The Women's Center in Cambridge is falling apart.

The house is 145 years old and needs major renovations.  It needs so many repairs, appliances and other resources that it would take months to inventory and report them all.  

Although the Center is not specifically for homeless women, because it is free, many poor and homeless women spend most of their time there.  The staff are almost all volunteers and interns; they are paid nothing for monitoring the house and for dealing with the issues which inevitably occur whenever several people have to co-occupy space for most of every week. 

The hours of the Center, from 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Monday-Friday, and from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, give much more time for people than either On The Rise or The Women's Lunch Place.  The latter organizations have gobs of money from contributions and funding.  Although On The Rise and The Women's Lunch Place say that they provide support to poor and homeless women, and that this support is their primary mission, I can tell you that neither place does anything to engage its clients in planning for the future, investing their time in worthwhile activities, or moving toward independent and sustainable living.  Clients are there for years, decades, eating, sleeping and, at On The Rise, watching television.  That's not support for people in a time of need; that is enabling.  

That enabling, the tacit acceptance that low levels of functioning are all that their clients are capable of, made On The Rise incapable of accurately perceiving me in the midst of all of my endeavors to be treated fairly in one situation after another where I was being abused and I asked for advocacy from On The Rise.  On The Rise did nothing to stop my being mistreated at the crisis unit at the South Shore Mental Health Center where I had a Department of Mental Health bed in 2015; that situation was traumatic for months and could not have had a more vicious, degrading and dangerous end for me.  Speaking of that facility, I'm sure that it still doesn't have a sink in the unit, despite having a refrigerator and a cabinet full of food and dinner deliveries from a restaurant every night, and that food waste overflows in the trash cans on the unit every day.  April is also the month when all heat is shut off in that building; probably, the budget for blankets has also not increased.  It was very cold at that building at night by April 2015, when I was taken, sobbing, from the building by force, driven to an Emergency Room, and forced into a locked psychiatric unit, after months of being unable to stop the harassment by one male client after another.  It's true that, at that facility, I refused to sign up for their "support services"; being a seasoned (over a quarter of a century) client of the mental health care system, and having been harassed in every mental health care setting since 2010 because of the conglomerate, I did not want my reports of harassment at the unit to be met with attempts by the "support services" to force more medication down my throat.  I also refused the one housing situation that the facility offered to me; because I had so many stalkers, men from all over the country who drove to the Boston area, followed me in their vehicles and parked by the side of the road both at night and broad daylight everywhere, I did not think that a house with no security system would be safe for me or for the other clients whom the facility wanted me to have as housemates.  My refusal to sign up for "support services" at that unit meant that they were trying to throw me out of the unit for months; if it weren't for the blizzard of 2015, and the snow almost covering the windows at that building, I'd have spent most of that winter snowed in with everyone else at the Pine Street Inn.  

If the food budget at South Shore Mental Health is obesity-promoting and the budget for heat, blankets and towels is miserly, it's probably because the staff eat the food but don't have to sleep or shower at the unit.  If there's no sink in the "kitchen" at that unit, so that there's nowhere for people to wash their hands before they touch the refrigerator and cabinet and the food, and after they eat, that's probably because the staff also don't have to live at the unit, even for a few days or a week.  If the Department of Mental Health pays more than it wants to pay for heat during the winter, despite the DMH's sickening lack of concern for how cold Massachusetts is at this time of year, it's probably because the heating system is old and DMH hasn't made the building energy efficient.  

On The Rise did nothing to advocate appropriately for me when I was first harassed, and retaliated against for reporting the harassment, at Bunker Hill Community College.  On The Rise did nothing to appropriately advocate for me when I was victimized by voyeurism and retaliated against for reporting it in the second apartment in a row where this has happened to me in the Boston area.  

Don't think that there was ever an apology to me from anyone at On The Rise for the losses to me because of that agency's ineptitude and condescension. All of my work, the 24-hour misery of being homeless, my years of futile housing searches, my studying during every available hour so that I did have a 4.0 average during my first semester at school in 2016 before the school administration attacked me for reporting being harassed, my paying my rent on time and having an apartment that was so clean and organized that wealthy people who watched me from the hidden, illegal cameras in my apartment ridiculed me for it (while their servants cooked and cleaned for them), my doing everything that I could to be pleasant to the 2nd property management in a row that was criminally violating my rights, all of it was thrown away by On The Rise and by every other social services system whose job it is to protect my rights.  They had no motivation to care or to take responsibility for providing the support of saying "Lena is not delusional, lazy or a difficult person," which would have made the school administration back off from blaming me, the police take me seriously, and the property management stop abusing me.  I would not be homeless again, and I'd be near graduating instead of having been treated like a criminal and my academic career destroyed, if people whose job it is to support me hadn't used my stigma to excuse their own misperceptions, laziness, and cruelty.  

Everything that I said about the probability that voyeurism was happening at On The Rise was ignored by the management; I was subsequently victim-blamed by the conglomerate for my inability to stop the voyeurism.  I don't even know if the cameras were ever taken out of that bathroom; for all I know, poor and homeless women have been livestreamed to the Internet, using the toilet and taking showers there, for 6 or 7 years.  

I hope that this blog page results in a re-examination of allocation of funding for On The Rise and The Women's Lunch Place, making continuation of the funding contingent on proof that staff seek to engage clients in taking responsibility for their lives.  I would ask that funding for the clinic at The Women's Lunch Place not be reduced for any reason.  

Since I'm discussing all of the support that I have never had to stop being abused by the conglomerate and those who follow the conglomerate's promotion of crime and human rights abuses, perhaps this is the appropriate time to remind people that I also had no support from the mental health agency that facilitated my renting the first apartment in the Boston area, (it was a suburb of Boston, which I'm calling the Boston area), where I was victimized by voyeurism and then hit with an eviction case for confronting the property management, and from which I was evicted into the snow in February 2014.  I had no real support, either, from the community agency that the judge for that case made me work with or be evicted during the first of several court hearings.  

Most of the public doesn't realize how much the social services for poor and stigmatized people tend not to be on the side of their clients; a lot of people who work at those jobs think their job is to assume that every client's problems are his or her own fault, and that apologizing to their clients' retaliatory abusers is advocacy.