“Coming alongside”

At the 2010 Guiding Lights Weekend January 29-30, my group role-played engaging with someone who seems or is homeless. Cultivating a safe yet open mindset seemed especially useful for “coming alongside.” Suggestions:

1. Sense and enjoy the life going on all around, and cultivate thankfulness for it. This puts me in a mood of happily “saying yes” to the encounter.
2. Remember personal boundaries and limits. I don’t give strangers cash, but I do offer to buy food. And I always stay in a public space. “How about I get  us some coffee at that cafe’ over there?”
3. Detach from outcomes. I let go of any preconceptions of what will happen or should happen in the encounter. Beyond being with the other person in the moment, there’s no such thing as “success.”
4. Imagine a safe, welcoming space to contain two people: I’ve already drawn a safe boundary circle around myself (see #2). Now I imagine drawing a loose, welcoming circle around me and the other person. Within it we can stand restfully, sit down on a nearby bench, go to a café, or walk along side by side. (Of course, the other guy may not want to engage, in which case I simply say goodbye.)
5. Remember that one is a guest in the other person’s world. Accordingly, I treat the other with dignity and respect. I have no need or desire to change him or her; I want just to experience the moment together. Maybe only I will change.
6. Stand “side by side” with the other person. Face-to-face companionship may feel uncomfortable to the other, slightly threatening, or too much like what police and bureaucrats do. Harborview Medical Center Mental Health Chaplain Craig Rennebohm teaches the importance of being “side by side.” Gentle eye contact is also important.
7. Notice the life going on all around, and share observations as it feels natural to do so. Silence is golden, too.
8. Cultivate a sense of wonder about the other person. Psychiatrist Alfred Margulies says, “A sense of wonder keeps us from behaving as if we have other people figured out.” Dr. Gabor Mate’ cultivates an attitude of “compassionate curiosity.” It doesn’t mean I ask lots of questions (silence is golden!).  Most important, I listen to what the other person has to say.
9. Listen and hear. As I absorb what my companion is saying, he or she will feel that I value the words that are spoken as well as the speaker. Bill Block, Director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, helped me realize that I don’t have to agree (or necessarily even to believe) in order to hear. When I say “I hear you” even to things that are troubling or that call for action, this openness to the other does not commit me to act in any particular way.
10. Cultivate a sense of mutuality. I help my companion feel that contact is important to me personally by inviting a later connection and offering a choice. “How about I buy us a cup of coffee next week? Where would you like to meet?”

“Depressed? Snap out of it!”

Clinical depression won’t let you just “Get over it.” Still, that’s the chipper advice many depressed individuals receive from people who don’t understand this mental illness. The Callaghans video is part of the BringChange2Mind series, teaching Americans about the presence of mental illness in individuals all around us, and about what mental illness is actually like.

The series provides an important counterweight to the sensationalized media stories we read about a tiny percentage of people with brain disorders who act out in antisocial ways. Most people suffering from these illnesses stay quietly under the radar – good citizens but often isolated.  BringChange2Mind draws them back into the human circle and lets us learn from them.

The Callaghans

“I look them in the eye and speak with them.”

A reader writes from a distant city:

My church seems to attract a fair number of, shall we say, eccentric folks. There’s a guy who wanders in and out during Mass. He talks to himself and anyone who will listen. I have no idea what he’s saying most of the time, but it’s an easy thing to listen and nod. It makes him smile and I feel better than I would if I looked the other way.

My homeless “friends” usually congregate in our riverfront park at night. They sleep in the shelter and look after each other and their stuff and sometimes ask a passerby for a cigarette. Mostly they go unnoticed. I always look them in the eye and speak with them. It’s another thing that costs nothing and lets them feel good about themselves. Last summer the riverfront was off-limits. After two floods, the whole area was cordoned off and didn’t get cleaned up until nearly September, and then it was too cold for them to hang out there. I miss them but I’d be really happy if no one has to sleep there this summer.

At a recent meeting on homelessness in Seattle a well-traveled woman observed that people in nations she visits are more likely than Americans to engage with strangers. “Americans don’t say hello,” she said. My experience abroad has been similar. Why, then, do we Americans consider ourselves an especially friendly, welcoming people? True, with some notable exceptions we’re more accepting of cultural and racial diversity than are many other societies – a virtue, even in cases where what we accept can be pretty much limited to the abstraction.

Anyway, I like to greet people on the streets of my city as though it’s a village and we all know each other even though we’re not all on a first-name basis yet.

Background about Freestyle Volunteering is in A little about me. More Freestyle Volunteer stories are at Get Started, tabbed above.

Wonder what homeless days are like?

A reader writes:

Ever want to understand what a homeless person endures? Dress up like a transient and walk around downtown Seattle. People go out of their way to avoid you. Women clutch onto their purses as you walk by. Street thugs hassle you. You get treated like a dog. You feel as if you could be a victim of violence at any given moment. Not to mention the obvious of being hungry, cold, lonely etc. Could you imagine living like this for several months, years or a lifetime?

People that are kind to the homeless are found in the strangest places. The young kid that makes peanuts flipping burgers at Dick’s (Broadway) or the grocery clerk at Safeway (U-District). But mostly, the people that look out for homeless are other homeless or formerly homeless people.

It’s hard to understand the plight of the homeless until “you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”.

Please consider choosing one person who shares our public spaces but is roped off from mainstream life by homelessness, and meet in a cafe weekly for coffee and conversation. Ways to get started are tabbed above. Thanks!

Is being homeless their fault?

A reader writes:

Here are some common misconceptions about homeless people:

1. They brought the situation on themselves.
   
2. They are all criminals, mentally ill, or lazy and unwilling to work

The reality is that while some homeless people have made bad choices that led to homelessness, it is only one of many causes for their situation. Often it is simply that circumstances thrust them into this state through no fault of their own.

While there are some people in life who are unwilling or unable to work, it can be incredibly difficult for a homeless person to get any kind of job. There is no way to contact them, they often lack appropriate clothing or facilities where they can to groom themselves properly, and once someone finds out the applicant is homeless their prejudices kick in and they will not hire them simply because they are homeless.

People are afraid to interact with anyone who appears homeless – fear being a huge barrier to communication. But f you get to know a homeless person, it brings an awareness that there is a very fine line separating a homeless person from yourself. We use avoidance to deny it could happen to us. Like some other people, if a homeless person says they are hungry I will buy them food from a restaurant or a grocery store. I will give them personal care items such as shampoo, deodorant, etc. I also offer information about shelters, free medical clinics, etc. Courtesy, kindness, and acceptance are qualities which cost you nothing but mean a great deal to the homeless person who quickly finds that being treated as if they are invisible is a chronic state.

Please consider choosing one person sharing our public spaces who is socially isolated by homelessness, and meeting for coffee once a week. Ideas about how to volunteer in this way are tabbed above.  My article about a program that leads to employment for street kids is at Crosscut.

“A student by day, he’s homeless by night”

According to Debra Smith’s article in HeraldNet,

Delay in financial aid check has forced EvCC student into tough situation:

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and Ryan Lindley’s van won’t start.

He discovers this early in the morning, after crawling from the brown leather sofa wedged in the rear of the van, out the back and around to the driver’s seat. He jams the key in the ignition, turns it and expects the engine’s rumble.

Instead he gets a weak RRRR, RRRR, RRRR as the engine feebly turns over. The interior lights fade in and out.

For many people, this is an inconvenience. For Lindley, it’s serious trouble.

His 1989 Dodge van is his everything: where he sleeps, where he keeps all his belongings, how he gets from here to there.

Sometimes it’s what keeps him warm…. (Continued at HeraldNet)

Lawsuit to help WA kids manage mental illness

Last week the advocacy group Disability Rights Washington filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit against Washington State on behalf of children and youth suffering from mental illness. The complaint cites the state’s failure to provide home- and community-based services that would effectively address these children’s health needs.

Susan Kas, staff attorney for Disability Rights Washington, said in a telephone interview that the intent of the lawsuit is not to recover financial damages but to change the way mentally ill youngsters in the public health system are served, by bringing Washington into compliance with federal law. “In return for billions of dollars in federal money, the state agrees to provide certain services,” Kas told me. But according to the lawsuit, the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) spends federal money on practices deemed ineffectual by the Department’s own studies since at least 2002.

Children in the public system who are diagnosed with serious mental illnesses are too often taken from their homes and placed in residential facilities. “Instead of creating more trauma for kids and spending money on institutional care that’s the most expensive kind of care but not nearly as good” as home- and community-based, family-centered care, Kas said, “the state should let children remain with their families” wherever possible and organize services around them. “The fiscal policy behind the federal funding is that if you treat kids correctly when they’re young, you can prevent their conditions from becoming chronic or severe. It’s a financial investment in the future of these children, that in the long run actually saves public money,” she said…. (more at Crosscut, “Getting ‘downstream’ dollars diverted ‘upstream’”).

Saying Yes

In The Sun magazine’s January issue, a volunteer at a Catholic Worker house reflected on the topic of “Saying Yes”:

Our community includes homeless adults who drop by for food, clothing, and human contact. It’s our policy to say yes to their requests:
Yes, you can look through the clothes closet for some pants.
Yes, I’ll get you some groceries.
Yes, we can talk. What’s up?

I’ve also ended up tacitly saying yes in many situations that no one had prepared me for:
Yes, you can talk to me nonstop for three hours about your sexual liaisons.
Yes, you can get high in our bathroom.
Yes, I’ll get up at 3 a.m. to answer the door because you called 911 when you thought the crumpled banner on the floor was a dead body.
Yes, you can smoke the Frosted Mini-Wheats.
I’m learning how to remain hospitable in such situations and how to say yes to tolerance, patience, and forgiveness.

The volunteer’s discipline reminds me of the Believing Game, one in a pair of intellectual practices recommended by writing teacher Peter Elbow. He argues that we need both the Believing and the Doubting games to help us pick our way through an uncertain world… (more at Crosscut)

More Andy Welsh photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallrevolution/

Vonnegut’s village, and mine

The late Kurt Vonnegut lived in Manhattan as if it were a village in which nobody was a stranger to him, and he arranged his days to increase his chances of running into all sorts of people. He wrote in Technology and Me (Harper’s, September 1996) that he refused to draft his stories and novels on a computer, and typed his rough drafts using a typewriter, then blue-penciled the pages, because it meant he’d have to depend on a typist to produce final drafts.

He’d call his typist to check on her availability, and on the phone they’d digress into the pleasures of idle conversation. Then, needing to buy an envelope in which to mail her the draft, he’d visit the newsstand across the street where, he wrote, “I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them.” …continued at Crosscut.

Homes, Not Handcuffs

In July the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless reported on the increase in laws across the nation that target poor and homeless individuals. New regulations discussed in Homes Not Handcuffs: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities include restrictions on panhandling, some of which resemble provisions of a “civility law” for Seattle that City Councilmember Tim Burgess is expected to propose  (…continued at Crosscut: “Homes, Not Handcuffs“).