Let's meet the challenges together

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We build our efforts to meet your needs, our community of partners. Only with your help can we coordinate our efforts to provide meaningful solutions. This is not a spectator sport, everyone needs to be in the game. We need you!

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Contents

Urgent: we seek a "fiscal sponsor"
Meeting our needs together
Safety requires cooperation of landlords & tenants
Adapting our mission
Partnering with law students & Professor David Yamada

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Urgent: We seek a "fiscal sponsor" We have applied for a grant to strengthen our ability to help you. With it we will expand the Coalition outreach; support our research, educational, and advocacy efforts; and to create an organizational non-profit structure to assure broader inclusion, growth, and a strong base for continuity.

Before the end of this month we need to find a nonprofit 501.c.3 organization that can be a fiscal umbrella until we get our own 501.c.3. This is a common solution for small non-profits; the umbrella nonprofit takes a fee for oversight and administrative work.

All we need now is a "fiscal sponsor" letter. Nothing can happen until/unless we get the funding, at which time we will create a formal organization.

Please suggest any possible fiscal sposor organization that we should talk to.

Please write to Coordinator@StopBullyingCoalition.org

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Meeting our needs together

Like you, I am in protective isolation. How can we meet the needs of tenants in this situation.

What must we have in this difficult time?

• safe transport, ie., to a doctor or dentist? Not prudent to depend on buses, cabs, Uber, Lyft---potentially spreading the virus.
• Delivery of food, medicines; for example, senior center organizes volunteers to do shopping
• social connection    
• mental health support: where can we find professional people online who are qualified and willing to offer emotional support and guidance? What role for peer counseling?
• solutions to the needs of disabled tenants
• Other needs or issues?

We need to find and create solutions to help each other, as well as to advocate for agencies and authorities to take action.

How can we take care of these needs, and/or enlist others in the effort?

Please write to Coordinator@StopBullyingCoalition.org

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Virtual meetings with Zoom and You

We will soon begin a series of virtual meetings using Zoom so we can meet each other and share our needs and resources.  All you need is a phone, smart phone, laptop or any other form of computer. A camera on your phone or computer is great but you can just take part with audio on your phone. And of course, an internet connection which you have on your smart phone or by cable or wi-fi.

Are you interested?

Please write to Coordinator@StopBullyingCoalition.org

 

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Safety requires cooperation of landlords & tenants

Public health protocols

• Need to clean and sanitize all public areas
• How can we encourage landlords to do their important role?
• How can they be transparent?
• How can we do oversight?
• We need to keep our distance from everyone else and we need to wash and sanitize to protect each other

Please write to Coordinator@StopBullyingCoalition.org

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Adapting the mission

The world as we knew it a couple of weeks ago has changed. We need to adapt our lives as well as the mission and strategies of the Coalition. We're in a fragile lifeboat afloat on an angry sea, and to reach a safe shore, we need to work together.

The primary focus of our work to date has been research to better understand the roots of bullying, the sources, and the remedies. The goal is to stop bullying in order to enable empowered tenants to work with managers and landlords to develop a healthy community for all tenants.

For the foreseeable future, everyone must do social distancing and therefore we may see a reduction in bullying, at least in the public areas of housing.

How can we combat the new emerging problems (some very similar to what we see in victims of bullying): loss of social support, social isolation, loneliness, stress, depression.

Our educational and advocacy strategy is likely to shift because of the epidemic and there is a lot we can do to serve the same or an extended population.

For example, we were ahead of the CDC in working to publish public health protocols specific to public housing environments including protocols for tenants as well as landlords.
 

What are the areas of concern that we should address?

Please write to Coordinator@StopBullyingCoalition.org

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Partnering with students of David C. Yamada, Professor of Law and Director, New Workplace Institute, Suffolk University Law School


I just had an online Zoom meeting with law students in the Law and Psychology Lab of David C. Yamada, Professor of Law and Director, New Workplace Institute, Suffolk University Law School. Yamada is a leading figure in the effort to create legal protections against bullying in the workplace.

A wonderful team of three students prepared a review of the Stop Bullying Coalition website and presented a critique and a number of very helpful recommendations for clarifying and organizing content. They also developed a very effective factsheet to quickly present our core mission and engage people in our work.

I am very grateful to Professor Yamada and the class, especially for the excellent work of the team. I intend to implement their suggestions, they reminded me to focus on answering the needs of visitors to our web site.

Tenants are, I believe, looking for support, a handbook of what they can do to stop the bullying, and how they can find healthy community. Is there something else? Revising and focusing the material will keep us busy while we wait for the COVID-19 epidemic to end. 

Anyone out there who is proficient in Drupal design and/or programming and can volunteer to help?

Please write to Coordinator@StopBullyingCoalition.org
 

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This is democracy. This is what we do.