Asylum

New full-height

2010-03-01T09:10:00.002-05:00

Fundraiser!

2010-01-25T11:15:00.009-05:00

Come on out and FEEL THE LOVE!

Saturday, February 13, 9pm - ???
Spring4th Center
Four bands:
- Buffalo Bangers
- ~~Magic Apron~~Aviva and the Flying Penguins
- Club Awesome
- The Orphins

$8 suggested donation a the door - come out , have fun, and support a good cause! Keep current at our Facebook Event page

ManKind Project

2010-01-19T09:44:00.005-05:00

ManKind Project builds a hut!

SAVE THE DATE: Feb 13

2010-01-16T18:56:00.000-05:00

We're throwing a benefit concert! More info coming soon...

Big Change

2010-01-03T23:06:00.004-05:00

Another email recently sent out on the list:

We have a problem. For the past several years, our organization has built around 18 shelters a year - and that's where we've topped out. Basically, we have too few volunteers doing too much work. In response, we've decided to try something new.
What separates the Mad Housers from traditional sheltering organizations isn't the construction, but the outreach - we find our clients and help them where they are, as they are. This outreach is critical to our mission, and the most difficult part of what we do. However, we don't spend the bulk of our efforts on outreach, but instead on construction. True, the construction takes time and effort, but it's a well-known process that's been refined, tested, and documented extensively. It's the easy part.

So, starting in 2010, we're going to focus on the hard part and work with others to provide the easy part. For years, we've had outside groups - Scout troops, churches, service organizations, grade school and college classrooms, and the like - offer to build structures. Generally, we've fit them in when we could as a sideline to our main operations. Now we hope to make working with these groups a central part of our operations.

Hopefully, this will have several positive effects. First, it gives us more time to work on the outreach side of the equation - finding new clients, supporting existing clients, and getting services to our clients to help them leave the huts. Second, this also expands the educational and advocacy aspects of our mission, as groups of new people are exposed to our ideas and methods. Third, these outside groups can themselves be a source of referrals for clients, volunteers, and donors.

What's the downside? Well, if you're a casual Mad Houser volunteer, there will be fewer volunteer-only builds to attend. Don't worry - there will never be a time where we don't build! But from the Mad Housers point of view, building by itself is not enough. Our job is not to build, it's to help. A building without people is just a shell.

This is not a decision made casually, and it will not be implemented abruptly. Over the next few years, we plan to gradually expand the total number of shelters built, and increase the percentage of those shelters built by outside groups. Our first few joint efforts are bound to be a little chaotic. But there's a time to stop planning and simply go forwards and learn along the way - and as anyone who's attend a build knows, we're not afraid of making mistakes! We'll learn, and improve, and in a few years we'll be helping more people in a better fashion.

The Board started discussing this idea back in May, went over it - along with several other notions - over the course of several meetings spanning several months. We voted it in right before Thanksgiving. It's a pretty radical change for us, since we've always have been focused on making the huts, but we realized that it's more important that huts are made than we make the huts. If this works the way we hope it does, it'll be well worth the change.

Awesome video

2009-12-16T09:48:00.003-05:00

This video essay was done by Amanda Gardner (www.agardnerphoto.wordpress.com). Thanks, Amanda!

Another email

2009-11-28T23:39:00.005-05:00

In response to a person who wrote asking what sort of design help the Mad Housers could use. My edited response:

The Mad Housers have long tried to balance between the issues of 'more' and 'better' when it comes to shelter. Given a limited (VERY limited) amount of resources, do we want to make fewer, better shelters or more, skimpier shelters?

Until recently, we've been mostly on the 'more' side - most of our design changes have been the type that help improve the longevity of the shelters (roof overhangs) or give great improvement at little additional cost (hi hats). However, our our Board is now beginning to think that certain quality-of-life improvements may help with the longevity of the camp as a whole. Simply put, if we start making additional investments in things that aren't directly shelter, such as building toilets or adding solar electrification, the quality of the camp may help convince outsiders that we're a net benefit to the community. Currently, even the best-run homeless camps are dicey propositions at best. Anything we can do to improve a camp's chances of survival should be considered.

So there's our challenge: right now, we're focused 100% on basic shelter. What other things can we do to make an encampment a better place to live? Once we start looking at things beyond simple shelter, there are lots of needs that our clients have. Hygiene. Communication. Transportation. Power. Storage. Food preparation. Community.

Here are our design constraints:

It should be a capital improvement, not an ongoing service. In other words, we can build a woodshed, but we're not going to start up firewood delivery.

It needs to be buildable by volunteers using ordinary tools and off-the-shelf materials.

It cannot be fixed to the ground. Our shelters sit on cinder blocks, which make them chattel property. If we were to pour a foundation, we would start crossing a number of laws.

It should give us maximum bang for our buck. Currently, one of our huts costs about $500 to build; this makes us the cheapest secure shelter solution that I've yet found. (If you can find a better one, please let us know!) Our total yearly budget is around $10,000. So a project that costs $4000 would be a huge investment of our budget that would otherwise shelter 8 people - it would have to be pretty compelling!

Anything that requires ongoing maintenance should be maintainable by our clients. For example, we've frequently discussed building composting toilets. But who's going to service them? We're fairly certain that the first time someone gets sick in a potty, nobody will clean it, and it'll go downhill from there.

So you can see, it's a challenging problem. You could pick just about any area and work with it. What interests you?

Email

2009-11-03T23:29:00.014-05:00

We've received some interesting emails lately, and I thought the responses might make for interesting blog posts. One volunteer wrote in recently offering several observations:

Frequently, it seems like volunteers stand around a lot waiting for things to happen. Perhaps we could split into smaller teams to work on separate things...?
Second, oftentimes panel loading seems chaotic, and items have been left behind at the warehouse. Checklists...?
Third, why aren't we soliciting for volunteers more aggressively?

All good questions. Here's my somewhat edited response:

Yes, there's definitely an art to splitting up tasks to keep everyone engaged.
For instance, we could paint the panels before we leave the warehouse, but in general we don't. Why? Because out in the field, there's usually a period where, in terms of construction, only one or two people can be building. Instead of having folks standing around, it's better to leave off the painting at the warehouse so that folks can paint in the field, even if that seems to take more time in the field.
The problem is, you generally get to be a build leader by knowing how to build a shelter, but that winds up being only part of the skillset of directing a team to build a shelter. Hell, I've been building huts for 15 years and I still sometimes wind up having folks idling. In general, we try to keep everyone occupied, but sometimes we slip up, and sometimes circumstances wind up making it impossible. But we can't have new build leaders become good build leaders until they're done, sadly, being not-so-good build leaders.
In terms of the loading situation - we are now implementing checklists, so that's better, but the Board realizes that this is right now one of the biggest bottlenecks that we have at a build. We're setting a shoot-for-the-moon goal of having our load time for a shelter deploy thinned down to 15 minutes. That's going to require some high organization and out-of-the-box thinking, especially for circumstances where half the team doesn't know their way around the warehouse. But even if it only goes to 20 minutes, that'll still be a vast improvement.
And in terms of getting new recruits... well, there's something big in the works. Watch this space!

Bees!

2009-10-26T20:37:00.000-04:00

We had some 55 gallon drums by our loading dock that were donated to us by a local bakery. Unfortunately, a couple were missing bungs and they'd contained sweeteners. Hilarity ensued.

Happy New Client

2009-10-26T20:35:00.001-04:00

OPC Redeemer Youth Group

2009-09-18T19:17:00.001-04:00

The OPC Redeemer Youth Group with our newest client.

Seussicle on Stewart

2009-08-21T07:54:00.002-04:00

I teach at Paideia School. After every stage production, I have been taking the old sets down to either Bankhead or Stewart where they are used for firewood or small construction.

This spring, I brought down the sets for Seussicle, a musical based on the Dr Seuss books. I returned two months later and..... most of the set is decorating the camp, particularly Ronni and Rick's spot. Check it out...a little surreal ....seemingly a homeless camp plopped down in a kid's Dr. Seuss picture book.

Another great site recon

2009-08-09T22:00:00.003-04:00

Our awesome volunteers after an afternoon of talking to homeless and trekking thru the off-road geography of Atlanta.

Emory Presbyterian

2009-07-27T00:34:00.001-04:00

Design Evolution

2009-07-22T18:09:00.002-04:00

I'm no architect, so it's a good thing that we get to talk with architects. At a meeting with the Atlanta Architecture for Humanity chapter, I described our hi-hat roof woes. One of the architects made the perfectly obvious suggestion of a salt box roof. Of course! I literally slapped my forehead. (For the other non-architects out there, a saltbox roof is where you knock the top corner off a shed roof. It has the advantage from my perspective that we can make the top angle a right angle, simplifying the manufacture of the gable pieces. This is what I've done here in this Sketchup model.) In a sense, we have a luxury that real designers don't have: we field lots of our product, and so we get to see in the field what does and does not work, and get to tweak the design as it goes. Since each unit is cheap to make and fast to produce - in an architectural sense, that is, it's still an effort for us - a design can rapidly go from half-baked to baked in a short period of time. Architects building real buildings for paying clients have to get it right the first time - we only have to get it right enough and learn for the next client.

Task force for the homeless earn-a-bike

2009-07-02T12:27:00.002-04:00

This fabulous organization has a program that allows homeless participants to fix up their bikes. Sopo bikes looks like something that may be of interest to MadHousers volunteers as well. I know there are many cyclists among us who could use their service.

Summertime...

2009-06-28T18:36:00.009-04:00

And the living is... well, still not easy, but certainly slower. If you look at our calendar during summer versus winter, you'll see that we have one build a month during the summer months and twoa month during the winter months. This is for purely practical reasons - during the summer, it's hard to scrape up volunteers to do construction in 90 degree weather (go figure), and it's also hard to get clients to have any sense of urgency about shelter. Come wintertime, demand shoots up and volunteers come back from vacation, but right now things are slow.

Doesn't mean stuff isn't happening, however. Summertime is a good time for us to experiment with new things - take today, for instance. We had hoped to move a hut from one location to another today, but the client couldn't be located and we only had five volunteers today, anyhow. Plan B: try to improve the Hi Hats.

Hi hats are a new way of doing hut roofs that we've been working on. Basically, it's a standard hut with a shed roof instead of a gabled roof; as a result, the loft area is much, much nicer and the loft platform can be raised high enough to make the living space below significantly less claustrophobic (with a standard hut, we lower the loft to just a few inches above the client's height, to give him as much room upstairs as possible). I think they're a big improvement over the standard huts - and for roughly the same price.

However, they're still in the beta stage, and so we're finding and fixing design flaws. Flaw #1: the roof leaks right in the middle of the hut during heavy rain. Clearly, that won't do. I believe it has to do with the lack of a substantial overhang on the roof - it only projects a couple of inches past the sides of the hut. On a gabled roof, that's not a problem, since the water's running down and off - but on a hi hat,one side of the roof slants towards the structure. I suspect the water's running into the plywood and traveling down until it reaches the midroof stud and then drops down. Our first attempt at a solution: extend the roof six inches in all directions. If you squint at the photo, you'll see that we've put a roof on top of the roof - we screwed foot-wide piece of plywood on top of the existing roof and covered it with more roll roofing. We'll see how it works as a patch; in the meantime, I head back to Sketchup to figure a way to improve the roof panels so that we don't have to do post-installation extensions like this. Once I'm happy with the design, the blueprints etc will go onto the website.

Our volunteers were, as usual, awesome. It takes real grit to head out on a Sunday morning, when it's already halfway to baking, to head into a field and do construction. The five of us emptied the cooler o'beverages before lunch, and brought back to-go cups from lunch to finish off the work. We discussed the possibility of starting summertime builds substantially earlier in the morning - say, 8am instead of the current 10.

Austria: Graffiti Artist

2009-06-16T10:36:00.001-04:00

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=673

Site improvements

2009-06-09T22:47:00.002-04:00

We've added a new metric blueprints section, redid the navigation a bit to (hopefully) make things a little easier to find, and added a blog - in fact, you're reading it right now! More is coming, so keep your eyes peeled. There are lots of little things that could be done to make this site better. If you have any criticism or suggestions, contact us.