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The Diocesan Service Corps (DSC) is a
program run by the Catholic Diocese that brings together college graduates
from around the country to live as an intentional community in the city of
Buffalo. DSC volunteers support each other in living a simple lifestyle,
working for social justice, and dealing with the challenges of communal
life.
I am one of five DSC members in this year’s
program, and my Outreach position at HOME is my job placement. One of the
primary tenets of Catholic social teaching and of the service corps
program is “to work with the poor in a spirit of solidarity toward a goal
of structural change in society”. With this focus, part of my work for
HOME has been to help expand and strengthen the outreach program to more
fully include homeless and very low income populations (those who have
been most marginalized by our exclusionary systems of thinking and
functioning). I have done this through outreach at area soup kitchens.
HOME engages in a variety of different
outreach efforts taking several forms ranging from formal presentations on
the nuts and bolts of fair housing law all the way to improvisational
street theatre. The primary objective of most all of this outreach is
civil rights education: to teach people that they have housing rights, and
that HOME is there to help them if they feel their rights have been
violated. Soup kitchen outreach shares this primary objective, yet
because of the extensive needs of the people involved it naturally has
taken a unique form.
What I soon learned during my first few
weeks of outreach was that, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t work to
stand up at a soup kitchen and simply tell people their housing rights.
In fact, the noise level in most soup kitchens often made it difficult to
even make a short announcement. More fundamentally though, most of the
time people do not even want to hear it. Quite simply, they have more
important things to worry about, and quite justifiably, they do not want
to hear anything that does not address their more fundamental need for
food, shelter, medical attention, physical safety etc.
This was troubling, yet I knew (from both
fact and personal conviction) that civil rights violations were indeed a
factor contributing to the difficult life situations that many of the
people at soup kitchens were in. And, that knowing their rights and HOME
services was an essential set of tools that could help them steer their
lives in the right direction. The problem I faced was how to make these
tools available in a way that was accessible: in a way that was directly
relevant to their most urgent needs.
I decided to focus on connecting people with
safe, decent, affordable housing, and to teach civil rights and HOME
services as they relate to these more fundamental housing needs. I
gathered and learned as much information as I could on a wide range of
housing options, as well as on housing related services, and financial
assistance. This lead to my participation in outreach committee meetings
of the Homeless Coalition and has allowed me to share the resources I have
developed for soup kitchen outreach with outreach workers at other
agencies. This dialogue has not only been an essential part of my
personal learning process, it has also helped make HOME’s services more
widely known and clearly understood.
While working to expand my awareness of the
human services system as a whole, I have concurrently worked to provide
each client at soup kitchens with information and referrals most relevant
to their particular housing situation. My initial focus with a client is
to connect them with resources in a way that makes these resources
accessible and that makes the next step a real possibility for them.
Then, having spent the time to understand and help with a persons most
primary housing needs, I have most often found myself in a situation were
it has been natural to communicate the aspects of fair housing law most
relevant to their specific situation.
With each successive outreach experience, it
became increasingly evident that this second aspect of the outreach work
was much more than just information on the side. On the contrary, it
frequently became a central motivating factor that allowed homeless
individuals to move forward through the often difficult process of finding
housing. I soon became acutely aware that just the phrase “civil rights”
has a charge of its own, and further that knowing these rights and seeing
how they relate to daily life was often enough to kindle a fire of hope.
Knowing that they could not legally be
screened out or steered away because of their disability, race, familial
status or any other of the legally protected classes seemed to open a
channel of possibility in people’s minds through which they could move
forward to better their lives. This year, I have consistently seen civil
rights empower people to create authentic and sustainable change in their
lives, and I feel blessed to have been a part of making this happen. |
