9 0 0 0 0 6B Wednesday, September 22, 2010 // The Statement Three miles from town is a make- shift homeless shelter called Camp Take Notice. With weekly meetings, an executive board and strict rules on drug use, the camp is more forthese 30 or so individu- als than just a place to live - it's a community. BY SUZANNE JACOBS PHOTOS BY JAKE FROMM TOP: Chairs for the weekly camp meeting set up in front of the camp's communal tent. Residents of Camp Take Notice use the tent as a stor- age space, a makeshift kitchen and a place to gather and socialize. little more than three miles west of the University is a small, unassuming patch of woods wedged between Wagner Road and I-94. To any passersby, the unkempt piece of land is nothing more than a blur on their periphery,but tosome, theunder- belly of that thick canopy of leaves is home - at least for now. Camp Take Notice is an adult-only, self-governing, drug and alcohol-free community of individuals who, for reasons specific to each person, can't afford traditional housing. So, inhab- itants resort to living in tents, a basic form of shelter they can provide for themselves. Looking around at the 20 to 30 resi- dents of CTN, it might not take long to see a familiar face, maybe even a few. That's because during the day, the campers venture into town to go to work or look for work if they are unem- ployed, to stop by the public library, to visit friends and family or to do any number of other activities any typical Ann Arbor resident might do. During his stay at the camp this summer, CTN resident Mikey, for example, usually got up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. for the free breakfast offered at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church on North Division. After breakfast, he headed to the libraryto check his email and then looked around town for work as a day laborer. For Mikey, distinctions between him and the rest of the com- munity lay only in where he lives. "Once I get into town, I'm just, you know, another person walking down the sidewalk," he said with a casual shrug and flick of his cigarette. "That's really the only difference between me and the guy next to me walking down the sidewalk, is at the end of the day he goes home to his house, I go home to my tent." Mikey, 31, drove a shuttle bus at the Detroit Metro Airport for four years until he was laid off at the beginning of this summer. He was one of many air- port employees, he said, who lost their jobs to the recession and were denied unemployment benefits. After about two and a half months without any sort of income, Mikey eventually found himself at the Delonis Center - a homeless shelter on Huron Avenue. After being asked to leave the shelter for using the elevator without permission from a staff member, he sought refuge at CTN. Mikey said he knew about the camp because he had visited it as a volunteer when living at the shelter. Like Mikey, everyone at the camp has their own story to tell, but onething they all have in common is the part where they pitch a tent at CTN. Ann Arbor native Caleb Poirier founded CTN in 2009. His story began a few years prior, when a medical con- dition led to him losing his job as a paramedic at the University hospital. Not wanting his friends and family to see him in a situation where he could not provide for himself, Poirier moved to Seattle, Washington. Without any income, he soon became homeless and took shelter at a local 100-person tent city run by the non-profit organization Seattle Housing and Resource Effort. By the end of his two years in Seattle, Poirier had become a community orga- nizer for the camp. The possibility of starting a tent city in Ann Arbor started to creep into Poirier's mind after a family emergency brought him back from the west coast in August 2008. Upon his return, he began to realize that the shelter system in Washtenaw County could not ade- quately accommodate the local home- less population. According to Ellen Schulmeister, executive director of the Shelter Asso- ciation of Washtenaw County, the limited capacity of the shelter system leaves about 200 to 300 people out on the streets on any given night. "There isn't a community that I know of that has enough shelter beds," she said. "It's very hard to have a shelter bed for everybody who needs one." The Washtenaw County Office of Community Development reported that the number of homeless individu- als in the county grew from 3,940 in 2006 to 4,618 in 2009, and Schulmeis- ter said she expects the recession to push that number even higher. She noted that any individual who make less than 15 dollars an hour would have trouble finding affordable housing in Ann Arbor. In the face of this harsh reality, Poiri- er began to conceptualize CTN. He said he started out by simply forming friend- ships within the homeless community and having "thousands of one-on-one conversations with people" about the idea of a tent city. The camp began to materialize when Poirier started shar- ing his camping supplies with other people who, in turn, shared their sup- plies with additional people. Poirier said that homelessness, like death and taxes, will always exist, but he hopes that CTN can serve as a tem- porary solution while people get back on their feet. "I'm not attempting (to) create a uto- pia," he said. "What I am shooting for is having an intermediate step, a lowest rung on the ladder for people to climb out of poverty." In June of last year while the camp was still in its infancy, Poirier met Brian Nord, a doctoral student in the physics department at the University. The two got to talking about the pros- pect of a tent community, and inspired by Poirier's vision, Nord decided to get involved. Nord said that far too often he saw people walk by panhandlers on the street and glance down at them with reproachful looks on their faces, as if to say "Just get a job, man." He felt that the disconnect between the homeless community and the rest of Ann Arbor came largely from ignorance and stigma and that telling someone to "just get a job" was an unrealistically simple solution for a complicated and nuanced problem. In CTN, Nord said, he saw the pos- sibility to create a positive environment for the homeless and a medium through which to educate the rest of the com- munity about the homeless population. "(The camp) centralizes this group of people that want to have a little bit better environment to live in, which means that if people want to change their habits and their lifestyle, then the rest of the community is more efficient- ly able to help them," he said. "I think that's a really big positive." Nord is now the president of the board of directors of the non-profit group Michigan Itinerant Shelter Sys- tem: interdependent Out of Necessity (MISSION), which Nord said serves as CTN's "buffer to the outside world." As trespassing laws have forced the camp to move several times - it start- ed behind the Toys R' Us at Arborland then relocated to an area of public land near I-94 off of Ann Arbor-Saline Road and in May arrived at its current loca- tion off of Wagner Road - MISSION has served as the camp's conduit to law- yers and law enforcement officers. While MISSION facilitates interac- tions between the camp and the com- munity at large, business within CTN is dealt with entirely by those staying at the camp through democratic self- governance. Every Thursday night, the residents congregate in a big circle and hold a formal, mandatory camp meeting. The meeting always begins with nomina- tions for a chair and a minute taker, followed by introductions around the circle and a review of the minutes from the previous meeting. Typical topicson the meeting's agen- da include sanitation and safety con- cerns, but occasionally, the camp has more serious issues to address. On a balmy Thursday night in mid_ August, for example, two recent events at the camp - a drug overdose and a one-night stay by a minor - threatened the integrity of the camp and chal- lenged its residents to come up with better ways to avoid such incidents in the future. Always wary of goings on at CTN attracting too much attention from local authorities, the residents held nothing back when discussing the serious issues before them. At times tempers flared and accusations flew, but no one left the circle until a con- sensus was made on how to better enforce camp policies. By the end of the meeting, the camp voted that those elected to the security committee would enforce a strict zero- tolerance policy when dealing with drugs and alcohol in the camp, and would remove anyone who violates that policy on the first strike. The residents also voted that anyone who wishes to stay at the camp must be able to prove through some form of identification that he or she is overthe age of 18. The unwavering determination of the residents at that meeting to main- tain the respectability and legitimacy of the camp was a clear testament to how much they value the community that has formed in that small patch of woods. While obvious difficulties come with A bathroom attendant caught Bruno Mars using cocaine in the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel's casino bathroom early Sunday morning. Mars, whose real name is Peter Hernandez, is set to have his debut album released in two weeks. Former Brighton, Mich. defense at- torney Ronald James Plunkett was sentenced to three years of proba- tion Monday for providing cocaine to a 22-year-old Ypsilanti woman who died of a drug overdose in his Ann Arbor apartment. Pope Benedi visit to Grea years Thursc controversy abuse allega protest in Ed victims of pm 01 2 4 5 6 7 89 10 quotes of the week on the cheap "Now is not the time to take it down a notch. Now is the getting home on a budget time for all good men to freak out for freedom." STEPHEN COLBERT, Comedy Central host, announcing he will host a rally called "March to Keep Fear Alive" in an effort to compete against colleague Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" at the same time and place. "It's a terrific performance. It's the performance of his career." CASEY AFFLECK, director of "I'm Still Here," speaking of Joaquin Phoenix's act- ing both on- and off-stage as a drug-addicted aspiring rapper, pausing his acting career for two years to make the documentary. "While it may be an act of God, it doesn't make it any easier for us." MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, mayor of New York City, on the brief but powerful ILLUSTRATON BYKATlE EBETS storm, including two tornadoes, that affected New York City and its sur- rounding area Thursday, killing at least one person and injuring others. rom time to time, it's nice to escape the University chaos and get back to the quiet safety lof our childhood homes. Unfortunately, however, weekend getaways don't come without a price tag. So, if you need a weekend away, here's how to get home on the cheap. the rules For those who live too far to drive home, it can seem unreasonable to leave campus for a _ _ _r_ _ _ _ _ _weekend. But there are ways to get around the sky-high flight prices. When booking a flight, make sure you choose a popular destination and time to leave. Airlines often overbook and No. 266: No. 267: No. 268: need volunteers to be "bumped" to a later flight, typically with a thank you in the form of a Facebook Don't ever e-mail a Hamburgers are the $300 travel voucher. If that doesn't work, just complain. After you land, just write a letter to Don't Fthe airline complaining about anything - a rude flight attendant, lost luggage, plane delays, friend someone when professor on your new burritos. you name it - and ask for them to compensate you. Chances are they will. they're in the same middle school hotmail If you're lucky enough to live within driving distance of the University and don't have a car, just mooch off friends. Whether you live in Chicago or West Bloomfield, chances are you can room as you. account. find a friend who lives there too. Or, if all else fails, there is always hitchhiking. Have advice for life on the cheap? Let us know E-mail onthecheap@umich.edu. by the num bersCOURTESY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES The number of gay and lesbian individu- The number of people kicked out The number of votes the Democrats needed als estimated to be currently serving in the of the service underthe "don't ask, to pass a bill that would allow the repeal of military. don't tell" policy. "don't ask, don'ttell." The vote was 56 to 43. Wednesday, September 2 2010 // The Statement 36 - 0 - -3 news in review Five of the most talked-about stories of the week, ranked in ascending order of actual importance ct XVI marked his first In a surprise outcome of the Dela- t Britain in almost 30 ware Republican Senate primary, Tea day, amid a storm of Party candidate Christine O'Donnell surrounding child sexual beat GOP Rep. Mike Castle, despite tions - there was a complaints that O'Donnell illegally lingburgh, Scotland of spent $20,000 of campaign money edophilic priests. in 2009 and 2010. ---------------------, -------, A Democratic efforts to have the "don't ask, don't tell" law repealed suffered a major setback Tuesday, when the party failed to win the 60 votes needed to advance a defense bill with a provision to conditionally repeal the law.