Category: News
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“They Were Locked In, We Were Locked Out”: A Story of Lockdown and Homelessness in Harvard Square
It was 22 March 2020. There were about 12 of us living in the shelter. Saturday morning was our last day there. We had no place to go. It would be my first day outside with nothing open, no restrooms, no place to sit and have a hot cup of tea, it really was hard…
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Cambridge-Based TabletConnect Helps Families Worldwide Communicate Face-to-Face During COVID-19
In the early days of pandemic-era social distancing, Steven Trambert realized his family had a serious problem. His 96-year-old grandmother had been in the hospital and, given the high risks of infection facing the elderly, she was suddenly off-limits. His family had no way of getting in to see her face-to-face or, due to her…
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Abby DeRigo Named Executive Director of the Homeless Empowerment Project and Spare Change News
The board of the Homeless Empowerment Project and Spare Change News has chosen Abby DeRigo, a recent graduate of Suffolk University, to lead the organization as it adapts to the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic and moves forward into the new normal. “The pandemic obviously changed everything that I had been thinking about. Now things…
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The Changes Come So Fast
My wife, Mary Esther, and I celebrated our wedding anniversary on June 22. We were married in 2002 and the time has just whipped by. So many different things have happened; it’s all good but sometimes there are hard surprises. Mary Esther has scoliosis, stenosis and various other things wrong with her spine. She had…
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With Spare Change News closed, a local fund awards one SCN vendor-writer a way to pay rent
Governor Baker’s March 23 emergency order for all non-essential businesses to close impacted Spare Change News and its vendors like myself significantly. Spare Change News closed its doors for 11 weeks and reopened Friday, June 12. Over the past three months, I sold older back issues to the public in my Coolidge Corner, Brookline spot.…
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Covid-19 and cages on Boston’s Methadone Mile
Just before all hell broke loose in Minnesota and Kentucky, I happened upon a story shared by a friend and done by Turtle Boy Daily News that said homeless people on Methadone Mile were being locked into a cage. I saw the pictures, but I still couldn’t believe it. Even knowing that I was at…
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A New Normal
In a recent ad by Joe Kennedy, who’s running for one of the U.S. Senate seats in Massachusetts, he talks about how now there’s “talk to go back to normal. Our normal was broken.” As far as political ads go, it’s effective. I began to think: exactly what was normal, and what the heck is…
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All We Are Saying
The world we live in has been rocked by crisis after crisis. First the Coronavirus slipped in amongst us, taking, at first, the most vulnerable populations from our nursing homes, Veterans’ Homes, Senior Living Facilities and then attacking the people who have the least access to medical care because they are financially stressed, Black and…