Our January meeting’s key speaker is former Assembly Member Howard Wayne who will provide his insights on the 2014 elections.
Howard has usually been our Annual Winter Party speaker at our December meetings providing a review of the year, but with the number of great candidates at that last meeting, Howard graciously postponed his annual update to January.
Come and find out what the hot races and key issues will be in 2014 – he will be the main featured speaker after the introduction of any candidates who are present, and the latest news on the election. After his Preview of 2014 Howard will take questions until 5:00pm.
Cynara Velazquez will update us with the the latest on the race for mayor of San Diego and the David Alvarez Campaign. Learn what the campaign has planned between now and the election, and how our forces in OB and Point Loma can most effectively contribute to David Alvarez’s successful bid to become the next Democratic Mayor of San Diego!
Jeeni Criscenzo, will be sharing her insight into the state of emergency in San Diego with regard to affordable housing and how Amikas, the organzation she founded in 2009, has evolved to impact this crisis.
Amikas addresses homelessness with affordable, innovative housing solutions for the San Diego Region’s most vulnerable population – women and children, with a focus on military veterans. They opened Amikas House in 2012 as a transitional home to help women get through a difficult time and get stabilized so they could move on to permanent housing. What they have now is a full house of incredible women who struggle to pay the $300 – $400 rent we charge them to cover our costs.
Even if a single woman or mom is lucky enough to have a full-time job, making $10 an hour, if they use the HUD 30%-of-income for housing formula, they’d need to find a place for $420 per month! That’s the ideal situation – many women are only making minimum wage… or can’t find a job… or have a past eviction… bad credit… a bunch of kids… and there simply is nowhere in San Diego they can afford to live! Tere is no realistic exit plan from transitional housing and HUD thinks the way to solve that problem is to de-fund transitional housing! Since most Amikas House residents can’t transition, Amikas House is doing the transitioning – by becoming a permanent housing solution, called “transition-in-place”.
Amikas House and the Amikas Double-Up Program (AD-UP) provide and facilitate group and shared housing where very low income women, with or without children, can pay a low rent that is made possible because they are sharing the rental with one or more women. Amikas gives perference to veteran women, who are now the fastest growing population that are homeless. They are doing this without government funding on a shoestring budget.
Jeeni Criscenzo is an activist, writer and poet who belives that if you want to change the world, you just have to roll up your sleeves and do it – starting right in your own neighborhood. She was the Democratic candicate for Congress in 2006, running aginst Darrell Issa. A serial entrepreneur, she ran an ad agency in Long Island, a web development business in Tampa and travelled the country in an RV as an activist blogger in 2004. She’s been able to apply all of the lessons and experise she’s acquired along the way to this latest effort – ending homelessness with real, local solutions.
to let us know how many are coming.
4:00PM – 5:30PM
Point Loma Assembly, 3035 Talbot Street, San Diego, CA
For additional info call Susan Peinado at (619) 800-5098
Directions and parking information
Social Time Members are encouraged to get together from 3:30pm before the meeting starts, please bring whatever light drinks/snacks that you’d like to share. After the meeting ends everyone is invited to adjourn to locally-owned nearby venues to continue progressive conversations.
As the Point Break Cafe outside deck is getting a bit chilly of an evening we’ve changed our regular post-meeting venues to either The Living Room Cafe 1018 Rosecrans Street, just across the street behind the Credit Union, or The Wine Pub 2907 Shelter Island Dr, that has an outside patio with a fire pit (and parking in the Union Bank parking lot behind the pub).
POINT LOMA & OB DEMS 