R), Elton Gallegly (R), and Sam Farr (D). Unfortunately, while the Senate Agriculture Committee recently held a hearing on this legislation, it failed to include it in the Farm Bill and it is unclear whether the bills will be taken up this year. ACEF will continue to work toward a national standard for egg laying hen enclosures, but this may take years to achieve.  California egg farmers are between “a rock and a hard place” and have no option but to now seek to invalidate Proposition 2.

“We simply cannot wait until ACEF members are criminally prosecuted to find out what Proposition 2 means and we cannot live with the King Amendment which would effectively put California egg farmers out of business,” said Debbie Murdock, executive director of ACEF.

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The Anaheim police brutality drama has not come to an end. Another violent protest against the deadly police shooting, which caused Manuel Diaz to lose his life and ended with 24 arrests and several injuries.

Protests have been going on for a few days, this time as many as 500 demonstrators and 250 police officers were confronting eachother for several hours. Most of the protesters acted peacefully but some became violent so the police had to use pepper balls and beanbag rounds.

The clash began after a City Council meeting in which different leaders from Anaheim, California voted to ask the U.S. attorney’s office to investigate the incidents from last weekend, which saw a shooting involving an officer that ended with the loss of Manuel Diaz’s life. Diaz was catalogued by the police as a known gang member but during the incident he was unarmed, which caused public outrage from the witnesses against the police. The protests have been going on since Saturday.

The council chamber surroundings were filled with protesters. At the beginning they were there peacefully, but as the place became overcrowded, some people pushed on the windows so the police had to push them back.

However, this was not the violence trigger, as the protesters just marched to the police headquarters and then back to the City Council. The event that lead to violent protests was the detention of a man who the police thought was armed, but in reality wasn’t, so the crowd started throwing rocks at the officers.

Sgt. of the Anaheim police Bob Dunn explained that the violent protesters seemed to be outsiders who wanted to provoke a violent clash between the police and the other protesters.  At one point, the animosity at the protest escalated with Molotov cocktails being thrown, and business windows were smashed and trashcans were set on fire.

The night ended with the detention of 24 protesters, 20 adults and four minors, with five people hurt, a police officer, two members of the media and two protesters, but no life-threatening injuries were reported.

The Diaz family is suing the city and the Police Department, and is asking, according to their lawyer, for $50 million in compensation for damages.

The Police Chief John Welter explained that in Diaz’s case, two officers had approached three men, including Manuel Diaz, who were acting suspiciously in an alley. Upon noticing the officers the men ran away and Welter explained that Diaz failed to obey the police officers orders to stop, and while in pursuit, he threw a package which was believed to be heroin on to the roof of a complex building.  The Police Chief did not explain the motives behind the police officers actions.

Image Courtesy of   TypeMRT

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San Diego, U.S.A. — The San Diego Film Foundation has announced that the 2012 San Diego Film Festival will host Oscar-nominated director, Gus Van Sant, for his first ever film festival tribute and retrospective. Known best for his direction on films ‘Milk’, ‘Good Will Hunting’, ‘My Own Private Idaho’, and ‘To Die For’, Gus Van Sant will attend his tribute and film retrospective on Thursday, September 27, 2012 at the Sherwood Auditorium in the Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla. With the renowned director in attendance, a new venue, and more film screenings, this year’s San Diego Film Festival promises to be the biggest and best yet.

Celebrating its 11th year, The San Diego Film Festival is scheduled for Wednesday, September 26, 2012 – Sunday, September 30, 2012. For the first time, the Festival will be held at two venues: the Reading Theater in the Gaslamp Quarter (701 Fifth Avenue, San Diego, 92101), and the Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla, Sherwood Auditorium (700 Prospect Street, La Jolla, 92037). Tickets start at $14 for pre-sale/$16 at the door, and go up to $75 for a one day pass, and range up to $500 for a Festival VIP Pass to all screenings, premieres, events, and panels on all days. A dramatic expansion this year, Festival organizers anticipate hosting over 100 film screenings.

Dale Strack, Chairman of the Board for the San Diego Film Foundation, producer of the Film Festival event, said, “Gus Van Sant’s independence and talent as a director make him truly stand out in this industry. We are honored to host what is sure to be the first of many film festival retrospectives to celebrate his films, his career, and his vision.”

The San Diego Film Foundation celebrates the art and power of independent film by creating unique, interactive, memorable film-going experiences. The non-profit San Diego Film Foundation produces the annual San Diego Film Festival showcasing one-of-a-kind film premieres, informative industry panels, and filmmaker and celebrity events. The organization is devoted to the inspiration and talent behind each film, and turns every screening into a must-see event, complete with after-parties. For more information, visit www.SanDiegoFilmFest.com.

Image Courtesy of   cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com

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