by David Waters
MEMPHIS, TN--Family photos on the dining room wall tell the story of a home nobody wanted but everybody needed.
There's Aniece and her 7-year-old son, who were homeless for six years. The money she made as a part-time floral designer and short-order cook wasn't enough to keep a roof over their heads.
There's Arlene and her two teenage sons, who lived with a car roof over their heads for more than a month after they lost their apartment and all of their belongings in a fire.
There's Sherry and her children, ages 3 and 7, who lived in a motel parking lot for several weeks after a friend wrecked her car and she lost her job because she couldn't get to work. She took her kids to a nearby Walmart every morning to get them cleaned up for school.
There's Delphany and her three children, who suddenly found themselves homeless after family difficulties forced them out of an apartment she had been working in vain to pay for. A relative was cashing her checks and using the money for drugs.
All were homeless or on the verge. All found a home here at the Dorothy Day House of Hospitality on Poplar near Cleveland.
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Sister Maureen Griner, with baby Preston at the Dorothy Day House in Memphis |
"This is a place nobody wants to be, so they're not necessarily grateful when they get here," said Sister Maureen Griner, who volunteers as the house's day-to-day director. "But by the time they leave, they are part of the family."
The ministry has provided a temporary home for 20 families over the past seven years. But there's room for only three families at a time, not nearly enough to address the growing need.
Already this year, the ministry team has turned away 71 families for lack of space, including 11 families during a four-day stretch last week.
"The safety net has never before been so strained," said Katie Kitchin, executive director of the Community Alliance for the Homeless. She was also a consultant to the Mayors' Action Plan to End Homelessness. "When the (federal) stimulus funds are gone, it will be even more stressed."
According to Kitchin, the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association screens about 500 families each month who are homeless or about to be. Most have no income. MIFA typically places about 30 families a month in available shelters or transitional housing. Last month, MIFA screened more than 800 families.
"You see a lot of homeless men, every now and then a homeless woman, but you don't see the families that are living on the street," said Michael Synk, a business consultant who is board chairman of the Day House.
"Homeless families hide. They know that if they get caught, their kids might be taken away from them. This ministry tries to keep families together."
This ministry began with a 2003 discussion about Dorothy Day, a journalist and social activist (and daughter of a Tennessee man) who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in New York City in the 1930s. Day and her friends sought to "live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ" by opening "houses of hospitality" to serve the poor.
"The mystery of the poor is this," Day famously said. "That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him."
The following year, several members of the discussion group bought and renovated a large, old house on Poplar near Cleveland, with the help of a no-interest loan from the Ursuline Sisters of Mt. Saint Joseph, a religious order in Kentucky.
The house's four-member volunteer ministry team includes two Ursuline sisters -- Sister Maureen, who is also director of music at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, and Sister Margaret Ann Zinselmeyer, who is director of Hope House. Catholic lay leaders Paul and Judy Gray also are on the team.
Team members don't live in the house, but they oversee it, making sure residents follow house rules -- including no visitors and a nightly curfew (residents don't get a key). They also monitor each family's progress plan.
"So many families end up homeless because they experience some personal catastrophe -- a job loss, car wreck, major medical bill, a fire, a death," Sister Maureen said.
"Most of us would have family or friends to turn to for help. These families don't have that support, for whatever reason. We become their extended family."
Ministry team members help families dig their way out of debt (back rent, overdue utility, phone or car bills), reconnect to support systems (food stamps and other benefits), deal with legal issues (car tags, court fines, custody issues), get the kids back in school, and find education and job training programs for the adults.
The team is supported by two physicians, a dentist, an accountant and several educators and attorneys, as well as a large network of volunteers who maintain the house and yard, provide a weekly family meal, help raise funds, and deal with larger issues. When a family is ready to move out on their own again, the team helps them find a place to live and furnishes it.
Some of the families who lived here couldn't or wouldn't follow the house rules. Others couldn't or wouldn't find jobs. Still others followed the plan, dug themselves out of a hole and then fell (or jumped) into another one. But most are making it.
Aniece has a full-time job and a nice apartment. So does Sherry. Arlene moved to California and says she's doing well.
Delphany went back to school, graduated from the University of Memphis last May and now works as a teacher/counselor with Youth Villages.
"I also lost 67 pounds," Delphany added.
"I hated this place when we got here, but it was a godsend. There's no other way we would have stayed together as a family. "
Dorothy Day in Memphis
The late Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement, visited Memphis in October 1952 to support the work of another house of hospitality. It was called the Blessed Thomas House, a day care for black children whose parents were too poor to afford day care while they worked cotton field in Arkansas.
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Helen Caldwell Day faced racist opposition from priests in the 1950s. |
Memphian Helen Caldwell Day, an African-American nurse who had worked alongside Dorothy Day (no relation) in New York City, quit her job and rented a storefront on South Fourth Street. She was particularly inspired by a 1951 fire that killed two black children who had been locked in a rented garage while their mother worked the fields.
The Blessed Thomas House was dedicated in January 1952, and supported by black and white members of the Outer Circle, an interracial group that often discussed Catholic social justice teachings.
The local Catholic bishop initially supported the effort, but Helen Day and her interracial, anti-segregation supporters soon faced opposition, according to a short history of the effort written by former Memphian Clare Hanrahan, whose mother, Alice, befriended and actively supported Helen Day and her work.
"Priests who disagree with us claim to speak for you and say to us and others that you disapprove of Blessed Martin House, except as a nursery for poor children and a shelter for poor women," Helen Day wrote in a 1955 letter to Catholic Bishop William Adrian, according to Hanrahan's history, "Looking Things Over -- Again."
"(The priests) do not see why we should be concerned with the very problems which have made nursery/shelter necessary. I guess, though, I am too much of a nurse to be satisfied with treating the symptoms only while the cancer grows."
Helen Day closed The Blessed Thomas House in May 1956. "Up till May, there were still thirteen children in that little six-room house, and very little support coming in," Dorothy Day wrote a few months later in "On Pilgrimage."
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