Seattle Community Network
Sites of the Week
November 9, 1998
Peace Heathens' Seattle Crisis Resource Directory
by Joe Mabel
Where do you go on line to find out about sliding scale medical services in Seattle? How about needle exchange? Or parenting resources?
The Peace Heathens' Seattle Crisis Resource Directory began life in 1989 as a pamphlet, which has gone through four editions; over 20,000 copies have been distributed. A fifth print edition is currently being fact checked. An edition of 10,000 copies should appear in late 1998 or early 1999.
At the urging of SCN's Aki Namioka, the Peace Heathens first took
the Crisis Resource Directory on line as a FreePort document through
Seattle Community Network in the summer of '94 when the Internet was
still "exotic." At that time, some people ridiculed the
notion of putting crisis resource information on line. Two years later
we turned it into a proper HTML-based website. Nowadays, when it is
literally easier to get a home page than a home, we believe the need
is clear for such fundamental information to be available through the
Net.
The Peace Heathens
The Peace Heathens began in the late 1980s, the brainchild of
Vivian McPeak, a sometime rock musician who wanted to create a vehicle
through which people from the various strands of the U. District's
youth culture could participate in projects to serve the community.
Early meetings were a combination of secular revival meeting, concert,
activist meeting, lecture, and party. Besides the first edition of the
Crisis Resource Directory, early projects included cleaning up streets
and alleys in the U. District, running fundraising concerts on behalf
of various worthy causes, a few short-lived zines, running security
for political rallies and marches, and running logistics for some
larger-scale events put on by other groups.
In summer 1990, as the Gulf War loomed, nearly all of the core Peace Heathens participated actively in the PeaceWorks Park vigil, which maintained a continuous, 24-hour-a-day protest action at Gas Works Park from August 26, 1990 until the shooting war ended in March 1991. Many were also active in the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. The Peace Heathens were instrumental in the logistics of most of the largest anti-war rallies. Work in opposition to the war was simultaneously inspiring and a burnout: it was amazing to see such a level of activism in Seattle, it was disspiriting to see it have no discernable effect on national policy. Toward the end of the war, as the coalition split, the Peace Heathens sought other projects. Unfortunately, the most ambitious of these projects, a U. District storefront, proved to be a short-lived money pit.
Through the early Nineties, the Peace Heathens evolved into more of an affinity group than a mass organization. We continued to be involved in similar activities to those before the war; most of our members are very active in the hemp legalization movement. The one constant has been the Crisis Resource Directory.
This fall, we are again in the process of expanding the
organization to a broader base. If you are interested in working with
us, you can e-mail us or call
the Peace Heathens' message phone, 547-0862.
The Crisis Resource Directory
The first Crisis Resource Directory was very much a grassroots
effort. Over a dozen people worked on it, most of them in their teens
or barely out. Research was very street level: people recommended
resources that had been useful to them. We begged, borrowed, and stole
access to photocopiers to run off a few hundred copies to distribute
on the streets and in the coffeehouses of the University District.
Once the directory hit the streets, people started contacting us to
suggest additional inclusions, but, to this day, the original listings
remain some of the most valuable in the directory.
Unlike many other crisis resource directories, we view our primary audience as users of services, not social service professionals. We tell our readers, "Take what you need, give back what you can."
Successive editions have grown larger and are more carefully researched and fact-checked. We validate every single phone number, address and description. We try to write suitably brief listings that are mutually agreeable to us and to the organization described. This involves careful editing and can involve negotiating with organizations that are very sensitive to the wording used to describe them in any public context. Although inclusion of a given agency or service in the directory does not constitute endorsement, we try to list numbers which have proven useful to people who need help. If we hear generally bad reports about a particular resource, we drop it.
Because our primary target audience remains the users of these resources, we list only services for which people are likely to self-refer. In the social service realm, our ideal is to list good gateway services. These, in turn, can help guide our readers through the social service maze.
Although social service providers are not the primary intended
audience, many have found the guide useful for referrals.
Organizations such as the 45th Street Clinic have become major
channels of distribution. Copies are now in the hands of everyone from
squatters to police officers. A U. District business, which chose to
remain anonymous, provided free printing for the second and third
editions. In 1995, Night Rider Overnight Copy Service printed 10,000
copies of the fourth edition free of charge. We are currently seeking
a comparable donor for a fifth print edition.
The Crisis Resource Directory Online
The first appearance of the crisis online was as humble as its
first appearance on the streets: we took the master Word doc of the
Third Edition, saved it as an ASCII file, split it into pages and made
minimal markup these to these files for SCN's FreePort.
In the summer of 1996, we put in the effort to build a proper website. Using the Fourth Edition as a basis, we again started from an ASCII file, but this time we reworked it as HTML. We spent days searching the Web for useful links outward. Between September 1996 and February 1997, we completely rechecked every listing. This was done with the intent of bringing out another print edition at that time, an intent which can sadly be counted among "the best-laid plans of mice and men." This fall, we plan another complete fact check, leading to a fifth print edition. As Bullwinkle says, "This time for sure."
We continually update the online version of the Crisis Resource
Directory, so even though it has been a year and a half since a
thorough review, most of the information on line should be current.
One benefit of being on line is that organizations are much more
likely to contact us to keep their addresses and phone numbers
current. Because we can post the correction to the web almost
immediately upon receiving an email, there is much more motivation for
them to contact us.
Life online, life offline
On the whole, we've been happy with our decision to take the Crisis
Resource Directory on line. We're proud that if you go to Alta Vista
and look up "Seattle"+"needle exchange" you'll
find us...and you'll find other sites that have copied out our
information. We get several emails each week from people needing
further information beyond what we publish; usually we can help them.
On the downside, some of the energy that has gone into maintaining the website might have gone into getting a revised print edition out sooner. And it is a little frustrating that our site isn't always easy to find: most people don't yet think to look on line for this sort of information, many of the people we most need to reach don't yet understand how easily they can get access to browse the web, and http://www.scn.org/crisis is not exactly the simplest of Web addresses.
We've been very happy to get free hosting from SCN, but a little less happy with how hard it is for someone to find us merely from knowing we're on SCN. How is anyone looking at http://www.scn.org to guess that we can be found under "civic"? Maybe SCN could use a good site map.
For the remainder of 1998, we intend to make the print edition of our directory a primary focus. (Naturally, the fact checking for that print edition will benefit the website even before the print edition hits the streets.)
The new print edition will prominently feature our internet address. We also intend that print edition to have a section on getting free or cheap access to the internet and to inform our readers that the online edition almost always has some information which is more up to date than anything we can get into print. In short, we are looking at the best ways to weave together online and offline approaches to distributing information.
Copyright (c) 1998 Joe Mabel