connecting*the*dots

Cara Michele Forrest is one of the good people, fighting the good fight. She’s a tireless advocate for the rights of homeless people in Greensboro, NC.

When I say tireless, I’m not using empty rhetoric. Below is a shot of her in front of the NightWatch truck that hits the back streets of Greensboro each and every Friday night, usually getting her — the mother of teenagers — home well after 2am.

She’s a mixture of spunk, sass, righteousness and southern momma to boot. It’s hard to imagine anyone not appreciating her take no prisoners attitude when it comes to serving the needy in our community.

Well, don’t look now, but it’s starting to look like she’s catching some blowback for her no nonsense approach to advocacy.

It’s not coming from her friends on the street.

And it’s not coming from Greensboro residents or businesses who more often than not have adverse relationships with the homeless in town.

The unfortunate element of this story is that the flak she’s beginning to receive is from players within the very same agencies that she works with on a daily basis, in the common goal of eliminating homelessness in Greensboro and Guilford County proper.

Who Is Cara Michele Forrest?

There are a bunch of issues at play here and being that Michele is too good of a soul to air some of the details — she’s too humble to frame the issues in the context of her daily life on the off-chance of making it about her rather than the work she’s doing — I’m going to play advocate for her position.

If you have any issues with this post, it’s my thinking, reasoning and positioning.

Mine and mine alone.

Let me start off by stating that Michele isn’t a career advocate — she doesn’t take a salary to help people; she helps people because it’s a part of her calling.

It’s how she walks that fine and narrow line with Jesus.

So when push comes to shove, Michele not only has zero reasons to back away from doing everything she can to serve her community, but she refuses to bow to situations that might lead her off that narrow path.

Basically, she’s the type of person that gives Christianity a good name.

I bring this up to distinguish Michele’s character and her purpose in life. It’s what makes her such an amazing advocate. She doesn’t serve the numbers of homeless folk in town; she serves her friends in need.

She listens.

So when she tries to advance the notion that there are homeless people that can and should represent their own needs during Task Force conversations — meetings that eventually craft an approach to helping the homeless — and it falls on deaf ears, she feels wounded.

Or the time Michele worked out a program with the Greensboro Public Library to provide library cards to the homeless (usually reserved for people with proof of residency in Greensboro), but the providers in town failed to see the importance of the program and wouldn’t agree to vouch for the people they serve.

To a soul like Michele, it’s just another example of talking loud and doing nothing.

The Bottom Line

Over the last month or so, Michele has become increasingly upset with the bureaucratic machinations of the homeless industry that she finds herself dealing with on a daily basis.

She refuses to give me details regarding most of her problems — being the narrow path, tightrope walker that she is — but I know she feels that there might be improprieties in play with the operations of the Homeless Prevention Coalition of Guilford County.

A few days ago, she openly questioned an element of a certain initiative — something innocuous like the non-announcement of its launch date — but after following up internally and getting an answer she retracted the post.

Maybe she should’ve posted an update to the post with the newly found information, but she killed it instead, so all parties involved should’ve been satisfied.

Not quite.

The HPCGC now wants her blog, Chosen Fast, de-linked from their member page, stating:

“The HPCGC website is not the place to share your personal opinions and thoughts, particularly ones that are contrary to the success of the Coalition. No one’s trying to stop your advocacy, Michele, but you need to use the proper channels.”

If the HPCGC considers a link to a blog “sharing personal opinions and thoughts” they’re sitting a bit too close to their monitors.

What their position says to me is that they’re extremely controlling with their organization, and particularly inept regarding the role of the internet and their objectives in the 21st century.

More precisely stated; they value appearance over substance.

Sounds like some marketing and PR consultants have made a buck or two over there.

Here’s a little insight of my own (for what its worth):

You don’t gain trust and credibility with your clients, customers, constituents or neighbors by coming off overly slick, rounded and without flaws; you gain such respect by delivering for them while allowing yourself to be viewed as a human being.

Try to name one organization on this planet that isn’t made up of the blood, sweat and tears of human beings.

You can’t.

So why represent yourself or your organization otherwise?

I’m sure the people at HPCGC think they’re doing “the right thing,” but this is how bureaucrats stomp the passion out of people trying to make a positive difference in the world — people who are more concerned with the well-being of the people they serve than becoming a sycophant to folks who are primarily concerned with their job security.

It’s not right and it’s not fair, to both Cara Michele and her homeless friends.

And the bottom line is that it’s just not good business.

Thank you, Michael Wesch.

(via BoingBoing)

Red state / blue state political maps now have a behavioral map to further support the simplistic notions of a two-party system!

Don’t get me wrong, I find the visceral imprint of this study from the school of information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor fascinating, but I’m hoping that as we further our attempts to understand one another through similar human behavior studies using our interactions on the web, we’ll look to use less obvious attributes than political party affiliations as a control.

World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?

Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:

The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.

I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.

Coincidence or…?

The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.

While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.

The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.

Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.

And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.

I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.

The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.

How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?