In response to this post by MadPriest, on the bishops in the Church of England speaking out against the Labour Party's economic policies:
So I am delighted that yesterday a whole bunch of my bishops laid into the Labour Party's economic policy big time, in particular its dubious moral basis. In fact, they savaged our political leaders like Jack Russell terriers in a barn full of rats. Of course, the labour politicians are squealing like cornered rodents and are quoting statistics like only called-to-account politicians are capable of doing.
Of course, it would have been better if the bishops had collectively been prophets before things got so bad.
Now I know that many of the bishops in the Episcopal Church have spoken out against economic policies which continue to favor the wealthy amongst us, to the detriment of the "least of these", but a collective effort would be fine thing to see. Here, too, it would have been good to see the collective message some years ago, preached from pulpits, not just in open letters.
What struck me most were the comments to the post on policies in England having to do with the homeless, such as:
If you're a single woman and pregnant your local council has an obligation to house you.
or
Actually, it is very difficult to be homeless in England. You have to chose to live on the streets or somehow slip out of sight of social services and homeless charities (this does happen especially with the mentally ill). I have worked with the homeless and the people using emergency shelters are all either addicts or mentally ill. Once we get people into the shelters we work with them and housing providers to get them off the streets as fast as possible. Unfortunately, this usually means that the alcoholics and junkies will have less money to spend on alcohol and so they go back on the streets. Even then we continue to offer them food, shelter, a bed for the night, medical care, advice and washing facilities in our facilities as often as they want it. We even have wet centres where alcoholics can bring their drink inside (we put in plastic bottles for them to avoid any nasty messes). All this is paid for by a mix of local councils and charities and by getting "sell-by date" food free from supermarkets.
Now I know that many churches, private charities, and civil authorities are giving aid to the homeless, and that some folks choose to be on the streets, many of them because of mental illness or addictions, but the efforts are, in many cases, small scale, ad hoc approaches.
When the Obama administration takes over, would it be too much to ask for those who legislate to pass laws requiring communities to give aid to the down and out so that the private and small-scale operations need not bear the whole brunt of the growing, sometimes overwhelming, problem of homelessness and the wandering mentally ill? The numbers of homeless veterans is growing after declining for 20 years after the Vietnam War. Many of them suffer from PTSD, and are not receiving adequate mental health care through the military health services.
Comments to the post from folks in the US highlight the sorry state of government help for the homeless and for the mentally ill who are poor. There are many more homeless than the small-scale operations can care for. Attitudes like "the homeless choose to be homeless" abound. Is it time to take another look at the policies that mentally ill folks cannot be hospitalized against their will unless they are an immediate danger to themselves or others (with many falling through the cracks) to see if that is truly the best way to go? And how about adequate funding for outpatient mental health care, once the folks are released?
Read a few of the posts at Under the Overpasses, a blog by Under There, who works the homeless who live under the overpasses to see a bit of the reality of homelessness in the US.
Surely, we can do better.
Grandmere --I hold your prayer for the homeless and the new administration --but in this, I am not overly hopeful. Again, churches and small institutions are facing overwhelming odds in trying to do what the government is unwilling to do....
ReplyDeleteWe will host 50 homeless women in our parish hall for a week at the end of January, a ministry we share with other churches in our area --many are young, most work, most have lost their children and families. The problems they face will not be solved merely by giving them shelter... the problems are systemic. And I am not exactly sure how we can begin to approach the systemic ills in a capitalist society... where capital, not people, come first.
Margaret, everything you say is true, but we must start somewhere. You well know that the next administration and Congress will not change the whole system, so we start somewhere and push to make things better, even if it's only for a few at the beginning. And then we press for a little more and then a little more. Or we throw up our hands in despair.
ReplyDeleteThe obstacles that non-profits face are endless. Not the least of these is the unhealthy competition for funding. Now, with the recession, there are even fewer dollars available while the number of people in need is skyrocketing. The organizations that I was involved in are considered "faith based". This makes it even more difficult to get funding even though we did no proselytizing, we were founded by religious institutions, therefore we were "faith based".
ReplyDeleteTo get government funds, you need a lobbyist. Then when you get the funds sometimes you need a detective to hunt them down. It's unbelievable.
To receive grant money from Foundations, you need a professional grant writer. They don't just give money "to feed the hungry". They want sexy programs with catchy names.
All of this requires money. Most non-profits try to operate with the least overhead possible. People who donate want their donations to go to the people who need it, not to fund raisers and lobbyists.
Throwing up your hands, at times, looks pretty good. It never lasts though. If you want to see God, spend some time working with the people who have made this their life's work. Then, look into the faces of the people they have the privilege to work with. It will change you.
Yes, we do have to start somewhere. And I am glad to say we have "adopted" two persons, and helped them get permanent housing, get them medical care, get them to the grocery --help them off the streets. But two out of how many hundreds??? --this can't be left to the work of churches and small non-profits... we need so much more.
ReplyDeletePlease believe me --I am not throwing my hands up in despair. But it is overwhelming at times, and is becoming more so. The persons and families who come to our door--each one... I guess I grieve for each one.
Guess I am tired and blue tonight, Grandmere. But not despairing. We do alright at the food and some shelter--but the bigger problems.... drugs, alcohol, sexual violence, no education to speak of, lack of medical attention, babies born to children, a gimme gotta getcha situation.
sigh....
Sara, sadly yes. Jumping through hoops for the bureaucracy is another obstacle for those who try to help. We don't have a homeless shelter here. We have no homeless folks, either. I hear that the homeless are given a bus ticket to a larger city to try find a place. But many of the shelters in the cities are full.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you don't do the quid pro quo of proselytizing in exchange for food or shelter.
Ah, Margaret, I know, I know. I'm a little discouraged tonight, too. I can't even write about the wonderful movie I saw last night. Maybe tomorrow.
there's a program here called Families moving Forward which is especially for families who experience homelessnes. The famlies use different churches for overnight. There is also a day center. The program also helps the families to get permanent housing/jobs,etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat's good about it is that it really helps church members learn about the problem of homelessness.
however, it is so limited, and it really is charity, not justice. And there are so many people who aren't eligible.
The thing that makes me tear my hair out is when people distinguish between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" homeless.
Diane, our small church does its little bit for a few, too, but it is so inadequate. Our rector is kind and compassionate for the poor, but it's like a drop of water in the ocean. Nevertheless, we must do what we can do. Who amongst us is deserving?
ReplyDeleteYou are a wonderful woman Grandmere.
ReplyDeleteOkay. I am ready and wanting to hear about the movie you saw. "The Reader" is not yet playing here --so we are thinking of seeing "Doubt." What did you see?!
Margaret, we saw "The Tale of Benjamin Button", but I must tell you that one of the stars of the movie is my beloved city, New Orleans. I am not unbiased.
ReplyDeleteGrandmere, stop a minute and think. If the FedGov legislates that states and local communities take care of their homeless, it won't solve the problem.
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, what other programs will have to be cut to make the money available? Schools? the Fire and Police departments? Close the public parks, thereby dropping all those people who staff the public parks onto the unemployment rolls, and cutting off what may be the only safe and secure environment for kids to play in, and cutting off public summer camps where little kids learn to swim and teens learn, via the experience of being camp counselors, what it means to have a paying job? Or raise taxes on people who generally think they're already paying too much in taxes?
In short, by forcing communities to spend more on the homeless, you are forcing them to spend less on the problems which make people homeless. (And we both know they probably don't spend enough on that score even now.)
And you may get the problem you adverted to in one of your comments--sending the homeless on to another location to save money by dumping the problem on someone else. (In 16-19th century England this was a big problem when poor relief was handled at the parish level, and parishes played a continous round robin in which they sought to fob their poor off on other parishes.)
Plus you get interesting variations on that problem, like the homeless folks who migrate south for the winter to avoid the cold winter. Florida's homeless population increases at this time of year because of that. And then there are the sex offenders who because of the laws now in place can't find a place to live, no matter how well they intend to live the rest of their lives .
And the more government is involved, the more the problems that Sara mentions come to the fore. Government money is controlled by politicians, which means that it's spent not on the most deserving program but on the one which has the best relationship with the politicians or the one which the politicians think will benefit themselves by good publicity, etc. That's why, as bad as the situation is, government involvement doesn't really help: better to have a situation where you can say to people, "You need to step up to the plate as an individual."
As for the mentally ill, one reason that people can't be confined against their will is because very often confinement was used as a tool to get rid of people whom families or local communities found inconvenient, even when that person could function, if not totally independently, at least with only a small amount of help, as a functioning member of society.
I suppose it's a balancing act, but right now the law has decided it's better to have people free who shouldn't be, than to have people locked up who shouldn't be.
Kishnevi, what would I do without you to fill the gaps due to my ignorance and set me straight? Why, of course, they should tax the rich to pay for it. They should get our troops out of Iraq and use that money. I could go on.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that other civilized countries can have more secure safety nets for their citizens than the US? It's not because we have less money. It's because we don't have the will to do it. That's why.
What Sarah describes as her experience is not the same as my experience. That might possibly be explained by different regions, or the passage of several years, I don't know. But I can tell about my experience, because I think that my experience, expanded exponentially, would work at the federal level.
ReplyDeleteOh cool. I get to be the hope in this conversation!
I sat on the board of the only homeless shelter in this county. Unbelievable but true, my city drives its homeless up to the shelter 25 miles away, the result of its NIMBY attitude. The shelter was an outgrowth of a need the local ministerial alliance saw and did something about. Our ministerial alliance includes most clergy, except for the Catholics and the Baptists, and yes, represents less than half of the churched Christians. Anyway...
I started on the board during the Reagan administration, and so initially I saw a preponderance of families, the ones on the cusp that, when their assistance dried up, they couldn't make it so ended up at the shelter. We also got a lot of recent prison releases, a spattering of Vietnam vets, and a few of the mentally damaged. Over the time I stayed involved with the shelter, our demographics changed, with fewer families, way more veterans, and about the same percentage of prison releases and mentally ill.
At first the shelter was only a night shelter, open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. The evening meal was supplied by whatever church was on the schedule, each coming around approximately every six weeks. Breakfast was another volunteer making the rounds and picking up all the day-old doughnuts (which were free for us). Rules for the shelter were few and simple: no drugs, alcohol or weapons allowed inside the door, and everyone must take a shower every evening. And that was it, if someone didn't want to leave his/her stash of drugs/alcohol/weapons out on the porch, they could sleep in the front yard and come no closer. Oh yeah, and that a person could only stay 45 days in total in any one year. That one we broke as often as it was kept, as long as the family (it was always the families) would not show up for a week's time so we could document them as in the midst of a new crisis, not the old one they'd used the 45 days on.
We saw the clear need for expanding our hours (just watching the families trying to get their kids moving and out by 7 was painful) and we had no family spaces, just a room for men and a room for women. Parents decided if their children were separated by gender, or if they slept in the women's room with mom. But there were no funds for that, we were just managing to pay our one employee (the director).
(this is already getting too long, so just pretend that about 14 years passed between last paragraph and this one.) With all the new space (possible from a grant from the county and state, paying us a price per head served) we had 10 family bedrooms, four classrooms and a workshop out back. We were now a 24 hour shelter, also housing the food pantry, the clothes closet and the furniture warehouse (all charitable organizations serving our population once they were out of the shelter in their own place) and we had expanded payroll to include a grant writer, a social worker (who mainly helped shelter residents apply for what benefits they could qualify for) and oh I forget what we called him, but two someones who split the night sheltersitting duties),
Here's the part I think could be expanded or at least built upon to make up a national program... in our classrooms we ran classes all through the days and evenings, classes such as how to manage a bank account, basic computer skills, how to budget, how to parent, you know, basic life skills plus literacy skills and a series of classes to help earn their GED. These were mostly taught by the different kinds of social workers out of the various county agencies. And in the shop area, those not going on job interviews were either working on bicycles or computers.
Last paragraph, I promise, but I've got to explain that... I'm particularly proud of this because it was my project. We put out the word that we'd love to get donations of old bicycles and old computers. Didn't have to be working, we were going to strip the usable parts out of them anyway. And that's what they did, they broke down the bicycle/computer and sorted the parts into our "parts graveyard," then those who had been trained (by us volunteers) were building new working bicycles and computers, which we either sold or used.
This came out of a need for computers for our basic computer skills classes (which have now expanded into various software training to improve a residents "hire-ability" like Excel classes, etc. And we'd already identified a huge problem with our residents finding a job, actually two problems, one was no residence or phone to be contacted at, and the other was no transportation to interviews or jobs. So that's why we started canabalizing bicycle parts to make whole bicycles. But it turned out that we were building way more computers and bikes than we needed, so we sold a lot of them, too. The residents who worked that week (doing anything in the shop) got credit for their share of the split. This resulted in them able to save that almost impossible first and last month's rent required to get a place.
It was like magic, everything worked. And the intangible worked, too. I saw residents turn into different people the first time they got their script to be cashed in the day they moved out for good. More than once someone would turn to me and brag "I'm now worth x amount of dollars." This was a real accomplishment, and the pride and self worth was way more than the dollar amount (usually between $50-150 a week per shop worker).
I have more, but Chere Mimi doesn't need a novel in her comments. But see? Can't you see the way forward? We didn't help all the homeless in the county, we didn't have the space. I hated having to keep a wait list. But we'd call all the police departments in the county with how many openings we had each day and I don't know for sure what they did for those we didn't have room for. I strongly suspect several of them were in the habit of taking these people home for short periods of time, in fact I know that was true.
And that's my story of hope for today. I can see how to adapt this to work on a larger level, and there are sooo many federal agencies that should cut into their budget for us, like the defence department, the justice department (rep for the VA), etc. Now our population is mostly ex-military young ones with PTSD. I know the VA doesn't get the funds it needs to take care of our veterans, but it should!!