Tom Burnham

Creating a Possibility for Hope

December 10th, 2007

     Ronnie came to us from a drug treatment program. He was in his mid-thirties. He had never been homeless before. He had been a somewhat functioning alcoholic and chronic pot smoker over half his life, occasionally indulging in other drugs. Then his life completely unraveled. He had supported himself with a series of low-demand jobs, never staying in one for more then a couple of years. It is one thing to live that way when you’re twenty…and quite another when you’re thirty-six.

     In interviewing him, I asked him how he became homeless and this is how his story unfolded.

     He became homeless when he was evicted. He was evicted because he stopped paying his rent. He stopped paying his rent when he got fired. He got fired because he was always late. He was always late because he couldn’t get up in the morning. He couldn’t get up in the morning because he was closing the bars every night. He had nowhere else to go except treatment. His mother wouldn’t take him in…and none of his close friends had places of their own, a rather telling sign for a man in his thirties.

     “So”, I asked, “you became homeless because of your drinking?”

     “No, I became homeless because I was evicted.”

     It wasn’t the best first interview. He wasn’t seeing the connections between all these things. Still, he said he wanted to have his own place and be independent. More importantly, he said he wanted to stay sober. Those are two goals we always want to hear from candidates for our transitional program. He hadn’t processed everything that had happened to him, but that isn’t unusual for someone with a few weeks of sobriety whose head has been in a cloud for  twenty years. We gave him a chance.

     Ronnie went to work immediately. In no time he was working sixty hours a week. This became a problem because, within a couple of weeks, he let his aftercare program go. It is easy to stay clean in a residential program. The challenge comes when you re-enter society at large. I doubt he was thinking of backsliding, but that is just how it begins.

     We gave him an ultimatum. He could not stay in the program and not have an aftercare plan. He grumbled and moaned but complied. He was going to at least three twelve-step meetings a week and he found a sponsor.

     One of the other things we told him was to avoid his old friends and hang outs. It is not about judging them so much as recognizing a weakness in himself. This is probably the single hardest part of recovery. Building a new social world for yourself isn’t easy, especially when you’re in such a fragile place. You just can’t stay clean hanging out with all the folks, and in all the places, you’ve been getting high in all your life. Between his work and meeting schedule, this wasn’t the problem it might have been for someone else. We weren’t that close to his old haunts.

     After about six months in our program, six months of sobriety, he went to his mother’s. He got there early in the day and spent time with her. When she got busy preparing dinner, he went out into the old neighborhood. He ended up over at an old friend’s or rather an old friend’s mother’s house. Some of the old gang were there in the basement smoking pot and looking out for the “old lady.” Ronnie was embarrassed to be there.

     After six months of sober homelessness, he had sober friends. Friends who were striving for goals and achievements and supporting him in his goals and applauding his achievements. He had more money in the bank than he had ever had before. He felt dirty hiding in a basement with grown men doing exactly what they had been doing since they were teenagers.

     When he was back at the shelter and we talked about what had happened, he said he could no more go back to that than go back to high school. Six months earlier, it was normal to him. It was all he had known since before entering adulthood. He wouldn’t have hesitated to pick up the pipe and get high. The space and time we provided him allowed him to see another possibility. That possibility allowed him to hope for a different and better life, something he didn’t even know he was lacking. He had built a new life for himself. And the only thing it had in common with his old life was the same ‘only thing’ that made a difference, himself. A year later he owned his own construction/demolition company with several trucks and employees and was working toward owning his own home.

     In all these things, I always point out that the work, the accomplishment, is theirs. We provide an opportunity. It is always up to them to take it or not. Ronnie took it. He found a vision of another possibility. Finding a way to create hope is our challenge. For so many of those who are chronically homeless, their whole life has been chaos and disorder. Our challenge is to show them something that may never have entered their field of vision. Or something that left their field of vision so long ago, it is like seeking Helen Keller’s “Wa wa” breakthrough.

     Ronnie was never “chronically homeless.” He could have moved either way. He took the right turn. He had much to reckon with, but compared to someone who grew up between the Department of Corrections and the Department of Mental Health (not as uncommon as you might think), he had it easy. He knew what a “normal” life could be.

     It has been said, you can’t tell somebody something they don’t already know. I think this means you have to have the mental construct that allows something to be comprehensible. Were I to start writing in a foreign language, it would be gibberish to you unless you knew the words, syntax and grammar of that language. Most of us share some common notions of how we are to live together and relate to one another. We have ‘faith’ ‘trust’ and ‘values.’ Most of our experiences reinforce these. They are common but not universal. There are variants in all our experiences, for better and worse. For some, it has been much more for the worse. Our goal is to reach those people and give them a vision of hope for a better life.

A Little Agency History…

September 6th, 2007

A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life. It isn’t a cross-referenced, fact-checked history. Memory tends to fill in gaps with whatever wattle and daub is handy to keep out the rain and retain a bearable level of comfort. The older I get the better I was.

The neighborhood of Soulard was named for a Frenchman who fled their revolution. The reigning Spanish governor awarded him a land grant in the 1790s. One day the Spanish lowered their flag over the territory and the French raised theirs. The next day the French lowered their flag and we, that is, the United States, raised ours. Circumstances begged the question: was the United States duty bound to honor a land grant made by an arguably spurious foreign power?

It took decades to wend its way to the Supreme Court where it was finally decided in favor of Soulard’s heirs. Early in the legal wrangling, circa 1810, in order to assess what was physically at stake, court surveyors left the village of St Louis and ventured a mile south to inventory the property.

There were woods and fields, streams and ponds, and a house. The house had been there for some time, ten or fifteen years, and although it showed signs of recent habitation, it had apparently been abandoned and needed repairs. Who had been using it? Trappers or Indians or perhaps some of the no account layabouts who had been living on the fringes between the Indians and the villagers, but then again, I already mentioned the trappers. That house still stands, with some recent improvements, about a block west from the entrance to the shelter.

As neighborhoods go, Soulard was historically a modest one. It was where the succeeding waves of immigrants would first settle. Climb atop a Soulard rooftop and count the churches. Most every one represents a different nationality although the Germans are represented  for each different wave that seemed to come every twenty years or so.

 Each church served as the social center for those immigrants providing assistance and community for the newcomers. They also served as community support for others as well. The very first chapter of the St. Vincent De Paul Society (dedicated to helping the poor), in the Americas was established here in 1848.

Soulard was a working class neighborhood. There were some wealthy families. They had to be able to get to and from work in a reasonable amount of time, but early in the twentieth century automobiles fixed that.

The first three quarters of the twentieth century weren’t very kind to the neighborhood. Prohibition was hard on a community of brewers and brewery workers. The end of Prohibition coincided with the start of the Great Depression which overlapped the Second World War. After the war, the men and women who fought it wanted a piece of the prosperity. The government created what was then the largest social spending program in history, the G.I. Bill.

The Bill provided low interest college loans and mortgage guarantees to millions and paved the way for the next two generations of prosperity. There was one catch, though. It was also a jobs bill. The G.I. Bill only provided loans for new homes to generate construction jobs. It didn’t apply to existing houses. If you were a returning vet, where would you live, in a new modern low-cost home or a hundred year old fixer upper that may not even have running water? Parts of Soulard didn’t have running water till the ’60s. That is the 1960s. Much of Soulard was simply abandoned.

By the 1970s much of the housing was vacant. The city floated a plan to bulldoze everything east of Highway 55. There were a few stalwart visionaries who fought off city hall but it was still a dirt poor neighborhood. I began coming to the market in ’65 and the neighborhood during the late ’70s.

A number of artists and musicians moved here for the low rents and made the place a destination. The Geyer Street Sheiks and the Soulard Blues Band are among the unheralded saviors of the community.

I remember cold water flats for as low as $45 dollars a month. I also had friends who were occupying buildings with no legal claim on them. They went to work every day. They had furniture and carpets and hung pictures on their walls. They would carry water home in plastic jugs and had heating and lights from kerosene. Their lifestyle wasn’t much different from my own except perhaps they had fewer bills. Some people would line up daily at the doors of the neighborhood churches and ask for food, blankets and clothing. This had gone was now so routine it called for a better response.

In 1981 three of those churches got together and worked to better address the needs that were being presented at their doors. Trinity Lutheran, St. Vincent de Paul and Sts. Peter & Paul opened a shelter. That first winter it was in the basement of Peter & Paul’s parish hall. The following winter it moved to the basement of the church itself, a neighborhood response to a neighborhood problem.

If you lived in Soulard back then, encountering people with serious mental health and substance abuse issues was a much more common routine. There were certainly scores and possibly hundreds of squatters among the generally poor people living in Soulard. It is hardly an exaggeration to say there were whole blocks you could have bought for what some single homes are currently selling for.

In 1982 the meals program was born. The requests for food came from beyond those in need of shelter. Many people on limited income, such as Social Security or food stamps, were running out of resources by the end of the month. Many churches came together to provide a hot meal. At first it was just the last week of the month but as more groups joined, the program has grown until today when there is a meal served on all but three days at the beginning of the month. The program starts, as of January ’07 on the fifth of each month at Sts. Peter & Paul. It moves to St. Vincent’s on the twenty-second where they serve up to including the first of the following month. This past year around 50,000 meals were served out of the two locations.

I wasn’t there for the shelter’s inaugural winter. I didn’t arrive until the fall of 1985. I was still in my twenties, for at least a few more weeks. I had read some poetry at a reading in one of Soulard’s myriad bars and was approached by Peter Rosenberg. Peter thought I had the right attitude and invited me into the shelter. There were men, women and children living crowded in the church basement. Eighty to ninety a night was typical. The door would open at nine each night and the crowd would rush in. Sometimes there would be a hundred at the door when we opened. When we felt we had our fill we would then offer transportation to New Life or Salvation Army. On Dick Pikey’s birthday in January 1986 we hosted 120 guests, it was ten degrees outside and we weren’t turning anyone away.

I was living nearby and it was easy for me to come almost every night. I would leave between eleven and midnight after most people were settled on their bunks and the overnight volunteers were all in. I worked the door. I was essentially a bouncer.

We saw a lot of one percenters back then - those alcoholics who lived for nothing more than their next drink, Pops, Ashtray, Johnny and Roy;  and severely mentally ill - Bucket Joe aka Gravois Joe and Cosmic Dan, and constant scrappers like Otis and Dumpy. We also had families with infants and children in school, abused women, abused men and folks just really down on their luck…and far too many veterans.  

When we closed at the end of March in ’86, decisions were made. We had been serving a lot of people but poorly. We were overcrowded. The numbers greatly added to the stress level. We helped open three other shelters intent on working with women and families.  We would cut our numbers down to fifty a night. We would, henceforth, only serve men. They would have to sign up for a reservation for a week at a time.

Initially, I opposed these changes. That we might exclude anyone struck me as a terrible idea. Within hours of opening, in the fall of ’86, I knew it was the right thing to do. The stress level had fallen off the charts. Previously at the end of each evening, I had such an adrenaline level it took hours to unwind. We still have our moments but not at all like we once did.

Out of those decisions a lot of good has emerged. We knew we could be more than a seasonal shelter. In ’87 we made our first attempt at a year round program, a transitional program. We were making it up as we went along. There wasn’t a handbook at the time and we failed utterly. We needed to give it a lot more thought. We didn’t want it to just be a smaller emergency shelter. We really wanted to see men move from the streets. We shut it down within two months.

We tried again in the spring of ’88. We had a clearer set of expectations for our guests and a better notion of who we might be able to help. Since then, many hundreds of men have received meaningful help in their journey back from the streets.

We have probably all heard about the de-institutionalization from the mental health system that was taking place in the seventies and early eighties. Libertarians were offended that people were being held, incarcerated because they were mentally ill but had committed no offense. Conservatives thought the government ought not be in the mental health business anyway. It was a much too nebulous a field to be wasting tax dollars on.

The upshot was we saw a lot of severely mentally ill people on the streets back then. Sometimes a mental hospital discharge plan was little more than a taxi ride to the vicinity of the shelter. We saw many folks revolve in and out of hospitals, jails and streets. Sometimes they would enter boarding houses only to drift away without proper supervision.

There was one program, Juniper House, that received a number of our past shelter residents. Many seemed to do fairly well there. It was run by Brother Bob Huston. Bob came down with cancer and his guests were foundering. We had been concerned with what we had been witnessing and felt we could do more in this area. In 1991, we established our mental health transitional program and adopted the residents from Juniper House shortly before Brother Bob died.

Known today as The Benedict Joseph Labre Center, the program is a 15-bed state licensed mental health facility. It is a transitional program with an occupational therapy component to assess and develop the living skills of the residents, where we seek appropriate housing and supportive services to enable them to live in the community, off the streets and out of the jails and hospitals. Once stabilized, many of our guests have gone to school and back to work and are contributing back to the community.

At least from my earliest days in the shelter, there has been the constant presence of HIV/AIDS. Ours is a difficult demographic, individuals who, in many instances have exhausted friends and family and other service providers. Many have come to us with shattered health and unstable mind. Some, we have held their hand to their end, but many others we have been able to assist back to health and stability.

We have about twenty people in housing today as part of what has become our Positive Directions program, and we have a day center where residents come for classes, meetings, meals and social activities.

Our newest program is the Breakfast Club. Originally housed at Christ Church Cathedral, we moved to Centenary Methodist Church in September 2006. Prior to 2002, Christ Church would daily open their doors and many homeless people would enter, especially in the winter. They would sit in the sanctuary, occasionally going to the offices asking for help with simple needs.

The Cathedral approached us about creating a program and managing it in their space. We opened in October 2002, expecting to serve around 50 to 60 a day. In short time we were seeing closer to a 150 daily. They renovated a larger space and our numbers blossomed again.

Once again we were serving a lot of people poorly, but not for lack of effort. The numbers were just too great for the space. A couple blocks to the west on Olive Street is Centenary Methodist, another beautiful old church. Their pastor wanted to develop an urban ministry serving the ubiquitous denizens of the downtown streets. We worked out a plan to move into their much larger space.

Today, we can (and often do) seat over 200 people at tables at one time and are serving a light breakfast with information and referrals to about 1,200 individuals a week. Centenary’s own staff has developed a lunch program serving similar numbers. In the past year we have served at Centenary, somewhere around a hundred thousand meals. We are beginning to develop an evening meal, too. In September, dinner will be served three nights a week. Many other agencies are coming on site to do outreach and provide services.

We make an impact. We make a difference. People come to us for help and get it.

One of the things I admire most about Peter & Paul is that all our programs came about because a problem or situation presented itself and we fashioned a response. We aren’t perfect and haven’t always been right, but we give our best shot with our best abilities. I came as a volunteer and continue with volunteers, people who give their time and money to make this a better community. From former recipients to corporate executives, liberals, conservatives and those who are apolitical, people who know they just can’t sit back and say, “Somebody ought to do something” and let it go at that.

Every now and then, someone asks me how I keep doing what I do. They see the grinding poverty, deprivation and attendant suffering. All of which is real and true. I suggest they look around and see the selfless giving and engagement.

Every year many hundreds of volunteers offer many thousands of hours to make our programs work. Our guests know this and appreciate that so many could be doing something else but choose to be a part of the solution.

Volunteers come to the work as a joyful thing. They know helping someone else helps themselves, that to be happy you make someone else happy. It isn’t the gift, it is the giving. The shelter was a neighborhood response to a neighborhood problem, a problem that couldn’t be ignored. All the other programs grew out of a budding awareness of the constellation of problems that made people ‘homeless.’ Some of our programs are more directly dependent on volunteers than others but all programs utilize them, need them.

art collabARTive

August 23rd, 2007

Yep.

That’s right.

CollabARTive.

Eight years ago next month we started what was supposed to be a time limited project bringing art into the lives of some of our residents, and the lives of some of our residents into art. At the time, I felt my time spent with the project was a guilty pleasure. It would have been very easy to send the men off with the artist and do something more “productive” with myself.

What I found, as a program manager, was that by participating with the men under the instruction of the visiting artist, we had opened up an avenue of communication that has become essential to the program. In the nuts and bolts of what we do, I, the case manager and the substance abuse counselor, are professional nags. “How is the job search going?” “Have you made your 12-Step meeting quota this week?” “Did you make your bank deposit this week?” These questions define our relationship. They also put up a wall between us. The men have to account for themselves to us and we become… how shall I say…tiresome.

For a couple of hours once a week, we step into other roles. One of a rotating series of artists come in and run workshops on art of various disciplines: writing, photography, drawing, painting and clay sculpting. The process lets us step back from our official roles and provides a forum to relate in a more natural way. It allows us to learn about each other’s issues and concerns in a more relaxed fashion. It allows us to step around the wall. It doesn’t work miracles. It creates more opportunities.

It has also fostered greater support among our clients for one another. They become mentors for one another. Several alums from the last several years drop by from time to time to reconnect with us and contribute to the current class of transitionals. One man from eight years ago is still quite regular with us.

One of the artists we have worked with extensively over the years is Jane Ellen Ibur. Jane is a certified “master teacher” who has spent most of her career teaching in non traditional settings: prisons and jails, nursing homes, community centers and shelters. She is a published poet and well known in local literary circles. And she has done a poetry and literature program on KDHX FM-88.1 for the last umpteen years, “Literature for the Halibut”, (Thursday’s at 8 PM).

Janey has been working with the men on a performance piece based on their writings turned in over the years, that tells something of their stories. The piece is being directed by Con Christeson, who has been the managing artist all these years . There is something of early home life and setting out on the road to homelessness, substance abuse and recovery, life on the “trail” and recovery. And it is hopeful. It is the story of men redeeming themselves.

Next week, some of us will be traveling to the KDHX studios and performing excerpts on Janey’s show. You can listen in at “Literature for the Halibut,” Thursday, August 30th, 7 PM, 88.1 on your FM dial. The following week, we will be performing the whole work at Christ Church Cathedral’s Art & Soul Cafe at 7PM, September 7th.