About Those New Crayons...

It isn’t that Ally doesn’t want to go to school. She does. Because she’s part of a homeless family, she faces a few extra challenges, like staying in one place long enough to really benefit from the learning sequence in any one school. Or, to gain a few friends along the way somewhere. Now a veteran of disrupted school and social surroundings at age eight, Ally has learned to adapt to everything from hunger to sleeping in the minivan for weeks in a row to the weird looks and comments she gets when she goes to a new school because of the things she doesn’t have.

It has been a long, wild and weird summer in Colorado. But Ally and thousands of homeless students in Colorado (along with thousands more students in El Paso County alone who have housing but live in poverty) are about to face something almost too mundane for the present Colorado context: the cycle of another school year. Indeed, among the many thousands of public school students in Colorado, by 2010 over 18,000 were homeless. That’s over a 50% increase from just four years before.[i]

 

That stinks. It stinks because homeless kids tend to be transient. And because their education process is so often disrupted, homeless kids are nine times more likely to repeat a grade, four times more likely to drop out of school, and three times more likely to be placed in special education programs than their peers who have housing.[ii]

Imagine for a moment how tough it can be for a homeless child to be considered a “regular student” just from the challenges of enrollment. Residency requirements -- does it really matter in which school district is the WalMart that let you park and sleep there overnight during June? Guardianship requirements? Delays in transfer of school records, if the child was at the last school long enough to even have meaningful records? Transportation insecurity? How about proof of immunizations?

It takes great determination and, almost always, a lot of extra effort for a homeless family to even enroll their children in school. The same goes for many families who live one paycheck or less away from economic collapse. But make no mistake, school is worth the effort for these families and their children. Education is still a pathway out of poverty. And while they’re going to school, students in poverty are fed there once or twice a day on school days. That makes a huge difference for them and their families.

And there’s something simple you and I can do to help: give the gift of school supplies so we can send our younger neighbors in need off to a new year of school with the classroom supplies they need. This week, visit Springs Rescue Mission at 5 West Las Vegas Street (or to your local mission wherever you are) to drop off a solid color backpack loaded with school supplies: notebooks, pens, pencils, Kleenex, hand sanitizer, blunt-tip scissors, pocket folders, watercolors and crayons for younger students, calculators for older students. Maybe you could fill up a backpack for a student the same age as your child.  And if you can’t fill a backpack this year, just drop off the supplies you can. 

You can stop by during business hours Monday - Friday anytime, any week, or come join us Friday, July 27^th from 8:30 am - 4:30 pm for a special School Supply Drive. Some of our local partners have provided light refreshments for that day, and KVOR’s Richard Randall will join us from 11 am - 1 pm if you can make it over the lunch hour.

Our goal is to collect enough school supplies this Friday alone to fill 500 or more backpacks, plain and simple. That number will greatly supplement the normal flow of school supply donations and help us meet the need of a growing number of kids, like Ally, who need adequate supplies for a new school year.

One last thing: Don’t ever think your school supplies donation of any size is insignificant.

• At the very least, you’re lessening the financial pressure on families that might otherwise have to choose between paying for rent and paying for crayons.
• And you’re providing special encouragement for homeless and at-risk kids to attend school as you remove peer pressure about new stuff or the lack of it.
• In turn, as noted earlier, attending school also gives these students access to school feeding programs.

Now, about those new crayons…

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[i][i] Colorado Department of Education, Homeless Education, http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeprevention/homeless_index.htm.

[ii] Institute for Children and Poverty, 2008. “National Data on Family Homelessness.” Retrieved from http://www.icpny.org/PDF/reports/AccesstoSuccess.pdf?Submit1=Free+Download.  

Guest Blog: They Live at the Bottom

Sarah Stacy is one of the Resource Advocate "angels" I often refer to in Light on Las Vegas Street. A tireless champion for the chronically homeless in the Pikes Peak region, Sarah manages the Resource Advocate Program for Springs Rescue Mission. The focus of her job (which she loves) is people at high risk who have often been written off by friends, family and the community at large. I've been pestering Sarah for several months to let us hear what's on her mind through a guest blog. As you're about to find out, she delivered!

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“My clients don't hit bottom; they live at the bottom. If we wait for them to hit bottom, they will die. The obstacle to their engagement in treatment is not an absence of pain; it is an absence of hope.” Outreach worker (Quoted in White, Woll, and Webber, 2003).

This quote resonates with me as a Resource Advocate in the Springs Rescue Mission's Resource Advocate Program (RAP). The chronically homeless with mental illness and addiction that we serve have no basis in their life or life-skills set to desire treatment of their illness, their addictions or their chronic homeless state. They have no money, they have no relationships or support systems, and often they don't even have a roof over their heads. 

And yet they are wonderful, uniquely created humans with great strength and courage buried under years of abandonment.  They are persistent in obtaining the necessities of physical survival like food, showers, laundry and good shoes to walk the many miles required to survive.  They have amazing and unexpected good humor as they deal with the realities of life on the streets. These are the lambs God has given the Resource Advocates at Springs Rescue Mission to feed according to His Word in John 21:15.  I rejoice in that calling, because these lambs are easy to love and respond positively to the most basic of human courtesies. And I benefit far more than the lambs do in the course of obeying the command to feed them.

There are some who fail to enter or respond to treatment because they are not experiencing real pain from the effects of their addictions. These are people in families where the family suffers the pain, where the consequences seldom become life or death; family that continues to bail addicts out of jail, family that continues to provide shelter and food and protects individuals from the harsh realities of loss in addiction.

That is not the case for the clients of RAP. By and large, they are middle- to late-middle aged white men who have lost all contact with family and have destroyed every relationship they've ever had. A few are quite young and already experiencing multiple encounters with the criminal justice system. They have frequently worn out their welcome on friends' couches, so they endure the rigors of living outside. Without point-blank asking, I believe that almost all of them have been repeatedly abused from a young age – sexually, verbally and physically. Those who are not victims of outright abuse suffer the effects of very dysfunctional and non-supportive families of origin. 

Treatment for chronic homelessness doesn't really exist outside of the Rescue Mission, and treatment for mental illness is difficult to come by when you have no financial resources or insurance. (Colorado ranks 47^th in the nation in availability of psychiatric treatment beds.) Almost as bad, there are very few drug and alcohol treatment programs geared to the homeless. Even if there were programs available to those with no income, making a transition through detoxification and treatment at the same time as making a transition to living in a building is extremely stressful.

How then, should mere care and ministry workers respond to this condition? The answer is amazingly simple: be a bringer of hope, and sit back and watch as God uses hope to move people with addictions and illnesses into treatment and those on the streets into homes and families! 

A recent study actually measured improvements in hope among clients of a homeless day center and the results were surprising. They learned that activities as simple as attending peer-support groups for addiction and seeking advocacy in obtaining housing can improve the level of hope our clients self-reported. Baby steps taken with a supportive person alongside actually deepen the perception of hope among the hopeless.

There are many ways that an advocate who works with the hopeless can bring growing awareness that recovery is possible:

• Recognize the humanity of each homeless, addicted and mentally ill person you encounter. That's the easy way to begin nurturing the God-given life deep inside of our vulnerable neighbors. The homeless person in front of you has a name and a story. And chances are, that story is deeper than you ever imagined. Can you imagine what your life would be like if you were a body in a line at a soup kitchen, a number on a loaned towel at a public shower facility or the source of the scent that has other library patrons wrinkling their noses in disgust?

• Help the addicted person in front of you to count their strengths. Addiction and chronic homelessness eat away at hope slowly. When a hopeless person can recount the strengths they already possess and when those strengths are affirmed, validated and nurtured by an advocate, baby-step changes begin to occur. The end result of that journey is the birth of hope for a changed situation.

• Understand and communicate that homelessness and addictions are chronic conditions and recovery may take some ups and downs. If an advocate takes relapse and discouragement in stride as part of the process, steps are made toward incremental recovery. Recovery is not an all-or-nothing deal. Often the effects of different encounters and different attempts at sobriety and treatment are cumulative. Studies have shown that most people who have entered into stable recovery had three to four unsuccessful attempts at recovery in the previous eight years.

• Let the addicted or homeless person you know take the lead in their own recovery. As a middle class American most likely you have a clear vision of “how to”. Your ideas and cultural values may actually present obstacles to a person to whom they are foreign. If the individual you are working with has a goal of obtaining housing and you know that they have a criminal record and lack of finances that precludes housing you can still name the goal “obtain stable housing”. There will just be a few extra steps to getting there for some of the chronically homeless, like getting an income from a job or disability payments, learning to pay bills, and staying sober enough to remember where the home is.

• Love unconditionally. If we believe that recovery is a process with ups and downs, we won't be disappointed or judgmental when our homeless friend has relapses and difficulties, we will love steadfastly and fiercely. We can support and encourage the next forward step knowing that eventually there will be more “ups” than “downs”.

We are the hope-bringers to those who live in addiction and chronic homelessness but we as individual providers are not responsible for their recovery. Our friends are each responsible for their own recovery with the anointing and guidance of a Father in Heaven who loves them more than we ever will be able to. It's that love of God, shown on earth by our actions, that can bring freedom, peace and recovery.

A Sudden and Miraculous Grace

(AP Photo/The Colorado Springs Gazette, Susannah Kay; http://www.dailylocal.com/article/20120625/NEWS04/120629708/rememberingpa.us/%27.$a.%27)

Eucatastrophe

Sometimes even when a word is unfamiliar if it sums up a big, far-reaching idea it’s worth using.

“Eucatastrophe” (pronounced YEW-kuh-tas-stroh-fee) is such a word. JRR Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, coined the word to describe what happens in a story when the good that comes out of a great disaster overshadows the disaster itself. In Tolkien’s words, it is “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with joy that brings tears.” 

And what is it like for the characters in, and hearers of, such a disaster? Tolkien himself says the eucatastrophe develops into “a sudden and miraculous grace.” Eucatastrophe never denies the reality of sorrow and failure because it would then deny us the joy of deliverance. It never accepts final defeat but instead gives “joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,” as a story’s characters -- perhaps with you among them -- come through trials that might easily have shattered them, but in the end didn’t.  

Last weekend one of my lifelong best friends (who, many years ago, actually introduced me to both Tolkien and “eucatastrophe”) and I joined family and friends for dinner and dessert in the shadow of the Pikes Peak range. Just a few days before the Waldo Canyon fire had been, by any reckoning, a great disaster.  But not long after, a sudden and miraculous grace -- the combined efforts of firefighters, a break in conditions, the prayers of strangers, the generosity of friends, the hand of God -- gave our community a sudden happy turn in the story which pierced us with joy that brings tears.

Today we stand at 98% containment. The fire might well be completely extinguished four or five days before the date originally projected.  (Who knew?)

The Waldo Canyon wildfire trespassing into Pikes Peak Region communities delivered a giant wallop in our collective gut two weeks ago. We sucked in the air around us, befouled as it was with ash and smoke, coughed and straightened up ready for the next round. 

You see, this is a remarkable community in crisis. The phone lines and emails buzzed between agencies, government and non-government alike, in everyone’s joint effort to help. Media dedicated themselves to keeping the community informed, period. Press briefings found a mayor standing shoulder to shoulder with a sheriff next to a fire chief adjacent to a Forest Service official, among others, all in a united front. No finger-pointing there; just colleagues working their way through a disaster.

In the early Christian church, there was a document called the Didache that carried this sage advice when practical challenges disrupted the daily flow of activity: “Do the best you can.” By doing the best we can, we help transform catastrophe into eucatastrophe.

We see that kind of transformation daily at the Mission. I have never yet seen it come without a price, or without the dedication of more people than expected, but I have seen it. It is the kind of transformation we need in continued support of the nearly 350 families whose homes were destroyed by the fire, and hundreds more whose belongings are damaged beyond use. It is the kind of transformation we need to encourage in the hundreds of single-parent families, underemployed families, and others who were homeless before the fire and continue to be so today.

It is the eucatastrophe of ongoing results when tragedies invoke neighbors to help neighbors.  So many people here are good at it already. Others have taken the opportunity in the last two weeks to put it into greater practice.

And I have this feeling that few of us will rest until the tears we see in those around us, too, are pierced with joy.