Bulletin Board
The place where you can stay up to date with the latest events, stories, news, and opportunities for our City Relief community.
Childhood Without a Home, Part 6: Their Story Doesn’t Have To End Where Their Pain Began
Last week, I introduced you to my friend and former colleague Malika Zlatkin. She has spent nearly eight years serving young people in foster care as a CASA—a Court Appointed Special Advocate. She’s also a former City Relief staff member and a leader at one of our NYC church partners, New Light Baptist Church.
Malika brought our team an idea: a paid internship for young people preparing to age out of foster care. They could learn professional skills in a supportive environment while serving people experiencing poverty and homelessness.
Childhood Without a Home, Part 5: Aging Out of a System Should Never Mean Aging Out of Community
As I've said over and over again, there is rarely just one reason someone falls into homelessness. Housing costs, unemployment, mental health challenges, addiction, fractured relationships can all play a role.
For young people leaving foster care, many of those vulnerabilities can converge at once, often at the exact moment they're expected to make it on their own.
But research suggests that 31% to 46% of young people transitioning out of foster care experience homelessness at least once by age 26.
My friend and former City Relief colleague Malika Zlatkin has spent nearly eight years serving as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children and young people in foster care in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Childhood Without a Home, Part 4: The Cost of Waiting
We’re spending more money on homelessness. So why are more people still losing their homes?
It’s a fair question. New York City’s budget for homeless services went from roughly $2.1 billion (with a “b”) in fiscal year 2020 to more than $3.1 billion in 2025—a nearly 50 percent increase. I’m all for investing in services that help our neighbors get back on their feet. But when spending and homelessness both keep rising, I understand why people wonder whether any of it is working.
Childhood Without a Home, Part 3: The Child Behind the Cardboard Sign
Every so often, I have the privilege of speaking at one of the churches that partners with City Relief. When I’m especially lucky, the pastor and a few members of the congregation buy me lunch afterward.
Not long ago, I spoke at Scarsdale Community Baptist Church in Scarsdale, New York. A few members of the church invited me to join them for lunch nearby, including a woman who teaches in the Bronx.
Childhood Without a Home, Part 2: When One Crisis Costs a Family Everything
I’ll never forget a father and his teenage son who sat across from me at a City Relief outreach in Harlem many years ago. Someone had given them a flyer with our location the night before. Desperate to find help, they walked all the way from the Bronx.
His son wouldn’t meet my eyes. At fifteen years old, he stared at the floor as his father told me what had happened. His wife had died a few months earlier. He had quit his job to care for her during the final months of her life, and without a steady income, the family fell behind on rent. Shortly after her death, they were evicted.
This boy had lost his mother and his home in a matter of months.
Childhood Without a Home, Part 1: The Child Sitting Next to Yours
Compared with much of the country, kids in New York and New Jersey begin school relatively late. My daughter just started her freshman year of high school on August 31.
Putting aside the tragic realization that I am now old enough to have a child in high school, I found myself thinking about everything that goes into setting her up for success.
The World Needs More Neighbors
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring what it means to see, welcome, and move toward people experiencing hardship.
We began with a man in the South Bronx who taught me that while people experiencing poverty are often recipients of ministry, they may also be the people through whom God ministers to the rest of us.
Then we considered the difference between Disney and the DMV, and why our processes should always serve people, not the other way around.
How Many People Do We Miss Because We Never Look Up?
Over the last two weeks, I’ve written about seeing people differently and creating spaces where they feel genuinely welcomed. Last week, I argued that our processes should exist to serve people, not the other way around.
But even the best process cannot help someone who never finds their way through our doors. Welcoming people when they come to us matters. We must also practice looking up, stepping outside, and moving toward those who may never ask for help.
Our Process Exists to Serve People—Not the Other Way Around
Disney and the DMV are both effective organizations, but they make you feel very different. My kids would vehemently protest if I invited them to spend an afternoon running errands with me. Tell them we’re going to Disney, however, and I’d get a very different response.
At Disney, nearly every detail is designed around the guest experience. Signs help you find your way, employees anticipate your questions and are trained to make every problem less… problematic. There are shops offering food, toys, and games, and there are characters everywhere ready to pose for photos. The environment communicates: “We knew you were coming, and we’re glad you’re here.”
The Absence of Protection
I stepped outside the other day to take my dog for a walk, and the smell of smoke hit me immediately. The sky had an eerie orange tint. For a brief moment, I wondered if I’d somehow wandered into The Book of Eli—a post-apocalyptic world where water was more valuable than gold. Then I remembered the Canadian wildfires.
100+ Degrees - The Deadliest Weather is Here
About ten years ago, my family made the same mistake thousands of others make every year—we took our young kids to Disney World in the middle of the summer.
Our daughter was still little enough that she couldn't walk very far on her own, so she spent most of the day bouncing between her stroller and my shoulders. Between the relentless Florida sun, the heat radiating off the pavement, and miles of walking, I eventually hit my limit. I remember getting to the point where I could barely see through the sweat running into my eyes.
The Crisis is Layered. The Solution Must Be Too. | Our Efforts Week 7
Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about Housing First, Shelter First, and Enforcement First. And if there’s one thing I hope this series has made clear, it’s this: Homelessness is not a simple problem with a single “one size fits all” solution.
It’s an ocean fed by many rivers: rising housing costs, trauma, mental illness, addiction, disability, economic instability, family breakdown, and systems that are often too complicated to navigate while in crisis.
Which means no single solution can carry the full weight of the problem on its own.
What "Enforcement First" Actually Looks Like | Our Efforts Week 6
And to be fair, those frustrations are real. No one wants neighborhoods to feel unsafe. No one wants people living in crisis on sidewalks or public transit systems. Communities deserve solutions too.
But here’s the question we have to wrestle with honestly: What happens when enforcement becomes the primary strategy before viable alternatives actually exist? Because for someone like James, enforcement doesn’t resolve homelessness. It simply makes homelessness harder to survive.
Lessons From Kilimanjaro: When the Only Way Down Is Up (Week 3)
The storm had passed by morning, but the mountain hadn't made any promises.
The sky above camp was wide and blue, almost offensively calm. If you hadn't been there the night before, you would assume everything was fine, but my body knew better.
The violent shaking was gone, but I wasn't restored. My appetite had disappeared, my head felt heavy, and my legs felt hollow — not weak exactly, just empty.
Lessons from Kilimanjaro - What a Storm and a Lost Bag Taught Me About Vulnerability (Week 2)
Last week I wrote about rhythm — how the mountain forces you to slow down.
This week is about the storm.
WEEK 7: Disability Discrimination & the Systematic Exclusion of People Who Are Different
I had planned to land the plane on this series about the complexity of homelessness—why the tidy stories we tell ourselves are incomplete and, often, harmful. But last week, I only brushed up against a reality that deserves far more attention: the intersection of disability discrimination and homelessness, and the quiet ways people are excluded from support long before they ever fall into crisis.
WEEK 6: He Had Heart Surgery. Then He Was Back on the Street.
This week, I want to zoom in on another layer of complexity that makes accessing safe and sustainable housing so difficult: healthcare, mental health services, and long-term care for aging or disabled loved ones.
WEEK 5: Those Who Don’t Know History Are Destined to Repeat It
Over the past few weeks, I've written about the complexity of homelessness—why congregate shelters aren't a solution for everyone, why creative approaches matter, and why the data we track doesn't always capture the full reality of the problem.
Underneath all of it is a more fundamental question: How did we get here, and why is homelessness so hard to fix?
WEEK 4: Why Counting Homelessness Isn’t the Same as Ending It
Part of the challenge in addressing homelessness is that many of our public conversations focus on managing the most visible effects of the crisis rather than understanding the deeper systems that keep people stuck in it. In city halls, community board meetings, and policy discussions across the country, the way we measure the problem often shapes what we believe is possible in responding to it.