This afternoon I had a fascinating conversation with Joe Finn, the President and CEO of the Massachussetts Housing and Shelter Alliance.  Not only did he give me a lot of great insights into the Boston homelessness/mental health situation, he also lent me this book by Jay Levy.  I finished the first few chapters tonight, and it's well worth a read if you can get your hands on it.

I've also been working through a few blogs:
The archives of HomelessnessLaw, a blog put together by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Policy. It's giving me a much better idea of some of the broader legal and political framework around homelessness advocacy.  

PsychCentral is a great site for those interested in psychology in general, but I've been using its epic blog compilation to see who's writing about dozens of different mental health topics, from anxiety disorders to sex addiction.

This week, I'm going to try to get in touch with Gary from HomelessLife.  He started the blog about his day-to-day life as a homeless man in Boston, and now is working on beginning a nonprofit organization to provide some basic needs for the homeless population here. He sounds interesting, so I hope he'll talk with me.

By far my favorite of the blogs I've found is InvisiblePeople. It's been around since 2008, but it's new to me, and I'm really excited about it. It's basically a global video catalog of the homeless, their individual stories, their wishes, hopes, and experiences.  I hope the HardLuckBlues project sticks around long enough to get to the level those guys are at -- they're definitely impressive.

That's all for now.  What else should I be reading?

-Alisa






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