Dignity Village is a formerly mobile shanty town in Portland, Oregon, well on its way to becoming a green, sustainable, urban village. It is home for people who might otherwise inhabit doorways and sidewalks. Dignity provides a peaceful community, a clean environment, a center, and safety. Shanty towns are units of irregular low-cost and self-constructed housing built on terrain seized and occupied illegally -- usually on lands belonging to third parties, most often located in the urban periphery of the cities. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Sustainability is an economic, social, and environmental concept. ...
On December 16, 2000, a group of eight homeless men and women pitched five tents on public land and Camp Dignity, later to become Dignity Village, was born. December 16 is the 350th day of the year (351st in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 2000 is a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Homelessness is a situation in which a person does not have a permanent place of residence. ...
Tent City is the name common to a series of organized shanty towns of homeless people in the greater Seattle, Washington, USA area. ... Shanty towns are units of irregular low-cost and self-constructed housing built on terrain seized and occupied illegally -- usually on lands belonging to third parties, most often located in the urban periphery of the cities. ...
DignityVillage, a tiny community on the north-eastern edge of Portland, convened an emergency session of its legislature recently.
The chairman of the nine-member DignityVillage governing council was there, along with the heads of most departments: the treasurer, the secretary and chairwoman of the tents and population committee, the security chairman, the trash and sanitation chairman, the toilet meister and the coffee meister.
DignityVillage's residents describe it as a "self-governing urban village", and it is one of the few government-sanctioned homesteads for the homeless in the US.
Dignity is a self-sustaining community of homeless, made by homeless to empower each other to transcend poverty and drug abuse; two issues that many residents struggle with.
Not only is DignityVillage teaching and empowering the homeless to provide for their needs, it is teaching and engraining methods of sustainable and eco-friendly living that many mainstream Americans are largely oblivious to.
The past and present residents of DignityVillage should be applauded for their efforts to clean up their own lives, and to help improve the lives of their fellows.
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