A very good and inspiring story about a man who changed his life from having to camp along the river illegally towards helping others recover their lives.
A project we began discussing with Loaves and Fishes awhile ago seems particularly relevant and is included in our annual report from 2005 on our website, www.arpps.org and here is a brief outline;
ARPPS Homeless Job Training Project (AHJTP)
We facilitated a series of monthly meetings in 2005 with representatives from Loaves and Fishes, the North Sacramento Chamber of Commerce, Sacramento Employment Training Agency (SETA), Mutual Assistance Program, Downtown Partnership, Homelessness Board, and Wellsprings Women’s Center, to develop a job training program for the homeless cleaning up the Parkway, based on the Ready, Willing, & Able model.
Here is the concept and the draft we came up with, which is now being considered by Councilmember Steve Cohn, and ultimately we hope, the City Council.
AHJTP Draft Concept
A job training, job development, and business creation program involving the recent homeless, who receive training and full-time jobs cleaning up the Lower American River Parkway, encompassing the Discovery Park, Woodlake Reach and Cal Expo area, eventually expanding to the Del Paso Boulevard area of North Sacramento, the Downtown area and the Capital Station District of Sacramento.
The first-year pilot project, focusing on the lower American River Parkway will consist of three two-person crews, working under one supervisor, using large push buckets or carts, and brooms, rakes, shovels, etc, loading refuse into a truck for hauling while separating recyclable material for redemption.
The program will move to the Del Paso Boulevard Area in the second year (six two-person crews and two supervisors), and
Downtown and Capital Station area in the third year (twelve two-person crews and four supervisors).
AHJTP Draft Funding Concept
The program will seek, after the first subsidized year, paying contracts with local business and government agencies, with the eventual goal of it becoming a private enterprise owned and operated by the formerly homeless.
An excerpt from the article this morning.
Portrait: A second chance
Eric Brenmark had to hit bottom before he could find redemption
- Bee Columnist Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, October 22, 2006
In an ambitiously ruinous life of chronic drug abuse and deceit, Eric Brenmark's decisive moment of clarity came one summer afternoon two years ago while he was sitting hooked up in the back of a police car.
Such posture often prompts enlightenment.
Hardly a crime wave, Brenmark had just run a stoplight on his bicycle. And was now cooling his heels, nabbed for outstanding warrants on petty theft charges and sundry citations for illegal camping on the river. For Brenmark, then 54 years old, jobless, no place to go, the futility of his plight, the pointlessness of his existence, finally pierced the fog.
"I just got the feeling that I couldn't do this anymore," he says. "I needed help. I needed God's help. I asked God to help me." One wonders how many times God has heard these expedient plea bargains before, these vows of reform in exchange for a reprieve. No matter. Mercy was given.
Or maybe Brenmark's deliverance was because of the intercession of his mother, a powerful beacon of light and perseverance, who, going on 40 years, never stopped praying for her son's recovery, never lost faith that he would one day return to the fold.
God's pity or not, Brenmark got another chance at sobriety, redemption. "I don't know," he says when asked why his woe warranted such special attention. "I don't know. The question for me is not why, but what am I going to do with this (opportunity)?"
On a recent morning, Eric Brenmark is sitting in a thrift-store loveseat, his feet propped up on a coffee table. He's been in this transitional-living apartment in the north area for the past month. With the exception of a couple of plants, the place is pretty much a white, blank shell. But it's better than his earlier residence, the riverbank.
