The Evolution Of Stone Soup Station

As my modest number of followers have probably noticed (or perhaps they did not, which says a lot, much of which I'd rather not repeat!) I have been silent here on Stone Soup Station for some months now.

This is primarily because the past couple of years for me - and especially the last year - have been both about professional development and an increasing focus on issues impacting our most vulnerable citizens that have moved considerably outside the purview of "homelessness" I originally started this blog to address.

While my daily work has required tremendous commitment and focus on issues of policy and technical assistance to help transform the Behavioral Health system in our country, a key theme runs like a gnarly, wild hair through almost all of the issues my work crashes headlong into;  poverty and social (in)justice. Give me just about any social problem and upon dissection of the issue, invariably I will be delivered to the doorstep of either one of the two areas, oftentimes both.

These two areas  are often compounded and potentiated by the ignorance of some who create laws and policies, either to address them directly or by the lack of foresight on the ramifications of a policy or law that results in negative impacts to others, ultimately in increasing poverty and/or social injustices in our country.

As a result, the focus of this blog is changing to encompass a broader topic area related to issues of poverty and social justice.

As an independent pragmatist, I do not care from which side of the aisle "a reasonable and logical way of doing things or of thinking about problems" arises. The problem as I see it is that there has been very little reason or logic arising from those aisles for a very long time.

So long as we're telling the truth here, we cannot ignore that over the past few decades, neither the Democrats/liberals or the Republicans/conservatives (or Libertarians/whatever) have done very well in advancing the end of poverty or ensuring social justice for all United States citizens.

Frankly, what we've become is a nation of "reactors," relying almost completely upon band-aid solutions applied with cheap glue to patch the plethora of problems resulting from entrenched systemic issues.  We cannot become proactive if we choose to ignore that the majority of the symptoms that result in the dis-ease of poverty and social injustice are arising from challenges within the foundational fabric of our communities.

While I hold no delusions of grandeur that I will somehow singlehandedly force the change that's needed, I add my voice to a chorus, with the goal of increasing the volume of that chorus so loudly that we cannot be ignored any longer.