Helping the homeless, part I

             Photo: Shi Yali/Freerangestock.com

This is the first installment of a three-part series on the religious and spiritual dimensions of helping the homeless.

"People forget how easy it is for someone to be here. How easy it is for someone to lose everything they've worked for."
--Young volunteer at Sacramento's Loaves and Fishes

For many of us, homelessness is more of an abstract concept than a living reality. Sure, we read about the homeless in the newspaper, hear about them on the news, drive past them on our way to work, and even encounter them occasionally face-to-face when we venture outside our cozy suburban neighborhoods into town. But it's easy to turn away from these superficial or momentary contacts and quickly shove homelessness back out of sight and out-of-mind, until, perhaps, a family member or friend becomes homeless. Then, suddenly, homelessness is no longer an abstraction. We see what a person we care about is going through and we want to help, but we don't know what to do, and it can be frustrating and painful. And if it's that way for us, we can only begin to imagine what it's like for our homeless friend or loved one and for countless others trapped in the same predicament.

Yes, there are services available in Sacramento and elsewhere to help the homeless, but they are generally inadequate, often demeaning, and sometimes even counterproductive. Tom Armstrong has been homeless for a year and has written about it extensively and eloquently in his two excellent blogs, Homeless Tom and Sacramento Homeless . In thoughtful posts such as Phobos and Thanatos , he addresses the psychological and spiritual toll exacted by being treated like unruly children or prisoners subject to unfair and arbitrary discipline, served bad food and bad religious sermons, and entangled in bureaucratic inefficiency that eats up so much of the day that there's little time left to seek employment and no chance to work a 9 to 5 job if you want a roof over your head at night in one of the shelters. As grateful as he is for any food that's better than no food, any shelter that's better than no shelter, and any other services and supplies that are better than none, he believes that things could be better, far better if those in charge of organizations such as Loaves and Fishes were less concerned with making things easy for themselves than with assessing the needs of the people they're supposed to serve and doing what's necessary to meet those needs.

Some had done their best to escape the stifling regimentation of the shelters by living in tents in a homeless community along the railroad tracks and the American River in northeast Sacramento. But then Lisa Ling and Oprah Winfrey's camera crew came to town and thrust Sacramento's "Tent City" squarely into the local, national, and international spotlight, and local government leaders scrambled to do something about this blight that they had previously ignored. They decided to spend gobs of money on expanding the shelters and closing down Tent City. But as Costa Mantis, a filmmaker who lived in the community for three weeks compiling a documentary of events unfolding there, cynically observed after the tented community had been dismantled:

Homelessness did not end last night. It simply got moved out of the public eye and into the bushes so that it's no longer an eyesore for the mayor and the governor...The city didn't solve homelessness last night. It simply moved them on so the media can't come and say, 'Look at the third world conditions in Sacramento.'

A few days later, Sister Libby Fernandez, the director of Loaves and Fishes, led a rally in front of the Capitol building to call for a "Safe Ground" on which homeless people who wished to stay out of the restrictive shelters could establish a legal outdoor encampment complete with sanitation facilities and security. A day later, Sacramento Bee reporter Marcos Breton published a story recapping the event and opining that if Sister Fernandez and her supporters get their way, it won't help solve the problem of homelessness in the Sacramento region. Rather, "it will create more homeless services, which, in turn, will create more demand for homeless services. It [the problem] will simply grow bigger--like Loaves and Fishes."

Breton may be right about this; he may be wrong. But what can and should government and privately-funded organizations do to help the homeless, and is there a role for spirituality to play in this? We'll consider these questions in Part II of this series.