Volunteer Reflections
Civil Rights Education for the Homeless By: Tom
The Diocesan Service Corps (CCSC) 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. CCSC volunteers support each other in living a simple lifestyle, working for social justice, and dealing with the challenges of daily communal life.
I am one of five CCSC 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 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 led 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.
All the 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 person's 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.