State-sponsored website with information to obtain food stamps. Single Illinois residents qualify for $149/month of food stamps, as well as other types of assistance such as rent and medical help.
http://gettingfoodstamps.org has valuable, general information for anyone looking to receive food assistance. It also tells you how to apply and what you need. Spectacular! Massachusetts typically gives $155/month to VISTAs.
On the first week with DANEnet, and now I'm relearning everything I once knew about HTML and then some! I'm also going to be administrating some sites using Drupal, so if anyone here uses Drupal and would be a good resource, it would be great if I could throw questions at you if I needed it!
And I have my meeting for food stamps on February 7th!
Also, to clarify, is there NO CTC conference this year? And what are the exact dates of the NTEN conference in DC? Let me know, thanks!
Of course, Ben Sheldon's doing the Drupal.
Also, our guest blogger this month, former VISTA Morgan Sully is also doin the Drupal.
And, Rebecca White, current CTC VISTA is doin the Drupal.
Brittney Fosbrook in San Francisco and also Jessie Rothschuh in LA. John Miller in Lowell as well might have some answers.
Basically, ask away your questions and we'll try to help.
Also, I'm trying to set up a strictly Drupal conference call, which when it happens, you should definitely join.
Wow...I'm glad everybody seems to be having a super-fun time in San Diego. I've spent the whole week updating 16 iBooks, using only a single installation disc, and a slow internet connection. fun.
Also, I finally got around to applying for food stamps. I'm not sure how much they are giving me, but it's not going to be as much as I had hoped. It turns out that if I had applied BEFORE the PSO, none of my "living stipend" would count as income, but having applied after my term of service began, it all counts as income. Making me poor, but not poor enough.
Where are you going to post your video? May I plug Blip.tv, then you could tag it "ctcvista" and it'll show up on our site! Check out my vlog on Blip if you'd like - http://mizzd2006.blip.tv/.
Did you hear anything yet from the MNN folks about digital distribution?
I had a meeting with a couple other PCM folks last week, where we discussed the possibility of working with MNN (and a few other places around the country) on a digital distrubution network. I don't know a whole lot about it yet, but I think something should be happening with that fairly soon.
I guess I've been here two and a half weeks now; it feels so normal now that I'm wondering what to say about it.
I get the impression that my organization (the California Coalition for Rural Housing, CCRH) is very different from most of the others. We're a suite of offices rather than a community center, and I haven't yet had any contact with the population we serve. Scratch that; our audience is the affordable housing community, rather than individuals. We work with groups like other affordable housing nonprofits, town governments, lobbyist groups, and tenants' associations. So in terms of the people aspects of our work, sitting in on conference calls and going to meetings is where it's at (though hopefully I will be involved in some GIS trainings later in my service).
Since living cheaply is a concern for us, I thought I would share this resource that was shared with me. Since there appear to be a few of you that, for many different reasons, don't qualify for food stamps, there is a group called Angel Food Ministries that has no income verification and anyone can purchase their boxes of food. If you read the About Us page, it tells how they got started and what the boxes of groceries typically contain.
It looks as though there are locations all over the U.S. so take a look and see if there is something in your area. The menu is posted for October and changes every month. The only catch is that you have to pay for your groceries approximately 2 weeks before you can pick them up, but for $25, who cares about the wait!! There are add on packs for $18 each month that change as well.
according to stuff online, i don't think i am eligible for food stamps since i have too much savings (too much being more than the limit of $2,000). savings in an ira must be included toward this limit, even though according to wikipedia "a debtor in bankruptcy can exempt his or her IRA from the bankruptcy estate" and this seems like it should be a similar situation.
Wow, "how much unnecessary stuff must one have/buy before it is wrong?," that's a deep philosophical question. I'm not sure how to answer that. Who decides what is unnecessary? Are things that are unnecessary for one necessary for another? Or is there a hard and fast rule?
Technically all one 'needs' is shelter, food, and water. But I believe everyone's lives should be richer than merely having those needs met. Though I don't believe anyone deserves to live in mansions, have five cars, and gold plated socks. But I have a lot of unnecessary souvenirs that I'd be quite upset if someone decided that I wasn't allowed to keep them.
I'd also like to say that I agree that there are a lot of strange things about our "health benefits" plan. Preventative care is so much smarter and saves much more money in the long run. Like so many businesses these days, the people that decided on this are not looking beyond the short term. Short sightedness has a strangle hold on our society just as much as material possessions do.
1- you are on a budget and could be making a lot more money for the work that you are doing, so there is no reason you should feel bad about it.