About COSAC
The history of COSAC started with just a dream and we were just a little agency that basically helped other agencies such as the Red Cross, Women in Distress, Center One and we fed the homeless. Then we kept running into homeless people who had no place to go after "cleaning themselves up", so the COSAC Foundation then put on a new hat, called Helping People in America (now our global warming site). This new division was to handle all other social problems and emergency services for disasters as well as doing a simple thing to make life happier for terminally ill kids, like taking them to have dinner with Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins.
Then, when the Broward County Government was having a hard time handling the homeless problem, especially with Homeless families, we created The Homeless Emergency Management Team. This Team responded to homeless families, 24 hours a day, when the police departments called us. The Team also responded to John Doe cases for hospitals, the most famous was Memorial Hospital's. This older Gentlemen was hit by a car and the police had no luck trying to identify him. The hospital called the Team and in turn, this gentleman's picture and situation was blasted over the Television News. Ten minutes after airing, Vickie Frazier of Channel Ten interviewed me, an assisted living facility in Fort Lauderdale called to say John Doe belonged to them.
After two years of struggling financially, we developed the Homeless Voice Newspaper, which became the newest member in the North American Street Newspaper Association and The Homeless Voice is the only newspaper that has a shelter attached to it. We put the profits back into housing people. The Homeless Voice has also been responsible for helping other community Homeless Newspapers get started by employing homeless people and therefore giving them income to survive on the streets. The Homeless Voice became the official name of our Homeless Division, which operates four facilities in Broward County.
Then came the birth of COSAC Quarters Hotel for the poor. This hotel has 21 rooms that serve people who have no money or people who pay on a sliding scale, based on income. The clients receive three meals a day at Arnolds Café, named after the great Homeless Advocate Arnold Abbott, who was ordered to stop feeding the homeless on Fort Lauderdale Beach. However, Arnold took the city to court and won the right to feed starving people. You would think that someone would not have to go to court in order to feed people who would go hungry otherwise.
During this time, COSAC Foundation decided it wanted to become the South County Food pantry. This way we could provide food for the "almost homeless" families so that they would not go hungry. COSAC rented a warehouse in Hollywood and it serves people who need a littlemore than food stamps gives them.
And this is where the story turns. Keep in mind all this happened in less than four years.
COSAC decided it needed to do more than just provide services to people. We started to look at the problems that caused our clients to need these services. One of our major projects was to organize a committee to look at prescription drug abuse. Pain Clinics, who we titled "Pill Partying Physicians", were basically drug-dealing doctors who prescribed narcotics as a business. The committee expanded and met with drug manufactures such as Purdu Pharma, which produces OxyContin. OxyContin is a time released (12-hour) medication intended to keep the pain sufferers from becoming addicted, however, when misused, it was a killer. When Purdue met with me, we asked them to look at the pills genetic behavior.
The pill was designed to release a narcotic over a 12-hour period. The company claimed this drug would help people who were in pain to not become addicted to it. I am someone who suffers from nine herniated discs and many other orthopedic surgeries. So I was familiar with how easily these drug could become addictive. However, kids were dying because they bought the pill on the street and were chewing it and getting the whole narcotic with no time-release feature. This is when we asked Pardu to make a smart pill, so if someone would try to break it, chew it or snort it; it would deactivate the narcotic formula. We even went as far as to meet with the Attorney General's office, to ask them to file suit against the manufacturer, just as they did in Virginia. Calls and calls were made to the National Drug Control Policy Office which belonging to the Executive Office of the president. In fact, I had a meeting scheduled in D.C. the same morning the Pentagon was attacked. But back to the main issue of food and medicine. Some people have asked me, why help people from other lands. My answer is a two fold answer. As a person who lives in America and helps Americans it is my duty to make sure America responds to Human Rights violations by other governments or countries because if we let these things happen there, then just maybe one day Americans would just let these same things happen here.
The second answer is the simplest one of them all. Human life is Human life and I am not going to sit back and let people die because they can't get food. From this we started NAAIA, the North American Alliance for International Aid. This new agency will not be spending large amounts of money to feed people because that has been done for years. If we had large amounts of money then we would feed the world& but that won't happen. Yes, we will feed people, but we want to find out how to fix the problem and so we are pushing pens, making calls to the United Nations and getting involved in as much as we can by forming committees to investigate why people can't get food from these corrupt governments. This will be a long, lifetime project and if we can just save one baby we have done our job. But we all need to help in any way we can. Prayers. Prayers, and Prayers. Money, money, plans, plans, and the right for all humans, anywhere, to have food and goodmedical care and not to die because they can't get a simple anti-biotics to cure one of the disease that an AIDS patient is susceptible to.
Think about what I just said about the 15 million orphan kids. Could you imagine that? Sometimes when the Lotto in Florida is up to 100 million I go get a few extra tickets hoping just maybe I would win. I even called my aunt up north and asked her to buy me a ticket for the big 200 million Powerball. Then sometime before the drawing, maybe when I am at the YMCA in the steam room taking a mental health break, I daydream about winning. This is where I become selfish. Most people would just want to be one of the lucky winners. I must confess I don't want to share the pot with anybody else. Why? I can think of 100 million ways I could use that money to help people. I would invest it, making it grow, and develop project after project to save lives. I would buy a few cargo planes and drop food to the poorest parts of the world, with or without their governmental approval. Pay attention to words I just said (with or without their governmental approval) why, because of their corrupt governments who actually keep the food from the poor so the dictator régimes can live better. Let me stop dreaming for a moment. No, let me go back to dreaming. People, it is up to every one of us to help somehow. You can help us, you can help the world food program, you can pray for peace, pray for the right to let kids get food in their tummies, pray that no human decides one day that a woman should be buried, alive, up to her neck and then be stoned to death by her neighbors. Can you imagine what a face and head must look like after it has been stoned to the point of bringing death to that person? Do you believe that in today's times I have to write about stuff like this? This is the world that God has given us, it is our world, and we need to keep the word love in it. Love starts by helping those who need it. Let me use the word homeless for a second. How many people say it is there own fault why they are homeless, so why feed them. Let's look at the smoker who is dying. We help that person. Look at the person who is speeding and may have had too much to drink and hit a tree, we still help that person. We surely don't let them die
It is the job of The Homeless Voice to inform about and plead for those who suffer and have so much less.
