Day 5: Advocating for those who can't

July 1, 2009
We attended 3 or 4 meetings today. After a bus mishap, we arrived at our first meeting 30 minutes late. Since we were late in our early morning routine, the group ended up rushing to catch the bus, we saw at our stop. Unfortunately, Michele's group (Team Dominance) were not informed that we could not board an express bus because that would not stop where we needed to get off. Any way, we switched buses and made it to the meeting with Rosemary, a staff member of GEDCO. We learned that GEDCO provided a multitude of affordable housing and care for the Baltimore community. Rosemary emphasized GEDCO's elder care service and described a new project for GEDCO called a greenhouse. A greenhouse is a type of nursing home which personalized care for its residents, created a community of elders in order to ensure that elders do not feel lonely, helpless or insignificant. A program that aids these goals was GEDCO's Bank. This Bank was not for money but rather a grand exchange of services. Members of the Bank submit the services they can provide and those that they need performed and GEDCO staff pairs the services with the servers to create a genuine sense of worth for the elders as they can help people. GEDCO also provides a food pantry and financial assistance and career counseling. GEDCO's speaker (Rosemary) spoke very passionately of GEDCO's work, I realized that really great services could be provided at local levels, and that maybe in Davidson such steps could be taken. After the meeting, I talked to Hope, Sara and Shelli about their thoughts and found they too were inspired.

Our next meeting was with the PC USA Washington Office. This was with Leslie, who described the process of government and non-government communications, which actually results in meetings with staff rather than members of congress. I suspect that this was mainly her justification of our next meeting with a staffer of Kay Hagan. Leslie, who had experience with such meetings, aided our group's planning for the meeting with Patrick, Kay Hagan's staffer. This meeting immediately preceded our meeting with Patrick.

Next meeting went fairly smoothly as Patrick was nice and friendly. Becca asked if he would suggest to Kay Hagan the co-sponsoring of the HEARTH Act, a federal level bill that supported assistance and services for homeless. That statement seemed to shock Patrick as he was speechless for 5 seconds. Patrick responded to the request that he would research the bill and consider Kay's stand on the issues raised by it. I cam out of this meeting realizing what the pace of the Senate was and how many things the members have to consider.
Nora Munger


Today we went to DC for the day where we had three meetings, the first, Leslie Wood of the PC USA office. After this we headed to a meeting at Senator Kay Hagan's office with a nice Wake Forest graduate named Patrick Brennan, who informed us of Kay Hagan's beliefs about poverty. A final meeting was arranged with the National Homebuilders Association, where we learned about their organization and affordable housing and were given a tour of their office. Everyone will be quick to tell about the hospitality we had from all of these places. We then got back on the train to Baltimore where we went to dinner at the Inner Harbor. I ate at ESPN Zone. I loved it, even though the service was bad. Again, thank you to Faith Presbyterian where we slept again –they were so nice.
Dan Kerr