At 4 a.m. in the homeless shelter, we make the
notation “Quiet” in the logbook, though it hardly is.
There is a racket of snoring in the basement of the Contact
Ministries building, but it’s a good sound. Some 40 troubled
souls are stretched out on the bunks here. Some are on medicines;
some are on drugs; some hear voices. All are safe, warm, and at
peace, if only for the moment.
At 5 we put on the big urn of coffee, hoping
that the smell will stir some awake. By 6 the morning rustle is in
earnest, and the banter takes aim at Larry, who’s in charge
at the desk. For much of the night Larry has been grousing that the
storeroom was locked and he wasn’t given a key. “Then
why should we even listen to you, Larry, if you’re not big
enough to get a key?” one client calls out. “You
ain’t nobody. You don’t even have a key.” Larry
ignores the taunts and tells everyone to get moving if they want any breakfast. There are
few takers for this morning’s menu of Pop-Tarts or peanut butter on toast. One
of the clients remarks that the shelter will soon close until next
winter. “This party’s almost over,” he says. He asks
the volunteers on duty: “What are you guys going to do with your
time when you can’t come here and stay up all night with
us?”
In many ways the Springfield Overflow Shelter
has been a remarkable success. A cooperative effort among existing
homelessness agencies to ensure that nobody would be forced to
sleep in the cold between Nov. 1 and March 31, the shelter was put
together on a shoestring and staffed with volunteers. It has been a
true community effort, with 20 different faith-based and community
organizations providing volunteers, food, and cash. More than 200
different volunteers staffed the shelter from 6:30 p.m.-7 a.m.
seven days a week. “I can’t tell you how pleasantly
surprised and happy I am that this thing came together,” says
Rita Tarr, executive director of Contact Ministries, who has worked
on the program with the Salvation Army, Helping Hands, the SARA
Center, and Fifth Street Renaissance.
Since soon after the shelter opened, it has
been full nearly every night, serving 42 people a night. Some 243 different people have stayed
there, some for weeks at a time, so the temporary shelter has
definitely met a need. But that is also a problem: Where do all of
these people go after the shelter closes on March 31?
“We’re trying to get them into
other programs and places,” Tarr says. The agencies involved
are working with the clients to help them find jobs and housing.
Some rent assistance is available, but the person has to have at least some income to get into permanent housing.
Many of the homeless can’t get a job because they can’t
pass a criminal-background check. “We need to try to give some of
these people a second chance,” Tarr pleads to potential
employers. “My philosophy is, they’ve already served their
time.”
Warm weather is coming, the shelter is
closing, and poverty remains. President George W. Bush pledged to
end homelessness in the next 10 years, then sent Congress a budget
recommending the largest housing-program cuts in history.
Springfield has successfully met a short-term need, but what will
it do for the long haul? The answers aren’t clear, but at
least now there are more people looking for answers. Many of the
200 SOS volunteers met homeless people up close for the first time
when they worked at the shelter, so now they have faces and names
for Springfield’s poor. These volunteers will be needed as a
core group of advocates for their new friends over the next few
uncertain months.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2005.
