Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The Squeeze Is On



Derek and Jeannie had to face their reality in a different way a few weeks ago. Their son Abe needed a tonsillectomy, and they had to come up with a four-figure co-pay.  Then they got the news that they didn’t qualify for school lunch assistance for Abe and their daughter Breanna anymore. Under revised guidelines, they make too much money for the program. (Not that what they make feels like too much money to them.)

The bottom line about their bottom line is that they have to come up with an extra 40 school lunches a month now at a time their savings are wiped out. In their wildest dreams, they never thought they’d have to come to the Mission to get help. But for the sake of their kids, they came last week for a food box. Thank God for neighbors like you, dear reader, who bring food to the Mission warehouse or to food collections at schools, businesses, and houses of worship throughout our community. You might be amazed at how many of your neighbors are neighbors in need, if only for a season.

More families than ever are showing up for food distribution at the Mission. I don’t want to minimize the fact that they need all the other things available for families here like clothing, furniture, household and personal items and even (some weeks especially) diapers. It’s that the need for food seems to be rising dramatically -- so much so that we now encourage families to stop by for food boxes an extra time a month if they need to. 

And they’re coming from places all over town. They’re scattered among the local zip codes now. Not evenly, to be sure, but still scattered enough to demonstrate that food insecurity for families is an issue to more of our neighbors than we might have dreamed of just a few years ago. In fact, 1 in 7 people in Colorado are “food insecure.” That’s a less painful way to say those neighbors really don’t know where their next meal is coming from, if it comes from anywhere at all. Depending upon whose figures you read, up to half the population in our state could be food insecure sometime this year--maybe only once, but isn’t that enough?

The squeeze is on for families in need of simple things like food. And there are few situations as compelling to move parents into action as having your kids playing quietly in the next room and assuming that food will be on the table when you’re actually trying to create a meal and there’s nothing left to squeeze out of an empty pantry. 

It’s a wake-up moment. It may be filled with pain or a sense of failure or relief or any combination of the above, but it wakes you up in any case. 

Just as it did Derek and Jeannie last week. So this week, I’m reminding you that the community is coming together over the next two weekends at the Rampart Range campus parking lot of Pikes Peak Community College (across from New Life Church on the north side of town) to offer non-perishable food, clothing, household items, furniture and appliances to help stabilize some of the 27,000 families in the Pikes Peak Region who live in poverty. The things you bring to the “Freely Give, Freely Receive” event will help some families start the journey from homelessness to self-reliance. You might keep others from becoming homeless in the first place. Or, perhaps, you’ll keep a couple of kids in your neighborhood from going to bed hungry.

And if you’re reading this from a distance, think about taking leftovers from the spring cleaning of your closets and pantries to your local rescue mission this weekend.

The squeeze may be on for families in a season of need, but we can do something simple, practical and genuinely helpful about it.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

So What Are the Odds?



It was waiting for me as I walked to my office door at the Mission this morning: a lottery ticket. Right there on the concrete landing; all bright and shiny.

Don’t get too excited. It was just a used scratch ticket. Someone had played the odds and lost, pure and simple.

Yet I couldn’t help but think about the odds in the everyday lives of the people we serve. What are the odds that someone becomes homeless, anyway? According to a trusted report on homelessness in America, over the course of a year the estimated odds of experiencing homelessness are presently about

  • · 1 in 194 for the general population,
  • · 1 in 29 for people with incomes at or below the poverty level,
  • · 1 in 10 for veterans living in poverty,
  • · 1 in 12 for people living with friends or relatives due to economic need,
  • · 1 in 13 for a person discharged from incarceration, and
  • · 1 in 11 for youth aged out of foster care.[i]

I don’t pretend to know how those figures strike you. They startle me. Look at them: about a 10% chance of being homeless this year if you’re freshly out of jail or foster care, or if you’re living with friends or relatives because of money, or if you’re a veteran living at or below the poverty line. You have a tad more than a 3% chance of being homeless if your income is at or below the poverty level.

(And just so you know, your odds are significantly better for becoming homeless from the general population [1 in 194] than for winning just $21 from playing a Colorado state scratch ticket [1 in 300].[ii] Just sayin’.)

Someone had thrown the ticket down in frustration or resignation or anger (maybe) for the loss of hope they’d once held in the ticket. I just hoped that it wasn’t someone who was homeless or at-risk. That feeling of loss, that stinging hurt of once having possibilities and now having empty hands, is all too common for our neighbors who come here for help. A losing scratch ticket likely would add insult to injury. But they’d already feel that the odds were stacked against them, wouldn’t they?

That’s why the roles we play as friends of the homeless matter. You matter because whether you encounter a homeless person only on occasion, or you meet new faces from the homeless in your community every day, you become a vendor of hope. Few feel the impact of hope (or the lack thereof) as keenly as those who consistently face homelessness.

Our task is to help them beat the odds against them.

Chances are we have better odds of doing that than in winning the lottery, at least.



[i] The Homelessness Research Institute. The State of Homelessness in America 2012, National Alliance to End Homelessness, January 2012, 38-39.