Greensboro pastors and agencies meet to discuss day center initiative

Two Greensboro district council members today called on pastors to marshal their congregations’ resources to establish one or more homeless day centers, and for nonprofit providers to align their services accordingly at a meeting at Shiloh Baptist Church, the second of a series of discussions led by District 1 Councilwoman Dianne Bellamy-Small.

I attended as a Food Not Bombs volunteer, day center advocate and participant-reporter with friends Tim Hutchinson and Cara Michele Forrest. The three of us helped organize a day center meeting that took place yesterday at nearby Grace Community Church that was mainly for people who are homeless or formerly homeless, although Guilford County Commissioner Paul Gibson also attended. So there are two parallel processes: one led by Bellamy-Small for service providers; and one, in which I am primarily involved, for homeless people.

The pastors, service providers, advocates and city officials around the table today tackled the tension between churches’ Biblical commission to care for the poor and community pressures to discourage the presence of homeless people, explored the balance between professional staffing and self-direction by homeless clients, and discussed mobilizing community support and determining a suitable location. Bellamy-Small said she would like to see a day center open by early summer.

Her colleague, District 2 Councilwoman Goldie Wells, suggested the city must find the political will to open a day center.

“To say that we have no place that people can go to, and be safe, is an indictment against our city,” Wells said. “To hear that churches that follow Jesus are not welcoming their brethren — that’s a problem. It’s not fair for us to go to our sealed houses, and there are a thousand people who don’t have a place to go, day or night…. We need to pull our faith-based community together maybe like we did for the gangs. Those preachers have an obligation not only to their people but to the Lord. If ‘When I was hungry and you didn’t feed me, I was naked and you didn’t clothe me,’ the Lord’s not going to look very favorably on Greensboro or us as individuals.”

Wells’ jeremiad was precipitated by a discussion about the conflicted mandates of churches and service providers. Many churches and service agencies prohibit homeless people from loitering on their premises during times when services such as feeding programs and emergency shelter are not operating — a regulation backed up by the city’s police powers. For their part, Christian pastors are acutely aware of the Biblical charge in the Book of Matthew that begins, “For I was hungry and you fed me,” and ends with the Biblical Jesus telling the eternally adjudged: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers you did for me.” At the same time, pastors endure pressure from parishioners and neighbors alike to enforce anti-loitering laws against the poor.

The Rev. Willis Johnson acknowledged just such a tension. As pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, a house of worship at the southern end of a stretch known among homeless people as “the block” whose focal point is Greensboro Urban Ministries and HealthServe, Johnson said if one of the church sextons spots a suspicious looking homeless person in a nearby park he would call the police with the expectation of response. “We kind of pushed them out,” Johnson said. “We have not availed ourselves as a welcoming place.”

Marshall Benbow, director of outreach ministries at Grace Community Church, said his church’s roughly 800-member congregation has struggled over a question of whether to open its basement for a day center.

“I’m sitting here praying,” he said. “I know what the Bible says about caring for the poor. There are camps of people living on our property at night. I’m saying, ‘God, what are you saying to our church?”

I can empathize with these two clergy members. As a member of the steering committee at St. Mary’s House, a small Episcopal church near UNCG, I can attest that discussions about our relationship with homeless people are a source of dissension. According to Forrest, ours is the only church in the College Hill neighborhood that hasn’t filed a notice of intent with the Greensboro Police Department, allowing the police to make arrests for trespassing. My pastor, the Rev. Kevin Matthews, with the support of our steering committee, has expressed the intent to deemphasize community outreach to better meet our mandate from the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina to serve students, faculty and staff at area universities and colleges. He has contemplated filing a letter of intent but has not yet been able to bring himself to do it.

For me, this drives home the reason why we need to establish one or more day centers around Greensboro, and why churches have a special responsibility to move this plan forward.

Bellamy-Small said she may propose that Greensboro churches, whose number she estimated at a thousand, set aside $100 each in their annual budgets to meet the needs of homeless people.

Where should homeless people who congregate in front of churches and service agencies be redirected? At the Shiloh Baptist Church meeting, Michele asked, “Is there a place where it’s legal for homeless people to be?”

Police Capt. Pam McAdoo-Rogers, who attended the meeting, had a concise answer: “No.” She added that the department takes a zero-tolerance approach to loitering, but patrol officers often find that they don’t have time to enforce it because of its heavy call load.

Joyce Johnson, a program director at the Beloved Community Center, which offers limited services to homeless people at a hospitality house on Arlington Street, asked, “What is the level of will around the table?”

Though ideas were in ample supply, commitment was inconsistent among meeting participants.

April Harris, executive director of Action Greensboro, left early. She said her organization, a civic booster and economic development nonprofit spearheaded by former Mayor Jim Melvin, was juggling several projects, but she wanted to hear the ideas presented.

Bellamy-Small pleaded for the organization’s support.

“Action Greensboro has a machine that can move people,” the councilwoman said. “I believe Action Greensboro can play a pivotal role.”

Cyndi Blue, a staffer at the city’s housing and community development department noted that establishing a day center is among the priorities of a 10-Year-Plan to End Homelessness that has received official support from both the Greensboro City Council and the Guilford County Commission. She said her research indicates that operating costs for day centers around the country range from $150,000 to $500,000.

A number of possible locations were suggested. Forrest threw out the idea of rehabilitating the old Rose’s Spa building on Fulton Street, which Blue said was structurally unstable. A couple people asked about some property the city owns on South Eugene Street that is slated for redevelopment. Bellamy-Small announced, “I’d like to see if we could give y’all the Canada Dry building,” and then laughed, as if to acknowledge that council is likely to approve an expenditure of city funds for such a use.

As an observer and participant, I have to say that the emphatic leadership of the two councilwomen, matched by the passion of the pastors and service providers is heartening. I hope we can develop the leadership and organization in the homeless community to ensure that the day centers are a place in which homeless people feel a sense of ownership and agency. I think with the active organization of homeless people, the financial support of the business community, the help of volunteers from churches and services by nonprofit agencies, they can thrive. I was glad to hear the Rev. Mike Aiken, executive director of Greensboro Urban Ministry, express support for the self-governance model.

In their parallel meetings, the service providers and homeless people have identified roughly the same kinds of basic services that a day center should provide: showers, telephones, referrals, mailboxes, counseling, laundry facilities and, not least, a welcoming place of community.

To quote from Forrest’s report, yesterday the homeless group at Grace Community Church had “a longer discussion about professional services versus peer support. There’s a movement in mental health to have a lot of peer support. People were talking about having a leadership where people who were getting off the street and getting their lives together could go through some kind of training to deal with some of the socialization issues like fights breaking out.”

As Michele mentioned, there has been strong consensus in the homeless group that the services provided by the Beloved Community Center’s hospitality house should be enhanced and better funded so it can expand into a full-service day center, instead of being put out of business by a new initiative.

Blair Benson, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Greensboro, said her organization plans to open a drop-in center. I think, and I’m pretty sure some others agree, that this could serve as a specialized day center serving a specific community in a larger network of day centers.

“The mission is that it is peer led,” Benson told me. “It’s not a treatment center. It’s a place of community.”