Business

Stone Soup.

It looks like one of the organizations that help folks on the margins reenter social life equipped with new professional skills, is in the process of loosing employment services funding. I am turning to my Multnomah County/PDX friends and readers with an appeal for action today. The rest of you can enjoy my newest montages, or check out if similar cuts are on the docket in your own neighborhoods.

As you know, I care deeply for support of those less privileged than the rest of us, and Stone Soup is a local organization that has done a lot of work to help people back onto their feet with culinary education and job training. They are also first line defenders against hunger among the houseless in our city. I let them speak for themselves below, and am also attaching an easily modifiable template to write to your Multnomah County commissioner – which is the action I recommend today. Your email to your commissioner will perhaps produce momentum towards keeping these services in the FY26 budget for Multnomah County. At least we can try. (If you have forgotten your district number like I did – here is the easy way to find out!)

Stone Soup’s plight:

And here is the Commissioner Outreach Template- Stone Soup PDX

Subject: Restore Employment Services Funding in the FY26 Budget

Dear Commissioner [Last Name],

I’m writing to urge you to reinstate funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. The current proposed budget eliminates this critical funding for service agencies, threatening the ability of organizations like Stone Soup PDX to continue providing essential job training programs.

Stone Soup PDX equips individuals facing employment barriers with the skills they need to secure stable jobs in the food service industry. Without this funding, many of our community’s most vulnerable residents will lose access to workforce development programs that help them build self-sufficiency.

Investing in employment services isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s a smart financial decision. For every $1 invested in Stone Soup PDX, local governments save $8 by reducing reliance on public assistance programs. By supporting job training initiatives, you are strengthening our workforce and ensuring a more economically vibrant Multnomah County.

I strongly urge you and your fellow commissioners to restore funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information]

It’ll take ten minutes and is one of the things we can so easily do to fight budget cuts that hurt the most vulnerable among us. Give it a thought, please! And if you want to link to this appeal on your social media to spread the word, that would be cool as well.

Eaton Wildfire: Facing Insurance.

Many people who have lost their homes and all belongings to the LA wildfires are likely overwhelmed by the multitude of tasks demanded of them at a point in time when all they want to do is crawl under a borrowed blanket and cry. I would be. Heck, I am, if under a blanket I own, given that I sit safely at home in PDX while my kids try to navigate the unknown after the Eaton inferno.

How do you find accommodations? Where do you buy a change of clothes, diapers, food? With what do you pay? How do you deal with your employers, how are you even able to work if sitting in cramped quarters or emergency shelters or can’t breathe for the smog? What do you tell your children why they can’t go home, or to school, or see their friends? How do you make it clear to the many well meaning people who inquire, that you have no clue what the immediate, much less far, future will bring?

And, importantly, who do you contact for insurance questions? Do you have even the names and numbers you need?

Here are a few pieces of information that were either handed down to me by people in the know or found on official websites, just my summary from what I gleaned that would be helpful.

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

For lots of information about getting help after the Eaton (or any) wildfire go here: the non-profit United Policyholders website guides you through various steps towards recovery and also FEMA applications if you are not insured. They have step by step practical and legal information that is extremely helpful.

The California Department of Insurance (DOI) has a website as well. It gives you instructions on how to approach and deal with your insurer.

Their top ten tips include advice how to obtain a copy of your full policy in the first month (they HAVE to give that to you) and answers to your general questions about rebuilding, loss of personal items, and current living expenses (for which they have to give you an advance.)

They remind you to track all your expenses after the fire ( keep receipts!), and to document all the interactions you have: “Record conversations with your insurer/adjuster about your claim and policy limitations in a dedicated claim diary. If your adjuster says something is excluded, limited, or subject to certain conditions, ask the adjuster to point out the specific provision in your policy being cited.”

And this: Get at least one licensed contractor’s estimate or bid on the cost to rebuild your home just to get a reasonable sense of the actual cost as compared to your coverage limits (for more considerations on contractors, view the CDI’s electronic brochure Don’t Get Scammed After a Disaster and check the California’s Contractors State License Board website.) While your insurance company may provide its own estimate, it may contain errors or fail to reflect local conditions or demand surge. Demand surge reflects price increases following a major disaster when contractors and materials are in short supply. (Will be a huge issue in Altadena, no doubt.)

Many more suggestions can be found on their page, including the possibility that you might want to have a public adjuster assess the damage and help you deal with the insurer, rather than the insurers’ own adjuster who knows who they work for. This is a bit of a dilemma – if you hire your own, you have to pay, often a hefty percentage of the reimbursements you eventually receive. Also you need to find one who you can trust, which can be problematic because there are unfortunately scammers out there, lurking at the borders of disaster.

You can, however, look at your insurer’s conduct record to see if they are pretty reliable or if you should have outside help. Here is a website that lists the 50 most frequent insurance companies and their complaint history (the list is conveniently graded from top (best and most reliable) to bottom (worst) by looking a the ratios of justified complaints to number of complaints, as of 2023.

Here is something else to be aware of: The insurer is required to give you their most recent breakdown of their cost estimate for rebuilding your house. Ask for it! You then have to make sure that the info about your house is actually correct.

“Did they ever check with you? Did they ever give you that breakdown to review before now? The breakdown will have a “quality grade”- usually standard, above average, or custom. Above average is supposed to be for tract housing communities. Any house that was built individually and designed by an architect is supposed to be at least “custom.” This one piece of data alone affects your insurance coverage by at least 30%. If they got it wrong, start digging into it NOW. Was your house built on a slope? Increases the cost about 15%. On a long and remote road? Another 15%.”

So what to expect – and bring to – the first interaction with the adjuster?

Contact info and description of current stay (friends, airbnb, shelter etc)
Basics of the lost property: estimated square footage, type of construction.
Try and have a list of all the property you remember in each room ( Oregon folks, for earthquake or fire PREP, it helps to video tape each room slowly with a description of furniture, instruments, artwork, jewelry, library, good china, household appliances, electronics, garage contents, sports equipment like skis or kayaks, clothes etc. Don’t forget ,comforters and linen cost money; so does rain gear and winter boots.) Writing up a list after the fact will be psychologically hard since it makes you remember all that you lost, but it will help to get funds for replacement.
Find out which fire department district protected your home
Info about additional insurance
Bank account number for transfer of funds
Info about your mortgage company

In turn, ask them, again, to give you the full policy details and also an advance for the immediate necessities, rent, clothing, food. They might have recommendations about provisional housing and will need to tell you how much your policy allots. Here the demand surge is likely a problem – it will not increase your stipend for expenses. Housing issues, already such a huge problem, will right now explode exponentially. As did the fires. As did the silence, in much of the mass media coverage of the catastrophe, about the role of climate change in generating ever more frequent and more destructive environmental disasters. Zip. Nada. But that we will discuss in another blog.

For now, tackle the loathsome business of dealing with the administrative burden of insurance. Then take your time in making a decision, DO NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING.

Rebuild? Relocate? So many factors need to be evaluated. The longing for familiarity, the place once home, for the community you cherish and want to recreate, is strong. That is why people return to floodplains and fire-prone areas in the first place. But you also have to consider, if the community can be reestablished given the rebuilding obstacles for many who were underinsured or not at all. This is particularly relevant for Altadena that was an unusually diverse and low-income town. (Historically it attracted Blacks because wealthier White folks avoided the local bad air quality due to the geographical trap for smog that the San Gabriels backdrop provided, catching the north- and westward drift.)

Fear of the unknown and inertia when you are trauma stricken are heavy burdens. But there is also the question of toxicity of the environment, for kids in particular, and the issue how schools and childcare availability will be impacted.

Importantly, there is also the looming threat that further insurance will be unavailable in fire zones exposed to future more frequent and intensifying catastrophes, so close to the canyons.

Insurers are leaving disaster-adjacent states like FL and CA in droves, or hiking rates up so they become unaffordable. Being a climate refugee is unimaginably hard, but being among the first still provides you with affordable options. A decade from now that picture will have changed.

I hope some of this will be of help. I’m crawling back under my blanket.

Bluebird photographs from November at Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery where Octavia E. Butler is buried. She was an astute observer of our society and a brilliant analyst of our history, all of which allowed her to write the Parable of the Sower, not mystically prescient, but thinking things logically through to a likely end, deadly fires and fascistic rule, set by her in 2025.

Music: Here is Pärt’s De Profundis.

Modes of Philanthropy

Does this happen to you as well? A particular topic enters your thoughts and then you see it everywhere you turn?

Philanthropy came to my mind when I stopped at a small history museum in Southern Oregon that was established in the late 50s by an Oregon politician who wanted to help Oregonians remember their history. More on Pottsville in a moment – photographs today are from that site.

I was also wondering about the mechanisms of philanthropy last week when reading about Melinda Gates’ decision to pull out of the Gates Foundation and start moving her philanthropic investment in a different direction.

I was thinking about philanthropy when I heard that multiple Jewish organizations in Oregon cut off their charitable donations to the Oregon Food Bank when the latter called for cease fire in Gaza in a statement critical of Israeli military actions. Never mind that Hamas’ atrocities were condemned as well, and the statement had been discussed with Jewish allies prior to publication. It seems particularly poignant to think of locally increased hunger being the outcome of ideologically motivated decisions when forced starvation of a locked -in region at war has been criticized by many entities across the world.

Last but not least, a chance conversation with a woman a bit younger than myself, elegance personified and a legend in her professional field, raised a different notion of philanthropic involvement: rather than (or in addition to) writing the big checks, with or without strings attached, you quietly contribute by adding your insights and knowledge to help steer non-profits that you are passionate about in a direction that allows them to maximize their impact and develop their full potential. A true form of more or less anonymous giving back.

I had simplistic notions of charitable giving. It can be either ethically or religiously driven, in fact for us in the Jewish realm it is a mitzvah, a commandment, not a choice. (If you are interested in the religious roots of charity, here is a neat summary out of Harvard.)

Giving can be used to promote or preserve a name – think buildings across American or European campuses, sports arenas, concert halls.

It can be a means to erase shame – think of the many donors and board members who make astronomical contributions to cultural institutions like museums, who are eventually called out for where their money came from. I had written about a specific case not so long ago at the Whitney. Recently, the V&A Dundee, the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris severed connections to the Sacklers, a dynasty indelibly linked to the global opioid epidemic, from which some members of the family profited via their company Purdue Pharma. The British National Portrait Gallery severed ties with BP in 2022, the end of a relationship that had lasted more than 30 years.

Consider the Tears

Reading up on the idea of philanthropy, I now learn that people categorize charity in more complex ways as well. (I’m summarizing, among others, from a source here.)

There is Philanthropic Investment which aims to invest resources into nonprofit enterprises in order to increase their ability to deliver programmatic execution. The Philanthropic Investor, like a for-profit investor, is primarily focused on the longer term increase and improvement in programmatic execution relative to grant size. Basically, they are building the organization, rather than engaging in spontaneous charitable giving for whatever need arises in the moment.

Then there are two types of philanthropy that try to affect change systematically. One is Strategic Philanthropy which buys up nonprofit goods and services in a way that aligns with a theory of change defined by the strategic philanthropist. This approach hopes to advance the solution that they believe is most likely to solve the problem they seek to address. The other is Social Entrepreneurism which seeks to directly execute programs that align with a theory of change, defined by themselves. I had previously written about philanthropy that hopes to be a direct agent of change here.

Present or future need – which should be served?

Politics enter the arena of charitable giving of course not only from the side of individual donors with specific goals or groups of protesters who try to influence the flow and acceptance of charitable funds. There exist direct attempts to oversee what can be given to whom, assessing the legality of the donations. Case in point is ‘Not On Our Dime’, a recently (re)introduced bill by New York Assembly member Zohran Mamdani and endorsed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The bill aims to sanction New York charities who send more than $ 60.000.000 a year towards Israeli settlement expansion, that the bill’s sponsors consider to occur in violation of international law.

Much to think about. Far easier to wander around a photographer’s candy store of agricultural machinery gently rusting itself into oblivion, among small buildings recreating villages of yore. The museum itself is only open by appointment, and the fairgrounds serve mostly locals for motorcycle swap meets, parades, fairs and the likes. We were the only living souls in the vicinity, mid-afternoon on a weekday, acres and acres to ourselves.

Pottsville’s founder, Eugene “Debbs” Potts (1909 – 2003) was by all reports quite a character, serving multiple roles, including decades as a state senator. Although named for the famous socialist Eugene W. Debs, his leanings were more centric, voting as a Democrat quite frequently with his Republican colleagues. He donated the land, gave seed money to the non-profit, and eventually contributed his gigantic collection of tools and machinery.

The highlight of my visit came when I saw a few murals by one Mark M. Jones on the sides of the buildings. Landscape scenery was lovingly depicting the wonders of our state,

a rodeo snippet was attributed to Olaf Wieghorst, a Danish-American painter who specialized in depictions of the American frontier in the vein of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

Then this.

My first thought was, “Is he familiar with Oskar Schlemmer?”

Then I read the signage and the referent painting was Farmers Planting Potatoes by van Gogh.

Oh, the surprises of Pottsville. Oh, the generous sharing of one’s means and/or skills for all of us to enjoy.

Long live giving.

Music today was written in 1915 to support charity for refugees. Polonia was first performed at London’s Queen’s Hall at a Polish Victims’ Relief Fund Concert in July 1915, with Elgar conducting. He dedicated the work to his friend Paderewski, a great pianist and later Prime Minister of Poland.

Silk on the Road

· Silk Road: traveling across continents and through the darknet ·

Business
May 28, 2016
1 Comments

Imagine you increased your weight 10.000 times in 6 weeks and then had to move your head 300.000 times to spin yourself into a cocoon with a thread that is between 700 and 1600 meters in length, made by yourself in your mouth while you’re frantically whipping your head….. such is the fate of the silkworm, Bombyx Mori. You need four of those super thin threads combined to be able to weave a silken cloth, and the labor involved of getting the thread out of the cocoon without breaking it, then washing it free of the animal glue, then putting it onto a spindle is a work of art in itself – and explains the high cost of the fabric. Silk has many qualities, warming and cooling at the same time, extremely durable, and gorgeous in its flow – no wonder it was a desired good since antiquity. Certainly it is still used from head to toe.

I was always fascinated by the history of the trans-Asian route known as the Silk Road. Long distance commercial activity can be traced back to 1000 BC to AD 1400, and with it the dissemination of world religions – however only in the direction from West to East. The Silk Road runs along the southern edge of the central Eurasian steppe, where the dry flatlands meet the mountains and runoff streams provide a reliable water supply. It acquired its name from the east to west traffic in Chinese silk, which was popular in imperial Rome. In return, merchants brought gold, silver, and wool to China. The ancient Israelites, ancestors of the Jews, also may have traded along the Silk Road. Jewish tradition holds that Israelite merchants traded with China as early as the 10th century BC, during the reign of King David, although this cannot be confirmed.

The first modern black market (or darknet market) called itself Silk Road as well, but sold all kinds of drugs instead of the woven commodity. It offered its services on the internet, guaranteeing anonymity, attracting unbelievable amounts of traffic. It was finally shut down by the FBI 2 years ago, although we do not necessarily know if there are successors. Here is a short clip on the modern day trading site trying to emulate the economic success of its historic name sake – to a bitter end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SK6rFf0CmY

Classical picture today: women preparing silk (after Master Chang Hsuan.) Unknown

YDP – your daily picture

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YDP – your daily picture

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YDP – your daily picture

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Eaton Wildfire: Facing Insurance.

Modes of Philanthropy

Silk on the Road

· Silk Road: traveling across continents and through the darknet ·