Category Archives: Homelessness

No matter what side of the street you’re on, everyone belongs in community.

Posted on by
1

“I don’t give to panhandlers,” she tells me. “I just walk right by.”

I am listening intently. She is there to find out more about affordable housing for formerly homeless citizens and I am there to hear her views.

“Nobody listens to what I have to say,” she tells me. “So why should I bother to share my thoughts?”

“Your voice matters,” I tell her. “And if you don’t share it, we won’t hear it.”

She looks at me with suspicion. Yeah. Right, her quizzical look seems to say.

She goes on to tell me about last summer when she went downtown for a Stampede Breakfast and afterwards, as she walked towards Rope Square, a big outdoor performance space that pops up during Stampede in the City Centre, she walked past a man who asked her if she could spare some change so he could buy a cup of coffee.

“You know they’ve got free pancakes and sausages a couple of blocks away,” she told him. “Why don’t you go get in line?”

The man apparently laughed at her suggestion he go line up and replied. “I’m not going to line up for breakfast!”

She was shocked. “Imagine him not being willing to go and line up for food yet he’s willing to beg for money,” she told me indignantly.

“Was he visibly homeless?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she replied. “He was quite dirty and kind of smelly too.”

“I wonder if his reluctance to line up had more to do with his experience of how people on the street treat him,” I commented. “Perhaps he’s been abused so often by passers-by he doesn’t want to risk what people will say to him if he stands in line.”

“Oh my,” she replied. “I hadn’t looked at it that way. I wonder if he was more afraid than lazy.”  She paused and seemed to get lost in her thoughts for a few moments before adding, “It’s horrible what we do to each other isn’t it?”

Yes it is, I replied.

Last night I attended a community Open House to talk about a new affordable housing project the Foundation I work for is looking to build. My job was to answer questions, to listen, to encourage people to fill out the comment forms as they left the room.

It was also to hold space for each person in attendance to give voice to their feedback, their concerns, their opinions. Without judgement. Without pushing back into their opinions. Without trying to change their minds but rather, to create common ground in which every voice was heard.

A group of women I approached to ask if I could answer their questions told me they had none. They hated the idea and didn’t want to talk about it.

Another man told me I was lying, no matter what I said in response to his questions, he wanted to hold fast to his belief he was right.

Fear is a powerful emotion. It can block our vision, shut down our capacity to hear, close off our minds.

As I said to one man, “We all fear change. This is a community that is experiencing great change on every level. Fear is a natural response.”

“I’m afraid these people will come here and destroy everything,” he replied.

“Is everything the way you like it now?” I asked.

His response was fast and vehement. “Oh no! This community is a mess. It’s not like it used to be.”

His ‘used to be’ was over 50 years ago when he and his bride moved into the house they still live in today. “There were kids everywhere,” he said. “We knew everyone on our street. Today, I barely know my next door neighbour.”

It is hard to accept change when what we are yearning for is a past that no longer exists. It is hard to see the future when all we see is the loss of what we once had that gave us a sense of belonging in our community.

For the people who took the time to share their views last night, whether they were for or against the project, there was a common thread throughout the conversation. ‘Our community has changed.’

As I stood and watched the people milling about, the small groups gathering, some of them eyeing those of us from the Foundation with suspicion, angrily talking amongst themselves, while others smiled and talked about the possibilities of the project, I was reminded of Ghandi’s quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

For those who came out to speak against the project, they are being the change they want to see in the world. They are working hard to protect what they have so that they can continue to feel like they belong in their community.

For those who were in favour of the project, they too are intent on creating the change they want to see in the world.

They are all part of community. That powerful place of connection and belonging, no matter what side of the street they walk.

Namaste.

 

To get out of the basement, you gotta get to higher ground.

Posted on by
9

Years ago, I met a man named Collin who wanted nothing more than to be a role model for his sons and the youth in his community on a Reserve in Saskatchewan.

He told me this while taking a course on self-esteem I was teaching at the homeless shelter where I used to work.

“I don’t get it, Louise,” he said as we were discussing the concept of ‘balcony people’ versus ‘basement dwellers’. “I’ve been sober for 3 months and all my friends here want me to do is go drink with them. Why can’t they be happy for me? Why do they want me to get drunk again?”

Collin had spent many, many years in a drunken stupor. He’d left his wife and sons behind and followed the path that almost killed him until one day he realized he couldn’t do it anymore.

“I didn’t want to be that drunken Indian people saw lying on the sidewalk. But I didn’t know how to get up,” he said. And then in Rehab for yet another time, light slipped through the cracks of his despair. He realized he couldn’t show his sons, as well as the youth on the Reserve from where he came, what it meant to walk the path of honour and pride unless he got sober.

It was his dream. To return to his Reserve and teach his sons, and all the youth, what it meant to walk with your head held high, proud of your heritage, proud of your People.

Collin found his balcony and he wasn’t coming off of it.

The challenge was, he still had a lot of people around him who were scared of looking up. Scared of reaching up from the gutter where they drifted through every day, their senses dulled by drugs and alcohol.

“What if you’re already doing what you dreamt of right where you are?” I asked Collin.

“What do you mean?” he replied. The lines around his deep black eyes crinkled up, deep furrows appeared in his brow. He shoved the tip of the white cowboy hat he always wore back from his forehead.

“What if your getting sober shows them that it is possible. That no matter how often they tell themselves they can’t do it, the path of sobriety is open for them too.”

“Then why don’t they just get on with it?” he asked. He smiled when he said it. He knew the answer. “Because it’s not that simple. Right? I was one of the basement dwellers too.”

He sat quietly for a few moments before sharing the rest of his thoughts. “If I’m in the basement living in the dark, it’s hard to see there’s a path leading towards the light, not just deeper into the dark.”

And that’s when the truth of his position hit him. “I couldn’t see in the basement because I was surrounded by people who were just as scared and lost as me. And they’re no different. They can’t see the beauty of the view I see from up on the balcony because they’re down there living in the dark. I can’t go back to the basement, but I can keep standing on my balcony showing them what’s possible.”

Climbing out of the basement is not an easy task. We want to cling to the darkness, hold onto the familiar, stick with what we know. And if it includes using drugs and alcohol to keep us numbed in that place, it can be even scarier to step up.

The only way out is to let go of what’s holding us down.

Staying out of the familiarity of the basement can be even harder when we are surrounded by those we knew ‘back there’. In their fear of what is ‘out here’ they want us to come back and help them feel safe in the dark.

 

Collin never got to show his sons what it meant to live a proud man. He died of a heart attack three months after our conversation.

But he did get to show those around him who feared the path out of the basement that it was okay to step into the light. He never gave up on his sobriety in those final months. He never let go of standing on his balcony and telling others about the beauty of the view he saw from up above.

I like to think he died with a proud heart. That even as it beat the final drum note of his life, he was standing tall, standing proud on his balcony surveying the wide expanse of the universe around him knowing that in walking the path out of the darkness, he was showing his People how not to be afraid of the light.

 

 

 

Can we end homelessness?

Posted on by
2

In January, 2008, I sat in a room with a few hundred other Calgarians, most of them involved in some way in the homeless-serving sector, and applauded the launch of Calgary’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness.

When asked, “Do you think we can do it?” my answer was  always, “It would be great if we could.” When pressed, I’d temper my enthusiasm with words of caution. “What do we mean when we say we will end it? Do we mean people will never pan handle again? Or fall on hard times with no place to go? Or not need emergency support?

If ending homelessness meant that, the answer was no.

But did I believe in the vision? Absolutely.

It is big and hairy and audacious, and it is vital to hold ourselves accountable to a vision like that if we are to make a difference, if we are to ensure people don’t get trapped in homelessness for years.

“Jack”* was in his late 40s the first time he stepped across the threshold of a shelter. He only stayed a few days before he sorted out the problem that lead him there. Before that, he’d done everything he could to avoid the shelter doors. He’d found a roommate to avoid Calgary’s high rents. When the room mate situation didn’t work out, he’d stayed with friends and when he ran out of friends, he spent a few nights sleeping in a park. He didn’t like that very much so eventually, believing himself to have run out of options, he landed at the shelter door.

The first time was hard. He was scared. Worried about what it meant to have fallen so far down he had no other recourse but to enter the shelter.

The second time, a couple of years later, was easier and by the third time he stayed at the shelter, he had filtered through enough of his fears and reframed the experience to mean, he wasn’t ‘a loser’, which is what he’d told himself the first time. He was simply using the resources available. And anyway, the folks at the shelter were nice and as long as he kept to himself, nobody bothered him. He was still determined to not stay there for long. He was still committed to getting out as soon as he could.

And then, the housing market went crazy. Afford his own place? Not going to happen.

What he thought would be just a few week’s stay became months. Months eased into years and suddenly, without his even noticing, Jack found himself permanently entrenched at the shelter.

“It became comfortable,” he told me once when I worked at the shelter. “Nine years go by pretty fast if you’re not watching.”

I ran into Jack not long ago. I was walking west. He was walking east. When he saw me he stopped to say hello and give me a hug. “I missed you when you left,” he told me.

We chatted for a few moments before I asked him where he was living now. “Are you still at the shelter?” I asked him.

“Nope,” he replied. “I got a place.” And he smiled and stood taller, straighter, prouder.

When Jack turned 65 and his old age benefits started to come in, he decided it was time to make a change. With the help of a senior’s housing agency he found subsidized housing he could afford. He’d been living on his own for a year when I ran into him on the street and was determined he was never going back.

“It used to be I’d work temp jobs, get some cash and blow it all on weekends,” he told me. “Even though I had the same amount of money then as I have now, I didn’t have a lot of hope I’d ever get out of that place ’cause I couldn’t see how I was going to afford it.”

For Jack, as for so many, Calgary’s high cost of living keeps them trapped in believing there is no alternative, there is no place for them to call home other than a shelter. As one man I know once said, “I’ve got a roof over my head and food on the table. I can’t complain about sharing my place with a few hundred other roommates. I can afford free.”

It wasn’t until Jack ‘aged out’ that a path to stability and independence appeared.

We can do better. We must.

Calgary’s Plan to End Homelessness is about ensuring people don’t get trapped in using shelter as a long term solution to their housing needs. It’s about ensuring Calgary has the system of care, the necessary affordable housing, and the right supports to ensure homelessness does not become a trap from which the only escape is to age out or die.

We will not be able to open the doors to home without a vision that says, “Yes. Together, we will end homelessness.”

Eight years ago I sat in a room filled with hope and possibility and a belief that together, we can make a difference.

A lot has changed since that day. We’ve learned a great deal. Acquired more information and data to base our decisions upon. We’ve filled in gaps, streamlined processes and gained a better understanding of what it means to be homeless, what it means to end it, and what it takes to do it.

One thing hasn’t changed. My belief that it is vital that each of us hold space for the vision of ending homelessness. Each of us believe in our capacity to make happen.

For Jack’s sake, and for thousands of others, we must.

***************

*Not his real name.

 

 

The story in our hands.

Posted on by
6

Hands. To hold. To carry. To touch. To feel.

Hands. They tell a story, our story, our past. They bridge the space between us, they reach within, they stretch beyond.

Hands.

Yesterday, I met a woman whose hands told the story of her life on the streets. Hard. Calloused. Strong. Her hands held mine in their vice-like grip as she poured out her grief, her sorrow, her frustration, her anger.

Her hands pushed the hair back from her face, they sliced the air as she told the story of fighting for every breath she takes. Of fighting for a space to call her own, of reaching for one small piece of comfort, ease, truth, acceptance.

And in her story-telling, she held out her hands towards me and showed me her cracked palms and insisted, You couldn’t imagine what it’s like. You just couldn’t imagine.

What I hear is your life is hard, very hard, I said to her.

And she bowed her head as tears flowed from her eyes. And then, with a shrug, she straightened up, angrily wiped away her tears with one hand and replied, It’s the life I’ve got. I gotta deal with it.

A few years ago, I sat at the bedside of a man from the shelter where I worked as he transitioned from this life to whatever lay beyond. I held his calloused hand in mine and felt the story of his life unravel in my palms.

I knew him well. He was one of the first people to come to the art program I’d started at the shelter. James had a love of photography and used whatever money he earned shovelling snow, working temp or picking bottles to purchase a camera, computer, software and other photography related tools that would help him improve his art.

It’s my retirement program, he’d laugh.

Retirement never came.

He’d been homeless for years and though alcohol had been a driving force in the tearing apart of his former life, he no longer drank. He mostly just kept to himself, did his work, took his photos and offered them for sale at our various art shows.

He was gifted. And passionate. His hands held his camera steady, guiding his eyes to the story beyond the picture he was taking.

And they never failed. They always found the beauty in the mundane, the unique angle in the light, the poignant story in a window.

His were steady hands. Hard-working. Strong.

As the cancer that gripped his body began to eat away at his life, his hands grew softer. Quiet. Until the final night when I sat with him in a room at a hospice just outside the city and heard his final indrawn breath and felt the last touch of warmth leave his body. For a moment, his hands lay still in mine until I had no choice but to let go. His hands were cold and I could not warm them.

Yesterday, a woman gripped my hands and I was reminded of James’ hands in mine on that cold December night when life let go of a man who had fought so long to hold his grip on it.

Her hands were warm and fierce and strong as she gripped mine. She did not need me to warm them. She just needed me to hold on, for a moment, while she told her story.

Sometimes, that is all we can do. Hold one another in communion, sharing our stories, guiding our hearts to listen deeply to what the other says. And when the time is right, to let go so we can each continue on our journey, strengthened by our brief encounter, knowing we are not alone.

The Longest Night of the Year. We remember.

Posted on by
4

We gathered in the early evening darkness, the city a constant hum of traffic on the streets surrounding us. We gathered and we held our tiny flickering candle lights and listened to the sounds and stood in the silence. Remembering.

We remembered.

People who have walked the streets, stood on corners and asked for change and slept in alleyways and city parks or a mat on the floor in a shelter.

We remembered.

The laughter and the tears. The good times and the bad.

We remembered.

The friendship. The camaraderie. The stories told and those not shared.

We remembered.

Moments we shared. Moments we knew about. And the stories we never knew of where they’d been before. Of where they’d come from before this thing called ‘homeless’ hit.

And as we remembered, as we carried the light in the darkness, the city moved around us, a sibilant, hissing stream of traffic carrying people to and fro the places they needed to be, wanted to go, had to get to.

And we stood surrounded by tall buildings looming in the dark, their windows lit, lights glistening. And our voices called out the names of those we’d lost. Our voices spoke their names into the night and for a moment, their names lit up the darkness and in the stillness between each breath, hearts beat in time, candles glowed and we were one.

Last night, we held the first Longest Night of the Year, a memorial service for those who have passed away in homelessness. About 50 people gathered in a downtown city park to stand together and speak the names of those they knew who had passed away and to write them on a large framed poster.

And one woman came to the mic and spoke of her brother who she’d lost to the streets. They had lived together on the streets. She spoke of gang wars and drugs and fighting and hurting people and lashing out at those who passed by who never saw her, who didn’t know her name but who still chose to call her names and mock her and her brother for their baggy clothes and angry ways. She didn’t care, back then when her brother was alive. She only cared about blocking out the pain, numbing the fear, burying her past. And then, her brother died a violent death.

We must stop the violence, she said. Stop the violence.

And she’s right. We, all of us, must. Stop the violence.

It was a night of remembering and a night of promising to do better. To do more to ensure we do not lose more of us to the dark. We do not lose our way completely.

And we stood together so that we do not forget those who have left who once walked our streets. So we do not forget they once lived amongst us. That they once laughed and joked and told stories and shared a cigarette, a last meal, a last smile.

And I wondered, what if we saw them/this differently?

What if we, the privileged ones, the ones with homes and jobs and places to go, stopped our busy just to see those who walk amongst us with no fixed address as other than ‘homeless’?

What if, we do not see them as ‘other than’ but as all of us?

What if we took time to remember, this is our world, one planet, one earth. One home. For all of us. And we are each responsible for one another. We are all one.

Namaste.

To read more about the Longest Night of the Year:

http://www.metronews.ca/news/calgary/2015/12/21/marking-a-solemn-solstice-in-calgary.html

http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=774895

 

Remembering those who never made it home.

Posted on by
5

longest night

 

There are a thousand roads leading into homelessness, but only two leading out of it. One leads home. The other leads to the grave.

On Monday, December 21 we will gather as a community to remember those whose road out of homelessness ended with their last breath.

We will remember. And together we will say, “You are not forgotten.”

It is hard in this place called, ‘homeless’ to remember that there are those who miss you, remember you, want to know where you are. It is hard to remember where you are, let alone who you are, when every street you turn down becomes a dead end leading you nowhere but back to where you came from, and that’s the road that lead you here, to this place called homeless.

It is the dichotomy of the place and state of homelessness. You have to lose everything you’ve got to get there yet, it takes everything you’ve got to get out of it.

For some, getting out of it is only achieved when their heart stops beating and breath no longer passes over their lips.

For some, the only road out is the road they so desperately tried to avoid with every breath they took to stay alive.

And then they are gone and there is no marker, no ceremony, no memorial to say, “I was here. I existed. I made a difference.”

A walk through the unmarked graves in Queen’s Park Cemetery in Calgary tells the story. The city provides land to bury those of no fixed address, but there is no money to mark the names on a headstone. When the grave is dug, a city worker places  cardboard tag affixed to a little metal stick with the deceased’s name scribbled on it with a black sharpie in the ground to mark the location of each burial plot.

If you’re lucky, the stick will still be standing up and the tag will still be affixed.

But mostly, the sticks have fallen over, the tags have gone blowin’ in the wind and all the flowers, if there were any, are gone.

It’s hard for those who want to remember to come and visit. Just as so often happened in life, they do not know where to find their loved ones in a field of unmarked graves.

This Monday, we will stand together and remember. Please come and stand with us. Come and remember and listen to each name called out, each candle lit.

And in our remembering, let us say together, “You are not forgotten.”

Namaste.

 

What if homeless didn’t equal criminal?

Posted on by
4

The story is not new. An employer discovers the guy he hired a few months ago lives at a homeless shelter. He’s been doing great work but now the employer is scared and the employee must go.

When I worked at a homeless shelter we would ask clients if we could film them to include in different advertisements and videos we created to tell the stories of the shelter. Several times a year I would get a request from someone asking me to please pull the clip from our latest video or advertisement where their face appeared. Their explanation inevitably went something like this,

“I’ve got a job now. I’ve moved on and I don’t want anyone to know I was there.”

or

“I’m looking for work and I don’t want a potential employer to google my name and find me connected to that place.”

or

I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me, but people don’t trust homeless people and I’ll never get a job if they find out where I live.”

At the Foundation where I now work, we present annual awards to those who have demonstrated excellence in the homeless serving sector. As part of their recognition we include a booklet that lists the names of the nominators and award recipients as well as a brief story about the recipient from the nominators.

Last year, we changed our policy from including full names of nominators to just first name and last initial after one woman phoned me in a panic. “I googled my name and found the article I wrote about (name of person she nominated) and why I believed she deserved the award. I’ve been shortlisted for a job and I can’t risk the company finding out about my past.”

We pulled the booklet off the website, (it was from an awards ceremony five years ago) but could not promise the woman that Google would not have stored it in a cache somewhere. It was the best we could do.

And our best was not good enough.

Not because the employer ‘found out’. I’m thinking they didn’t because the woman did not contact me again.

Our best was not good enough because that woman, and so many others, live in fear that people will find out they were homeless. That they live or lived at a homeless shelter. That they used services designed for people experiencing homelessness. That they are somehow, in the views of many in our society, not good enough, broken, lacking and even, because they are homeless, criminals.

Most of us don’t spend our days worrying too much about the judgements of others. We’re not really impacted by the person behind or in front of us at the checkout. We know we won’t see that stranger in the elevator again so don’t really pay much attention to them.

We live in our bubble of ‘normal’ and move through our days without giving much thought to what others are thinking of us.

For someone experiencing homelessness, judgements come fast and furious.

They are heard from strangers walking by who hurl words at panhandlers that pierce like daggers to the heart.

From kids driving by in a car who think it is funny to hurl eggs at the woman pushing the shopping cart, or the man picking up empty pop cans from the street.

They are visibly homeless and thus, somehow do not deserve our respect or that we behave as decent, caring human beings.

For that man who lost his job because of his address, there is not much we can do. Discrimination of this sort is not illegal, and, even though we created a Homeless Charter of Rights, they are an idea, a beautiful wish for all mankind. They are not enshrined in our legislation.

And so, he will move on. He will chalk it up to another strike against himself, another let down, another put down that is just the way it is.

It doesn’t have to be. It can be different.

If we change. If we decide not to see people experiencing homelessness through eyes of condemnation and fear. If we decide not to equate poverty with lack of ambition, smarts or ability. Vulnerability as weakness. Homelessness as criminal.

If we change the way we see those whose lives have lead them into homelessness not as victims of their own doing, but rather as fallout from a social system that does not have the resources, affordable housing and supports people need to make their way in life, perhaps we will change our minds about who ‘the homeless’ really are. Perhaps we’ll see, ‘they’ are not us versus them. They are you and me, all of us.  Together.

 

 

Keys to Recovery: Unlocking the Potential

Posted on by
2

Karen Crowther is compassionate, dedicated, fiercely loyal and determined. She gives her whole heart and being to creating success for her organization, her staff, and the people they serve. And in return, her staff, the people they serve and the communities within which they live and work love her back.

Karen is the Executive Director of Keys to Recovery and as Broadcaster, Performer and last night’s Emcee Jonathan Love said at the Keys to Recovery (Keys) Unlocking the Potential fund-raiser C.C. and I attended, “There’s a lot of love in this room. I can feel it.”

It’s true.

There was Love. And… passion, commitment, a fierce conviction that we can make a difference. A deep understanding of what it takes to do that and a belief that everyone deserves a second, third, even fourth chance to change their lives. No one is hopeless.

Keys fills a unique niche in the homeless serving system of care in Calgary. They provide housing with supports to formerly homeless Calgarians who would otherwise be discharged from successful completion of rehab back to the streets.

It can be a vicious cycle.

Imagine. An individual knows what they are doing is not working for them. They want to get clean and sober and make the scary, yet liberating decision, to go to rehab. After treatment, they are sober, have the tools to continue their sobriety but, the one thing that is the same, is the lack of housing that contributed to their homelessness, and their addiction, in the first place.

Without Keys, they would be returning to an emergency shelter, or the street, with little support to maintain their sobriety and thus, change their lives.

Keys provides that support. They wrap a person in compassionate care, providing both housing and structure to support them in their efforts to retain sobriety and create a new life for themselves and their families.

Gabriel Chen, the keynote speaker last night shared a powerful and inspiring message of what is possible if we imagine a different way.

Gabriel knows. He is a lawyer whose client base is entirely made up of individuals experiencing homelessness.

In the first story Gabriel shared, “Mary” found herself homeless and, feeling defeated, gave into the lure of drugs to numb her from the dark reality of the life she was experiencing. Eventually, she knew she had to do something different, went to Rehab and got a place of her own and was working on her sobriety. But she was on her own, struggling every day to make ends meet and to retain her sobriety. One day, she got picked up on a misdemeanor and when the police ran her name through ‘the system’ it was determined she had some outstanding warrants from when she was using drugs and stole some food and got caught. She was sent to the Remand Centre and attempted to call Gabriel. Except, she was only allowed one call a day and the phone at the Remand does not allow the caller to leave messages. It was a week before she reached Gabriel when he happened to be at his desk. By then, she was terrified of losing her apartment and told Gabriel to plead guilty on her behalf.

She lost her apartment anyway, Gabriel shared and because he was brought into the cycle after she’d already represented herself at her bail hearing, he could not change the course of her journey. She ended up with a criminal record which, upon release, impeded her ability to get a job, an apartment, go back to school or to make any constructive changes in her life.

And the cycle continued.

Imagine instead, asked Gabriel, if Mary was supported throughout her journey. That upon exiting rehab and being immediately housed with supports, she chose to work with her Case Manager to clean up the outstanding warrants before they created more trouble in her life.

Imagine if Gabriel was able to stand before the Court to plead on Mary’s behalf, before the judicial process kicked into high gear with its judgements and criminalization of homelessness and addictions.

Imagine if he could have demonstrated to both the Judge and the Prosecutor that Mary was maintaining her sobriety, was going back to school and had support to change the course of her life.

Imagine that the judiciary were aware of Keys and respected and supported the work they were doing in the community to end homelessness.

Imagine if…

Keys to Recovery makes this possible, Gabriel said.

It’s true.

************************

Keys to Recovery plays a vital role in Calgary’s Plan to End Homelessness. Every Calgarian has a role to play — the board members of Keys who were all present last night, the volunteers who helped organize the event like my dear friend Wendy C., and the people who came out to support Keys in their inaugural fund-raiser like Diana Krecsy, President & CEO of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, all made a difference.  You can too. Check out the Plan and see where you fit. (Action Step No. 14 is a great one for every Calgarian) Let’s take action! Together. We can end homelessness in Calgary.

 

 

 

Homelessness isn’t sexy

Posted on by
8

I am talking on the phone with a peer at another agency about their efforts to stage an event, and the lack of up-take from corporate Calgary.

Homelessness isn’t on a lot of company’s radar, they tell me. Most big companies want to invest in kids, women fleeing violence, the environment. Things that capture the public’s attention and help them feel like they’re making a difference. Homelessness just isn’t sexy enough.

Not ‘sexy’ enough? When was ‘sexy’ ever part of the homeless equation?

Somewhere in our collective psyche is the notion that people fall into homelessness by their own fault. Their own doing. Collectively, we hold an unspoken belief that people don’t deserve to receive any more help than having an emergency shelter to fall back on simply because, what they need to do to fix their homeless state is to clean up, dress up and get a job.

It’s not that simple. It’s not that easy.

Homelessness is not that benign.

Homelessness is a state of being present in a world that has not taken steps to address the issues that undermine people’s capacity to access the resources they needed to live without fear of falling through the cracks.

When we feel strong, when we have access to knowledge, resources and supports, finding our way is possible — no matter where we stand on the road of life. We have enough resiliency to get through the dark times because we’ve been supported in building a foundation that is strong enough to withstand life’s knocks.

People living on the margins, who have never known what it means to have equal access to resources to help them achieve their dreams to not know what it means to be resilient, self-confident, self-determined. Their lives have been limited by the lack of resources, lack of support, lack of advantages most of us take for granted.

In their lifetime of scraping by, of being unsupported, unacknowledged, unseen, they don’t recognize or see resources waiting to be accessed. They are too familiar with doors slamming closed in the face of their efforts to not fall through the cracks gaping on their road of life.

Homelessness is not who someone is. It is not a dream come true. It is a nightmare.

Believing people can fix the potholes and cracks in the road that lead them into their state of homelessness is like telling someone with terminal cancer to stop dying. No matter how hard you wish for it, it isn’t going to happen without a miracle or two and a whole lot of care and attention. Like a diagnosis of terminal cancer, the damage was done long before the evidence was in or someone hit the doors of a shelter.

We humans can be shallow. We can be pack animals. We can be easily lead to judge and label others based on our lack of understanding of what it is that they are experiencing.

Homelessness isn’t sexy.

It also isn’t a choice. It isn’t a decision one morning to get up, jettison everything in your life you hold dear just so you can wander the streets and sleep in a crowded space with others experiencing the same condition, and eat what you’re given when told and sleep where directed and lose your dignity and pride and sense of who you are in the world — if you ever knew it in the first place.

Homelessness is nullifying.

Debilitating. Scary.

Homelessness is deadly.

It strips you of everything you own, and steals your life from the inside out, one nullifying indignity at a time, scraping away your pride, your confidence, your belief in yourself (if you ever had any) with every grinding step you take.

Homelessness isn’t sexy.

Neither is telling someone when they’re down to just get up, clean up and carry on.

If it were that simple, we’d all do it every time we hit a bump in the road of life. If it were that easy, we would all just pull up ourselves up by our bootstraps and get going on living the dream life we’ve always imagined.

Someone told me yesterday that homelessness isn’t sexy.

They’re right. It’s not.

 

When giving spare change isn’t enough.

Posted on by
15

“Do you give to panhandlers?” one of my co-workers asked as we sat chatting about working in the sector and homelessness and what it means to end it. She is new to the homeless serving sector having come from the management team of a large retailer. She tells me how working at the Foundation has changed her perspective, helped her respond more compassionately, but still, she doesn’t feel comfortable constantly giving money to people on the street.

I never know if I’m doing the right thing, my co-worker said.

And I understand.

I used to give to people on the street who asked for spare change, and stopped. I never felt like I was doing enough. The giving always left me feeling empty. So now, I smile and acknowledge someone’s presence and tell them I don’t have any change, or that I can’t give them any money. But I always acknowledge them. Always let them know, I see you. You are real to me. Not a problem on the street I need to ignore. You are visible.

Several years ago, while teaching a class in self-esteem at the homeless shelter where I used to work, one of the students shared the story of finding himself at the far end of the city with no money to pay for a train ticket back downtown. He’d gone out to the south end in the hopes of getting a job he’d heard about. He hadn’t planned on not getting the job and only got one-way transit fare from the job office at the shelter.

When he got to his destination, the job was already filled and he had no way back downtown. He was stuck.

It would have been easier for me to hold someone up at knife-point and demand their money instead of panhandling for it, he told the class. But I don’t want to go back to jail so I begged.

I had never thought of panhandling as a stay out of jail card but for this 32-year-old man, life had always been about taking what he wanted by force. He’d learned the ropes in foster care and then juvenile detention and then, ‘the big house’ once he’d turned 18. The two years he had just spent not in jail represented the longest single stretch of time he hadn’t been incarcerated since he was 12 and started his relationship with the criminal justice system.

 

To this man, panhandling was the lesser of two evils. Going back to jail or panhandling to get back to the shelter for the night.

Panhandling stripped him of dignity, he told the class. People either didn’t look at him and pretended he was invisible, or those who did look at him saw him as ‘less than’. Some even called him names, mocked him where he stood, holding his ‘worthlessness’ in empty outstretched hands for all the world to see.

So often we look at panhandling through our eyes of judgement, or getting to choose, ‘is it right to give money or not?’. Seldom do we see it from the perspective of the asker. What does the act of panhandling do to the human being standing with outstretched hands hoping for a handout?

Desperation lead that man to panhandle. Not laziness. Not a need to feed his addiction or a desire to live off the system.

He’d never known true freedom. Never known what it was like to come home from school to sit around the kitchen table doing homework, laughing with his siblings and having a loving parent patiently guide him through the intricacies of life and living cooperatively within the world. He’d never been taught it wasn’t right to steal. He’d only been taught it was the only way to get what he wanted/needed. He’d never been shown how to be ‘a man’. He’d only been shown how life is a battlefield, it’s do or die, take or perish.

And there he was at 32 learning how to live outside the justice system, learning how to get by in a world that was foreign to him. People expected him to ‘know’. But he didn’t. He’d never been taught the ropes of life and never been shown how to navigate it in peace.

Last I heard from him, he had moved on from the shelter. He was living life beyond ‘the big house’. He had his own place. A good job. Friends to share the good times, and to lean on in the bad.

“If you’d told me this would be me,” he wrote in an email he’d sent me to let me know how he was doing, “I’d have told you that you were the one on crack.”

To read more on the subject of panhandling, the Homeless Hub recently shared this article:  How should I handle being asked for spare change?