thank you all for coming this evening for the community meeting addressing on demand treatment for opioid used to store my name is molly kearney i'm the executive director of evergreen treatment services we offer a very large medication assisted treatment program for adults with opiate use disorders down an airport way so we work with people who are seeking formal treatment for heroin of prescription drug abuse i've been asked to moderate the discussion today because of the agency that i run and the number of people that we treat we have about fourteen hundred people in treatment down there i was also a member of the king county heroin task force so i worked with a number of folks across the community and many different disciplines as we are collectively trying to put our heads together about how to help this epidemic come under under control lastly i also sit on the board of directors of the king county accountable communities of health the a c h as it's known is a group of stakeholders representing primary care or hospitals managed care organizations all different kinds of folks involved in the population level health in king county and together we are trying to make the system improve and help people out who have been formally left behind in the health care system so the folks who are potentially going to be using the service that you can be hearing about tonight are covered under the a c h so i wear many different hats here and again i've been asked to moderate the discussion today because of my area of expertise in  specifically we're going to have a panel presentation and then we'll have about a half an hour at the end for questions that you may ask for the panel and we're going to start initially with introductions across a panel so i can ask each person to come on up and introduce who they are and the role that you play in tonight's discussion thanks i'm david newman the substance use disorder services program manager community psychiatric clinic tired simpson and pastor of the church and i should just take this opportunity to say we do have restrooms is there a locked door between us and them ok we've got a couple of church members here you can get you into restrooms if you just find them create thank you everyone and thank you so much to the church for hosting tonight's discussion so we're going to start out with a david newman who is the substance use disorder program manager for community psychiatric clinic who is going to describe what the program involves how it came into existence and how it's actually going to operate david hi everybody i'm so glad you're here we decided to go with the help of people's harm reduction alliance this support of king county and working with volunteers and people in the community decided to develop a program that took the usual way that people access opioid substitution treatment and turned it upside down because usually there are a lot of challenges in front of people who might want to usage and so some of those challenges involve finding a spot that you might be able to do treatment and a booking an assessment and there might be a wait list and you might have to have certain kinds of funding in place so instead of that we decided to do the opposite which is work on designing a program or if you want to change your opioid use and you are perhaps a participant the needle exchange you could just say hey i'd like to see the nurse and i'd like to see about getting a prescription for suboxone or buprenorphine which is a very effective and safe opioid substitute and then that person would on demand be able to get a prescription by one of our partner of physicians from swedish recovery services so then peirce will help support people to pharmacies help them find their way in the community to the pharmacy of their choice and and then peers also come into play in a sporting people throughout the church and to the offices we have here  providers in the community such as primary care to continue at a primer care provider with the opioid substitution therapy then peers can help link them to that service as well in addition if people want impatient treatment or outpatient treatment for other substances of use then we will have chemical dependency or substance use professionals here on site to do assessments and link them to treatment either here or in the greater community and we'll also be bringing mental health providers here to provide those services and again link to if people in the psychoactive medications for emotional disorders so those services this array of services it will be the first time that in forty years behavioral health services have been available in the university district which is hard to imagine because there if if you are not the casual observer or perhaps even as a casual observer at times you might notice that there are folks who might seem to be suffering in this community and so we felt it was very important to put a lot of services within  this safe space where that people's harm reduction alliance has set up we are partnering in terms of our partners i mentioned swedish ballad recovery services will provide the physicians on call an on site community psychiatric clinic my employer will be providing all of the health providers and then we'll have people harm reduction alliance will be using many of their volunteers and peers in all their shifts to get out the word of the availability of treatment and also provide some of the peer workforce to get people from where they've received their prescription and now filling their prescription for example at pharmacies will also be connecting and have been connecting with partner pharmacies in the area so that that part of the process goes smoothly that people can get prescriptions filled and that the purpose of this is to give one more tool for people that that people's harm reduction alliance provides tools to have people have safer lives prevent overdose and now if a person wants to take that a step further and then and or reduce their use even more significantly and we're going to give those tools to folks on demand thanks david i'm going to follow up on a couple things that he said one one is that this low barrier view project was something that was discussed and really hatched out of the county heroin task force so the idea behind this is that it becomes a very important tool in a continuum of care that is being developed across seattle and king county generally what we have had up until really now is people who have active use and then there's programs like ours which is going from kindergarten to college and once we offer the highest level intensity of care and many people are not ready to take a really major leap of life off the streets in many times and living in a life of chaos into an incredibly rigorous program like ours where they have to come on site six days a week to consume their medication in front of a registered nurse they have to engage in counseling they have a medical provider it's incredibly rigorous so really there has been nothing between those two extremes up until these low barrier bute programs have been identified in the purpose behind them is really to give people a much easier entrance into the system they can test the waters see whether or not the medication helps them stabilize out of their out of control use of act of getting feeling the effects of whatever substance a may be using going into withdrawal and then needing to find another fix in order to get out of the withdrawal symptoms that cycle is what drives many of the behaviors that you're seeing out in the community and many many of the behaviors that are difficult for community members to tolerate so the medication actually helps stabilize people so that they can then begin to get shelter if they need shelter get go back into the working world if that's what they want to go back into school to really engage in a life of recovery over time but it takes people time so these low barrier programs are really very important to help people take the first step into that longer term goal so i just want to give that background here i'm going to introduce denise next for a couple of moments our comments from her in this are you ready to talk or do you want to go a little later here again so this is methadone and if i would know what i know now i would chose the locks and if it was easier for me to get you when i was in active addiction i would have been able to get on that story and start my life  sooner like i'm excited like i just started to have years ago on this road and i used for three years before that and i looked for a year and a half for a way out and i couldn't find it in this way would be a lot easier for people that don't know the things that so many other people do and it's also risen to the point so there are two main medications for the treatment of opiate use disorders methadone which you can only get in a program like the one that i run and then there's suboxone which you can get from a primary care provider one of the advantages of a it has a different mechanism of action it's a little bit safer than methadone is and this is one of the reasons that many members in the community have actively been seeking assistance from programs like c p c to get involved  making these prescriptions available for people because the more that we get the prescriptions out there the more likely we are to help people get stabilized and then the subatomic we've we've started to a chink away at the current a study of it so what next i'm going to introduce joe tensely from of cracks when i say that and i kind of gotten old but it's been a great and awesome experience but throughout those that my time at the exchange i've had to work with people are forgotten the privilege to work with people who have been in positions of trying to seek out t reatment and who have run up into roadblocks because the of all the hoops that they have to go through to access care so low barrier treatment programs are like the most awesome thing in the world and it's a terrible adjective to describe them because it really doesn't do it justice we started doing a low barrier of the box on a program at my program on january seventeenth last year and we since then we've been able to place one hundred fifty four people into treatment the goal of our program or the design of our program is really to make it as low barrier barrier as possible so people would come into the exchange engage with one of the frontline staff and then get immediately hooked up with a public health nurse that would do a medical assessment have a conversation with a doctor and within an hour sometimes an hour and a half if the epic system didn't work quite right it would be able to leave with a prescription for a life that saving medication idea around it was really the you know the easiest if we can make it for somebody to access treatment the more likely that somebody is going to succeed our initial idea was that we would get people on board and really work with them until they got stable enough to transfer them and so had another community based organization for long term maintenance care one of the things that we found as a challenge was that there weren't a lot of other low barrier services available to transfer people out so we sort of bob a fact where we can only take so many people and have so many people and growth in our program so that was kind of frustrating or actually very frustrating but also gave us an opportunity to do a lot of outreach to other organizations and other prescribe errors to really highlight that you could work with people at a low barrier manner and find success with that person and the definition of success can be very different from person to person and so it's either the somebody that's reducing their use or eliminating their opioid use completely or in gauging with somebody around mental health services or housing services or job training services one of the highlights and sort of successes of our program because we were able to really transfer people out at a quick manner we were really able to hold on to people and show people that we cared about them and that we really valued them as an individual by not giving up on somebody we were able to then see some of those changes in reducing their you other drug use or reducing their opiate use all together or seeking other  services i think having a lot as many low barrier services available for people just gives people more options and more opportunities to sixty and that's all i mean thanks joe i heard a story from one of joe's colleagues at the syringe exchange program which is that they are finding correct me if i'm wrong but as people come in and try to low barrier you program they may stay for a short period of time initially but then the come back later and stay for slightly longer and and people are getting more and more engaged over time as this program is being made available to them so that's a good sign and it's a demonstration of the fact that this really is a continuum of care it's a it's a it's reaching a hand out for folks who previously really are not engaged in the system at all i also want to add that there are a number of different organizations in the seattle area and particular that are starting to work in look with low barrier buprenorphine programs so this is not the only one in the city at  all we've got programs being run by valley cities behavioral health it's being pioneered in clinic market downtown it's being tried in a number of different settings around so the c p c program here in the university district is just one of many hi i'm amber and i go to c b c i have about seven months sober now and  i'm actually one of those people that had a hard time trying to access care like when my prescriptions ran out i said screw it i just went off the stuff and called place to place and found out i couldn't get any care so i was pretty pretty stuck at home sick as a dog so i accessed i finally called to get an assessment and i had to wait a couple days and then i got in and then i started the whole suboxone treatment and i'm here now and it's very stabilizing people once people get stabilized they're going to be able to actually move on with their life but the first step is to get them not sick because that's their number one fear and that's why there's so much crime in the areas because that's what they need to get to survive so if we can get suboxone in people's systems then we can stir making behavior changes changes and see a positive outlook on the community i also want to point out that suboxone and methadone both are shown to reduce the risk of overdose death by about fifty percent so it's really important to get these medications out to people because if they have to wait for them or if they don't have access to these medications people are at risk of dying down the limpia right now because we don't have the capacity and there are other really are no other providers down there has a wait list of one hundred fifty people that takes people months to get end every day which is really a day of risk for them so it's really important that the communities understand the importance of medications to treatment that really is understood as the medical standard of care for treatment of opioid use disorders at this point in time and that the more that we can get the south there the better off the community is and certainly the better off folks are her in need of services next up we're going to have pastor simpson come up and speak from the church to say a little bit about context you mentioned this being a safe place and it's a very complicated place for those of you who don't know just in this building in addition to people's harm reduction alliance we have a radio station we have besides the church a church is the radio station we have  their roots young adult shelter that opens in the evening feeds them shelters forty five young adults during the night serve some breakfast in out the door about the same time they're leaving  our children school which is a full fledged daycare center plus curriculum opens at seven say seventy six so we have families dropping off their kids picking up their kids and teachers coming early in the morning and what if i miss and team feed one night a week saturdays so there are a lot of meetings to yeah yeah church meeting international socialist organizations here on tuesday nights et so a lot of these people use the alley as their access to the building and once you get past the end of the alley you've got my pizza you've got to allegro you've got the bookstore  so this whole internet is full of a mix of people coming for different reasons accessing different services or just coming here because they need a place to be and a lot of those people that have either addiction or mental health issues or just plain are at the end of their rope because of a difficult life things that make it hard for them to manage their behavior so it's really hard to keep the alley a safe place for everybody from somebody having their coffee at the allegro to the parent dropping off their kids to the post office trucks i forgot those those are probably a big a safety hazard although you would think on the surface that offering this new low barrier treatment would be the least controversy of that people's harm reduction alliance has ever done in fact in this environment where safety is hard to hard to guarantee its rates neighborhood concerns about bringing more of those people into the alley and my response to that has been that one person at a time this weekend's to have not only help those individuals but build a safer community as people are able to come back and contribute  meantime the church trustees before this was approved were very careful to inquire into how to be managed how security would be maintained within the building particularly to secure the children's center area during during their operating hours the i do the people will be escorted that they'll have a support person with them in the building we're relying on step person by person offering these services will move us in that direction there may be questions about safety and security later and we can field them one by one who think you've made a wonderful point not only about how to build community which you've already done in this sanctuary here but also about how engaging people in treatment really is the process by which you turn the situation around so that you've already heard some stories tonight you're probably going to hear some more about people who wanted to engage in treatment and were unable to it's the folks that you want to engage in treatment you really want to do encourage them to get into treatment because that everybody is much better off particularly that person but the community as well so next up is shiloh from the people well thank you so most people here probably know me if you don't i was born and raised in this neighborhood i was homeless in this neighborhood and i have been a long term drug user livin on the streets of this neighborhood and one day a my best friend in the whole wide world died of a heroin overdose wine right next to me and i wasn't going to take it anymore and i really wanted to start doing something about it and i went to all of the social service providers and they told me that i was a homeless junkie and the only thing i was probably going to do is die and a really amazing man named bob quinn told me that i could volunteer at five to seven on wednesdays and i did my first shift and then the next shift i came thirty minutes late and he gave me this big lecture on how he did not say five thirty he said five o'clock and it was really the first responsible thing i ever did and i volunteered at that place and i watched my friends who are in desperate need of services and treatment services slowly go to jail die lives destroyed scars on their bodies hepatitis c with struggling pain and people just yelling at them telling them they just stop or you know they're bad people and they're worthless and again year after year all i could do was sit there and cry watching my family and my community die and i kept working at the exchange and i slowly got a job as at the exchange doing you know at the huge change with bob and then with s o s then i became the coordinator and then when s o s stopped during the exchange and we had lost all funding i became the executive director with three months rent paid in three months supplies and we did everything we could broad based and steeled just to make sure we could survive and again we start adding more harm reduction services and feeling really happy that we're in this church with such love and support i can't talk enough about how positive this church was and for people who don't know the history you know some of the more elderly  years have formed to me that in the fifty's they invited african american families to worship here in the seventy's they invited gay men to be part of their church and when they let us  they told us that this was just another generation of civil rights and you know this church has fought you know for what's right not necessarily what's pretty and i think that's always been really important and you know as the heroin task force was created i put myself on the treatment side of it because you know we had done surveys before and we had done a recent survey and seventy five percent of opiate users that we serve wanted access to treatment right so that means the vast majority of the people that we serve it's trying to get treatment but couldn't get it and there are many homeless people in this neighborhood who don't have the means to get on a bus six days a week to go down to the methadone clinic because you know the sad part is there's not a methadone clinic really in the north end right and so it was one of those things that i i took brad who was one of the co chairs aside and i said i'll do all this work but if it really changes not happen i'm going to come for you and he reminds me of that incident right over there  and i say and he said i'll get you suboxone at your site if that's what you want and i can't take them enough for helping making that happen and it was lots of other players behind the scenes he did a lot and i feel like for the first time drug users in this neighborhood and opiate users have an opportunity to not go through the pain that i and my generation had to go through watching their friends and their family die because when that happens all it does is build more trauma on to someone and it makes people you know more self hatred and more sad and it  deepens their addiction and i think the one thing that we've always done and one thing i'm very happy that we're partners c b c because they really feel the same way is that the most powerful thing we can give to people's unconditional love and to really show that caring and you know that was the caring in the love that the labor cafe gave me when i was young street kid and all i do is buy a cup of coffee and you know i could sit there and draw you know it's the same thing that this neighborhood gargoyles used to give me half price and my about my first aunt there you know the falafel place would give me cheap and it was all these individual people who are positive we reinforced my life and gave me love in this neighborhood  and so i just cannot stress enough the opportunities that drug users are going to have in this neighborhood and how groundbreaking this is to give someone who is homeless who is in chaos the tools to help themselves and put the power in their own hands and make them feel worth something and it's you know every single time and at the exchange people ask me i want to get on treatment i want to do this you know and you know ten years ago i used to say well are you rich and have insurance because if not you can probably detox in my house because all that's all there was the system was allowed you know and you know we had folks in this neighborhood who used to have you know let people detox in their house and there was a small network but that's all they had  the vast majority of people suffered and died because we didn't have an infrastructure and so i really want to thank the church and the board of trustees they really stepped up and they really did what was right and there's you know hundreds and eventually thousands of lives that will be changed by the simple act of compassion and love and i know if jesus was around he would be a methodist so i'm just throwing that out there so and so yeah i just want to we have questions here soon but i really want to thank everyone here because i want you to look around and this is the you district and this is the neighborhood who has always pushed to have more services always push to have to look after each other's neighbors and do what's possible for this community first asked me to service keynote it came to me through the grapevine that their true first choice for a keynote speaker was macklemore and so i started practicing my rapping skills in front of my husband at home to my surprise even after dropping my mad jams he really discouraged me from trying it all with you today i know what does he know jim lounger also gave me some history about some of the more memorable keynote speakers at this breakfast including one who removed his pants during his remarks so i hope you all understand why i'm standing here thinking i might be a complete and utter disappointment to you this morning of course i'm deeply honored to be here to talk to you about real change there is much to say about this visionary newspaper the real change it brings to its readers through bold and insightful journalism the real change it brings to it vendors through self empowerment and of course a real change it brings to our general community through engaging us read lentulus li with truths we may not wish to confront real change challenges us to dust off our moral compass to open our eyes and to reject the pervasive myths of homelessness and poverty and so i'm here today to amplify the call for real change that is real change within ourselves especially how we react to visible poverty or more precisely how we react to visibly poor people you see as a lawyer and particularly intrigued by how we express our fears and our impulses in our laws and policies laws and policies that can make some feel more comfortable and more protected but at the same time even in unintended ways those same laws can make others less protected more vulnerable further marginalized so today i want to expose some of this process and to challenge all of us to recognize how despite our good intentions and for many of us regardless of our very very hard work we are all complicit in creating the circumstances within which poverty and homelessness can thrive begin to see the ways that we contribute to this problem and if we are willing to engage in real change we can actually stand up with our poorest neighbors and start to begin working on some actual solutions to this problem i mentioned a moment ago about how we express our fears and impulses in our laws and policies and in my circles we refer to that as the criminalization of homelessness criminalization refers to laws that prohibit or severely restrict one's ability to engage in necessary life sustaining activity in public even when that individual has no reasonable alternative so examples include laws that prohibit sitting standing sleeping receiving food going to the bathroom asking for help and even protecting oneself from the elements these are things that none of us could forego for very long and still survive and yet the act of surviving and public is so tightly regulated that people experiencing homelessness cannot help but get caught up in the web of these laws they cannot avoid somehow tripping a wire that result in significant potentially life altering consequences criminalization laws don't have to start as criminal charges although many to many do many also start a civil infraction it's a ticket with conditions or requirements like show up in court avoid a significant area for a significant period of time pay a fee these conditions are extremely difficult for poor and homeless people to meet and when they fail to do so that civil infraction can then mutate into a misdemeanor and once that person is saddled with a misdemeanor now they may be ineligible to access food shelter and a host of other benefits that could actually lift them out of homelessness so by criminalizing their efforts to survive in public we have actually made these people more resistant to recovery more likely to become sick more likely to self medicate more likely to become incarcerated and even more likely to die obviously criminalization comes at a significant cost not just the lives and liberties of the men women and children but also to society generally speaking a vast range of studies show they prove that criminalizing homelessness and poverty is far more expensive than investing in non punitive alternatives such as permanent supportive housing mental health treatment substance abuse treatment so if it's such a bad idea why do we why do we do it  well there's there's many reasons why but the primary contributor that i'd like to focus on today is the power of our instinctive response to visible poverty we are all stained by what i call the influence of exile deeply ingrained class and status distinctions that guide us even subconsciously to enact and enforce laws that restrict the visibility of poverty of poor people in public space studies show that evidence of human struggle or desperation commonly provokes fear annoyance discussed and even anger from those who witness it neurological tests you know where you put the probes on your brain to see which parts of your brain are firing in response to visual stimuli even neurological tests prove that we when we're confronted with evidence of visible poverty or human desperation we respond with higher rates of negative reactions than we do when we are confronted with any other marginalized trait including traits that we historically associate with discrimination like race or gender so this fear and discussed that we have specially reserved for poverty it's expressed oftentimes without us even thinking about it in our laws and policies and this is what i mean by the criminalization of homelessness and my work the work of my incredible students and many others who are here today center on homelessness and poverty has been tracking criminalization laws in about one hundred eighty seven cities for over a decade and their most recent report from two thousand and fourteen looked at the differences in criminalization laws between two thousand and eleven and two thousand and fourteen and they made a whole heck of a lot of disturbing discoveries for example citywide bans on camping increased by sixty percent that's in four years just four years citywide bans on bagging twenty five percent increase citywide bans on standing around thirty five percent increase bans on sitting or lying down increased by forty three percent in just four years and bans on sleeping in vehicles the thin thin line between you and the street those increased by a staggering laws in our state in two thousand and fifteen and that report found that such laws are prevalent throughout our state seventy eight percent of surveyed cities criminalize sitting or standing seventy five percent criminalize sleeping and sixty three percent criminalize camping i understand that in many jurisdictions the way that camping is defined is so broad that it can encompass even a temporary behavior like propping a coat up on sticks to protect yourself from the rain we observe that a significant number of people spend ninety days or more in jail for violating these laws we also observed that as rates of income disparity grew in certain cities so did the rate at which those cities inforced their criminalization laws in other words the greater the gap between the rich in the port in a particular place the more likely that place is to become punitive for the poor and homeless people within its boundaries so these are just snapshots of contemporary criminal and criminalization but it's something that we've been pretty good up for some time american history is replete with examples of how discrimination and bias can fuel the enforcement and ackman and enforcement of laws that criminalize the presence of undesirable people in public space jim crow auntie yochi sundown town laws these are just a few of the notorious examples that we have since rejected and when we reflect on these legal artifacts we do so with some collective sense of shame but it's important to notice that many of these same marginalized groups are disproportionately impacted by criminalization laws today marginalized groups including  people of color single female headed families people with mental illness or addiction people with physical disabilities l g b t q youth immigrants all of these marginalized groups are disproportionately represented in homeless and poor populations when compared to the general population so this disproportionate representation of marginalized groups among those who are suffering poverty and homelessness is not a coincidence it's a symptom of the structural inequities that we all create and maintain common stereotypes and prejudices quietly influence our judgments regarding whether someone else is worthy of protection and those judgments then can unconsciously determine how we allocate rights and resources to poor people generally but to visibly poor people in particular it's the sustained visibility of poverty that prompts us to react we firmly want poverty and human suffering to remain private so we perpetuate this marginalization through lenses of blame studies show that public support or tolerance for a particular group or or an individual turns on the degree to which we believe that group or individual is responsible for a particular trait in america especially compared to other countries we are particularly enamored with the bootstrap work ethic the cheery belief that if you just work hard enough you two can avoid poverty over a quarter of americans believe that the most significant cause of income inequality is the failure of the poor to work as hard as the more affluent we also commonly embrace the fiction that homelessness is the product of simply a bad choice that people experiencing homelessness do not want help that they do not want something better for themselves we tend to assume i think especially in this city it's clear to me that if someone declines an offer of service that person deserves their fate that person deserves society's divestment that person deserves not to be cared about and even when we talk about emergency shelter it can serve as a real distraction from long term solutions that are really really critical and hard but have to be done societal ie we rest on the assumption that emergency shelter is a solution but it isn't it's a stopgap measure that very few of us would actually choose for ourselves we must reconsider what we define as a is it a reasonable offer of shelter if we require people to give up their family members their beloved pets their sense of community what about their actual community how about their personal belongings are there conditions that they need to satisfy or put another way are there measures of privacy autonomy or human dignity that we're asking them to give up is it a reasonable offer of shelter to expect another human being to give up all these things for one night of an easy street sleep next to a bunch of strangers only to be ejected back out on the street early the next morning with none of these things the bottom line is that we've taught many people to distrust services and shelter through experience many have learned that emergency shelters emergency responses do not promote their sense of safety stability and dignity this experience is so deeply embedded that even if a a real meaningful offer of service or shelter comes along reasonable people in their shoes might not accept it they have learned that emergency responses do not create the experience of a home they certainly do not create the experience of a real human place to belong so the next time we feel incredulous that someone would pass on an offer of service or shelter we might instead consider the possibility that we offer people false choices and then blame them for not taking it so what are solutions if the problem is visible poverty it should be pretty plain by now that i think that the answer is not to each act poor people from view although that is the primary achievement of the criminalization of homelessness actually it's the exact opposite that we want to aim for i believe that in order to create a meaningful shift in american laws and poverty and policies that the crisis of poverty as long as it exists must be visible in public space we must figure out a way to confront the problem that we are responsible for creating so it is necessary proximity is necessary for social change my law school mentor my professor in law school who's an amazing lawyer and social justice advocate bryan stevenson thank you i got to give it up  the book just mercy and it he argues that to fight injustice the first thing that we have to do is to get proximate to it we have to show up and see things with our own eyes and then we will feel compelled to act right so just as importantly we can't develop a viable solution to a problem unless we show up and get a personal up close view of it so proximity is one of my modest suggestions for real change within ourselves one simple step you can take today and going forward is to create meaningful and sustained opportunities for you and people that you know and love and care about to get to know someone who is poor or struggling with housing instability donate big time to real change today volunteer for the amazing agencies that we have in this city like mary splays and youth care get to know this amazing community that my friend rex holbein facing homelessness has created download today a new app called we count that my friend and colleague graham press has designed it will connect you immediately with people experiencing homelessness and the things that they need right now so there are so many ways it's an awesome app download it there are so many ways that you can get to know some of the intelligent and spy ring resilient it almost makes me cry because they're awesome awesome awesome people thanks like the fourth time i cried this morning so don't be impressed and all likelihood that proximity will convert you if you're not converted already that proximity will convert you and you will be able to rest until we get the social change that we need both cities you have things to do too and although they have access to all of the a trap reports which contain many specific and numerous recommendations i still get requests for something simpler could you broke you know boil it down so i did i created a list of twelve simple steps that cities can take to mitigate the criminalization of homelessness and the full document is on a traps website but here's just a few summ extractions as you can see they range from specific changes in the law to what i think is the most important one and that is a proposal to create leadership positions for people experiencing homelessness so they have direct and regular access to because after all proximity is necessary to solve this problem so speaking of proximity we are near the close of my remarks as i promised i did not wrap one time not one time i wanted to but i didn't and my pants have remained on during the entire duration of my remarks as far as you know but we can do this let's commit our today to real change within ourselves within the people that we know and within the laws which at least for now do too much to drive poor and homeless people to the literal fringes of society and condemn them to stay there here is to real change and thank you