Charity, Carnival and The Gobble Gobble Turkey Wobble

I thoroughly enjoyed my hometown school’s Band Carnival. We transformed the cafeteria, gymnasium, and outside yard of our high school into a smorgasbord of game booths and food tables. (I also remember pulling regular shifts as one of the “Dunk Tank” targets…hmmm…) The event helped the elementary, middle school and high school bands buy instruments and uniforms. It was quite something for a small town of 3,500 to finance an entire instrumental program for seven grade levels mostly from one event. It was a lot of fun, and it worked.

A far wiser man than I has suggested that the spirit of charity, at its heart, is the spirit of carnival. In other words, it can actually be fun to give toward meeting someone else’s need without expecting anything in return.

In earlier times, carnivals were held in part to provide a central gathering place (and event) that made it easier for people to bring help for those in need. Sometimes carnivals were “sponsored” by communities; other times by fraternal organizations within churches. As time passed, events have been used by schools, youth groups, civic organizations, and others to raise awareness and funds.

This year, in just a few days, Springs Rescue Mission joins with Care and Share Food Bank for the 2012 “10,000 Turkey Team” whose goal is to raise 10,000 turkeys through donations of frozen turkeys or the money to help buy them during the week of November 10-16. Ten thousand turkeys will provide enough protein to cover 330,000 meals for our neighbors in need in the Pikes Peak region and southern Colorado. It’s a challenging task, but not impossible.

And besides – we can have fun making it happen. We need thousands of people like you to join us for the kickoff event November 10 at America the Beautiful Park starting at high noon. The Gobble Gobble Turkey Wobble offers you the chance to not only provide a turkey or two, but to set one, two or three world records. (Please register now to be a part of those record-setting events at www.mysrm.org/wobble.)

You may not feel like you’re taking the problem of hunger seriously enough by having fun while you’re helping to provide protein for 10,000 or so hungry families, but remember the early church wisdom saying the Lord loves people who give out of cheer, joy, or even (in some translations) outright hilarity.

So be hilarious. Come to the Wobble dressed like a turkey. Dance the Twist for five minutes. Do the Hokey Pokey in a single line for another five minutes. Bring yourself and a friend or your family and a frozen turkey.

Let’s have some fun doing good through some cheerful charity. It works!

Perfect Storms, Tribes and Social Miracles

The common definition of a “perfect storm” began as “a phenomenon where conditions are just right to produce an event of catastrophic proportion.” I’ve also heard “perfect storm” used frequently and, I think, appropriately in describing the lives of so many we serve at the Mission. 

Rarely can we point to one single circumstance that drives a family or an individual into profound need or homelessness. It’s more a matter of conditions piling on top of each other in a way that produces catastrophe in someone’s life.

For example, when Warren lost his wife to cancer some years ago, he turned inward and medicated his grief with alcohol. He ended up alienating his married children and grandchildren. He began showing up at work hung over and depressed, which led to him losing that job. Unable to find another job in a shrinking economy while he was on unemployment, he ended up homeless, alone, hungry and addicted.  Grief, alcoholism, broken relationships, an economy on the fritz and fading chances for employment. Smells like a storm, doesn’t it?

Jerry’s cardiologist is convinced that the stress of being laid off led directly to Jerry’s cardiac collapse a few months later. Jerry kept looking for work while he was recovering. He went into interviews looking well-dressed, but really haggard. Meanwhile his nest egg shrunk and then disappeared. His deteriorated health fed his deteriorating opportunity to work which further deteriorated his economic stability-- or should that be in another order? Maybe it’s all of the above, together, firing at random.

So what do you do when your neighbor is caught in storms like those? Convene the next meeting of experts and make the homeless and hungry the main topic? Write a politician and tell her to take care of the problem? Hope some rich family foundation or Donald Trump-type coughs up a huge check?

What if you could be part of a social miracle? 

In his book Lost Icons (T&T Clark 2000), Rowan Williams (yep, that one -- the Archbishop of Canterbury) comments on what historian John Bossy calls “the social miracle” of the medieval community and church -- charity resulting from “the extraordinary process by which sectional loyalties were from time to time interrupted and overcome by a sense of integration, of belonging to an entire social body extending far beyond one’s choice or one’s affiliations of interest and ‘natural’ loyalty” (Williams, p.54).  In other words, people made the choice to move beyond the tribalism of the Dark Ages into a greater community to benefit those in need. Bossy counts that as nothing short of a miracle. 

He’s probably right. Think about the tribes, each with their own biases, mores and folkways, in our modern culture. Tribes spring up over economic status. Tribes thrive on divisive politics. Tribes nurture differences of social position. Tribes watch with fear should someone invade a comfort zone within their territory. Asking tribes to move beyond their perceived boundaries of relation is tantamount to social heresy. If one’s boundaries don’t include those who have slipped into a different tribe of people struggling with alcoholism or poverty, it can be difficult to even see the need to offer a hand up to others.

But that hand up is necessary for those neighbors (there’s a community term), many of whom may never share our tastes in candidates, football teams, restaurants or radio stations, who find themselves in perfect storms.  Our neighbors need the extraordinary process that interrupts sectional loyalties and goes way past “natural” loyalties. They need someone, in fact a community of “someones,” to break tribal boundaries and offer a hand up out of the chaos of their perfect storms.

As the old Bruce Cockburn song says, they’re waiting for a miracle: the miracle that happens when our attention is fixed, even for a moment, on the fact that because we share the planet and our days with them, the hungry and homeless are somehow miraculously and wonderfully a part of each of us.

They need responses beyond tribes, elections, and platitudes. Our neighbors need the miracle and true synergy of community response, starting with the life jackets that will help them navigate their perfect storms -- food, clothing, education, options, housing, basic care.

Count this your invitation to be part of a social miracle right where you are.

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.  

Running and Recovering

I vividly remember a warm late spring day at my brother’s house in Atlanta about two decades ago. My son Ben was just discovering the joys of running at age two, and he was running down a hall full tilt toward my nephew’s closed bedroom door. 

I caught him just before he did a face plant into a door panel. “Ben, don’t! That door isn’t going anywhere, you know!”

Ben just grinned and put his head on my shoulder. I carried him to the living room and pointed to some blocks on the floor. “Build a rocket for us, OK?” Then I went to the kitchen to refill my coffee.

In a few seconds, I heard little footsteps going full tilt down the hall again. I left my coffee cup and sprinted toward the noise, but too late. BAM! Ben had indeed successfully executed the face plant into my nephew’s closed bedroom door. (Remarkably, there was no blood.) I picked him up just as he realized the door had won.

Helping Ben learn to run was a matter of catching him when he hurt, and encouraging him when he made progress. 

It’s like that sometimes with the homeless and addicted. One of our neighbors who regularly visits our Resource Advocate Program, Donny, has been working with us for at least 16 months. During that time, he’s been sober save for one day last winter. When Donny introduced himself to our RAP “Angels” (if you saw them in action you’d agree the nickname fits) he had already “graduated” from living in a dumpster to prison to being homeless in a shelter. The Angels helped Donny to get housing, dentures, and approval for Social Security over the next few months.

In a way, recovery involves a series of choices where you decide not to hurt yourself. You can self-inflict healing with certain choices. Donny has been on that path of choosing to get better for years. Yet not too long ago, the Angels had to escort him out of the RAP office because he came in intoxicated. 

But that was last week. This is today. 

We believe that Donny will show up sober again, and soon. We believe that, especially as Donny is reminded he has the freedom to choose, he will continue to make more choices to heal than to hurt himself. 

Our job is simply to catch him when he hurts and to encourage him when he’s making progress.