This year more than ever, your donations and memberships will mean the world to somebody
We can’t weave a world of peace in streets full of homeless people
Homelessness has tentacles. People in Fayetteville who make less than $18 an hour (lots of us) are on a cliff edge that makes housing feel fragile. REALLY fragile.
An illness. A car breakdown. A sick child. Small things can push us, or people we care about, over that edge.
Those tentacles of uncertainty reach out to make everyone in the community less secure. Some feel sympathy for people in need—others may feel it threatens their way of life—but everyone’s disturbed by the presence of desperate people on our streets.
The last election didn’t make anything less uncertain. The new administration won’t waste any sympathy on vulnerable folks.
When it comes to taking care of each other, communities that care may find ourselves on our own more than ever. But housing is a primary justice issue of our times, and none of us are immune. Those folks who have fallen over the edge live in hidden systems of injustice that are tough to escape without help. It weakens our community’s precious sense of connection and erodes Fayetteville’s thriving economy.
If the fabric of our community unravels from the bottom it threatens the peace and stability of our entire area. But this is where we are. And we need your help. We need to tackle this together.
For the past year, some of us in the OMNI community have explored the housing and homelessness crisis in Fayetteville deeply together. We want to understand it and do something.
There are two action projects at OMNI we’d like you to know more about:
- The Homeless Solutions Project — a group that’s been learning for action since August 2023. Many wonderful speakers have shared the work they do to help unhoused people. Every month’s program was an education and an inspiration. When the Fayetteville Housing Crisis Task Force was appointed this summer, we shifted into advocacy to alert the Task Force to the hardships of many city residents. Homeless Solutions meets the first Thursday of every month.
- OMNI’s also deep into planning for Gateway Village, an attractive village of pod housing where 20 or so unhoused people can stay with dignity while they wait for the real homes the city’s Task Force promises. This village will be a safe, clean, and environmentally sustainable site where some good people can access the services they need to live safely and legally while they await their own housing. Everyone working on this project is committed to seeing it become a real gift to the city we love and to our neighbors in need.
As we learn to care for the most vulnerable, all of us become more secure. This year your support will not only sustain OMNI as a powerful space to address the critical issues of peace, justice, and a thriving Earth, but will also help us build Gateway Village.
Help us focus Fayetteville’s compassion to show that lives matter to us even when they’re falling apart. We’re as serious about this as you are. Together, we can move our city forward. Please make your gift to OMNI now and be part of a new, more sane and humane world no matter what tentacles are twisting in the political winds.
Thank you, OMNI folks!
OMNI HAPPENINGS
Buffalo River follow-up From the Ozark Society
Arkansas Senate Bill 84 to allow industrial swine CAFOs in the Buffalo River watershed, came before the Senate Agriculture Committee again today. SB84 was placed in a status of “deferred,” meaning it is removed from the…
Environmental & Outdoor Education Conference
Connecting Health and Nature: Building a Sustainable Future Arkansas Tech University, Russellville March 7 & Saturday March 8, 2025 Registration is open for Arkansas Environmental Education Association’s Environmental and Outdoor Education Conference. The conference is…
Housing Crisis Task Force
Meets Weds Feb 19 – 5:30 pm City Hall Room 326 People on this Task Force care about Fayetteville people who are losing their housing, but they need to hear from YOU friends! To come…
Connecting Health and Nature: Building a Sustainable Future
Environmental & Outdoor Education Conference Arkansas Tech University, RussellvilleMarch 7 & Saturday March 8, 2025 Registration is open for Arkansas Environmental Education Association’s Environmental and Outdoor Education Conference. The conference is a professional learning event…
For Gaza, With Love
From Susanna Brinnon Dear Friends, I’ve been wanting to find a way to help the people in Gaza, and I just met Fayettevillian Marriah Berquist who is doing that. One year ago she posted an…
Housing Crisis Task Force
Meets Weds Feb 19 – 5:30 pm City Hall Room 326 People on this Task Force care about Fayetteville people who are losing their housing, but they need to hear from YOU friends! To come…
Arkansas Renters United Meets
Saturday Feb 15 – 1:00 pm – Omni Center, 3274 N. Lee Ave. Renters in Northwest Arkansas are next meeting Saturday February 15 – to talk about their concerns – which are many. Any Omni…
Helping build a future for the next generation of peace people … It’s for all of us
Greetings Peace People out there
To build a future, Omni suggests that Fayetteville build a timebank. In fact it’s already under construction. It’s a good vehicle for creating connection and cohesion, and helping communities get themselves through hard times.
This is Fayetteville. Connected and cohesive is what we want to be, because
we’re all in this together. We have history to build on that will let us do that
when other communities find it a far stretch. One lesson of covid might be that we’ve been shown where healing needs to happen, so we can go there to heal.
Here lies the work of peace.
hOurWorld.org—An internati onal network of neighbors helping neighbors. https://hourworld.org/
Timebank.org—Building the timebanking movement https://timebanks.org/
What is a timebank?
Support Omni
Time-Based Currency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time –
based_currency
Timebanking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come – Yes Magazine 2011
About the time of the Occupy Movement, and during the post-2008 economic crash time-banks got some good press. Cooperative currencies like time dollars are especially helpful during hard economic times. Thankfully, the economy is strong now, but no one expects that to last forever.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/
economy/2011/11/18/time -banking-an-idea-whose-ti me -has-come
NPR 2011 Beyond Barter: Banking on Connections
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/19/138510242/beyond-bartering-banking-oncommunity-connections
The Timebank Solution – Stanford Social Innovation Review 2015. Interview with Time-banks founder Edgar Cahn and Christine Gray
https://ssir.org/arti cles/entry/
the_ti me_bank_solution
OMNI CARES
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