H.O.M.E. Word – A blog from Project H.O.M.E.

The congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, known as the “Super Committee,” is currently working to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction savings in the U.S. Budget.  This Committee, which was set up after last summer’s long, drawn-out over the debt ceiling, must present a plan to Congress by November 23. 

It’s very likely that programs that support lower-income Americans could be on the chopping block – such as Food Stamps unemployment insurance, Medicaid, WIC, Head Start, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Child Tax Credit.  With poverty on the rise – and extreme poverty reaching the highest levels since the Great Depression – this is no time to put our most vulnerable citizens at even greater risk.

One member of the Super Committee is Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey (R).   As Pennsylvanians, we need to send our Senator a strong message: 

Protect funding for programs for hungry and poor Americans. Deficit reduction should not be accomplished on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens. 

To send this message to Senator Toomey, click here.

For more information on the Super Committee and efforts to protect vulnerable Americans from budget cuts, see:

• The Coalition for Human Needs “Save for All Campaign” (www.chn.org/save4all)
• The faith-based “Circle of Protection” campaign (www.circleofprotection.us).

This past week, members of the Project H.O.M.E. community gathered for a memorial service for Billy Hope, a resident who passed away recently. Billy was part of our very first emergency winter shelter in 1989, and stayed connected to us ever since then.  In honor of Billy, we republish this post, which was originally published last May.  Billy is the resident described in the second paragraph — a testimony to his generous spirit despite many rough years on the streets.  This piece was written by Will O'Brien, who has been with Project H.O.M.E. for over twenty years.

Awhile back, I was asked to speak to a group of college students about the work of Project H.O.M.E. and the crisis of homelessness.  Joining with me in the talk, to share his personal testimony, was one of our alumni, who after years living at one of our residences, is now on his own, working and contributing.  After the talk I drove him back to his home.  In the flow of our conversation he talked about how now that he was working a legitimate job, he was making more money than he ever had, and certainly more than he needed.  In the spirit of “giving back,” he shared that he recently helped one of our current residents by paying his monthly rent for him, because that resident was going through tough times but didn’t want to lose his housing.

Billy Hope in 1992 at The Crossing, one of Project H.O.M.E.'s early transitional residences for men.

A couple of weeks earlier, one of our former residents stopped by my office, as he does on occasion.  We have known him since our earliest days, and he had been through the ringer many times.  Even now his housing was tenuous, and he was living with a fatal disease.  On this visit, he was laden with several large shopping bags.  He had come into some money, and went on a shopping splurge at our thrift store, Our Daily Threads.  He took his various purchases out of the bags to show me, with evident pride at his fabulous bargains.  “Guess what this pair of pants would cost you in the store?  Forty bucks.  I got it for two bucks.  And look – it’s as good as new.”  But none of it – the pairs of pants, sweaters, jackets, all, as he insisted, in great shape – was for him.  He had bought it all for the guys who lived in the residence with him.  All like him on severely limited incomes, possibly on the brink of returning to the streets.  “I don’t need much myself, and I got plenty.  But the guys will appreciate these.”

I also think of another long-time member of our community, who came into our first shelters twenty years ago.  He too is living on his own now, but poor health and years on the streets have taken their toll.  Not even fifty, he walks haltingly with a cane.  Practically as long as I have known him, he has taken a portion of his meager disability check to sponsor a poor child in a developing country.  At one point, he had relapsed and was back on the streets, but when he restabilized, he immediately restarted the sponsorship.  He usually carries a photo of his child with him and is glad to talk about him.

 

 

At Project H.O.M.E. our work, like that of many nonprofit organizations, is enabled in large part by what is traditionally called “charity.”  We use the word to describe the act of voluntarily making a gift of a portion of our assets to support a cause or to help persons in need.  And we are exceedingly grateful for and amazed by the generosity of the thousands of charitable donors, whose gifts, small and large, come to us each day.

My experience of being part of Project H.O.M.E. for many years has given me cause to reflect on this business of charity and generosity.  One paradigm of charity presumes it is those persons with means who share with “the less fortunate.”  But I have been challenged as I have witnessed remarkable generosity by our residents, those who have known utter destitution or who live on extremely modest means.  I see them sharing their resources, however slim, with an astonishing ease, without counting or calculation, without ego or need for accolade.  They have “been there.”  And they know others are still there.

Billy, a few weeks before he passed away this fall.

For some persons, certainly, the struggle for survival can create a hardness, a close-to-the-bone instinct of grasping and hoarding.  But for others, that same struggle seems to have birthed a very different response, a radical freedom that includes an amazing spirit of generosity.

Perhaps we need a larger vision of charity and generosity.  I am coming to believe they mean more than the discrete acts of gifts or donations.  What I have learned from our residents is a kind of generosity that is a fundamental orientation of our lives toward empathy and solidarity.  It embraces the truth of our own struggles and connects it to the struggles of sisters and brothers.  The sharing of resources is a free and natural instinct, one expression of this deep empathy.  And this empathy, I am convinced, makes us more truly human.

I am still on a long journey toward such a spirit of generosity, but I have been blessed with some remarkable teachers.

Last Thursday, November 3, Project H.O.M.E.'s co-founder and Associate Executive Director Joan Dawson McConnon spoke at a rally in Philadelphia about cuts to the state Homeowners’ Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program (HEMAP).    Here is the text of her remarks — also see below for action steps you can take.  The rally was held by Philadelphia Unemployment Project and Occupy Philly.

In June, at the urging of the Corbett Administration, our state legislature adopted a budget which shut down the Homeowners Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program to any additional Pennsylvania families.  According to the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, which administers the program, “HEMAP is a cost-effective means to prevent homelessness among Pennsylvanians.” By giving assurance of steady mortgage payments, it allowed homeowners to seek alternate employment, job training, and/or education when they needed it most. Since 1985 this program has been a life-line to over 45,000 Pennsylvania families who through no fault of their own were at risk of losing their homes due to a temporary loss of employment or medical emergency. The net discounted cost to the state to keep a family in their home is approximately $1,600. Today when over 500,000 Pennsylvanians are unemployed and parents are struggling to keep a roof over their children’s heads, our state government turns a blind eye to their suffering and says to its citizens, “You are on your own.”

Joan Dawson McConnon (left) and Jennine Miller are among the Project H.O.M.E. community members who joined the rally to save funding for HEMAP.

We are not satisfied that our veterans or anyone else are forced to sleep on our streets; we are not satisfied that families lose their homes because of medical bankruptcy; and we are not satisfied when a company who earns $85 million in profit is given tax-payer money to line their pockets.

We can let Gov Corbett know right now that we get the importance of keeping jobs in Philly. We understand the concept of an economic multiplier effect. But we are here to tell the administration that keeping families in their homes makes as much economic sense as keeping 550 jobs in Philly. They both matter equally. And while Gov Corbett claims that states have to compete for employer’s favor otherwise they’ll get fat and lazy; we are here today to raise our voices to let the administration know that we need to tie the economic well-being of the Janney Montgomery Scott workers to the economic well-being of middle- and low-income families who need HEMAP support. 

We need to demand that our administration and legislature find an equal amount of money, $11.5 million, and reopen HEMAP.

We need to look directly at the leaders of Janney Montgomery Scott and ask them….Is $85 million not enough?  In these struggling times, when families are losing their homes and  children are going hungry,  was your decision to take advantage of the struggling economy and use your jobs as a commodity, bidding them to the highest state, the moral and patriotic thing to do? We need to ask the leaders of Janney Montgomery Scott to do the right thing and return that money to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania.

In the early 20^th century Justice Louis Brandeis stated, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Stay put, Occupy Philly!  Continue to raise your voices and shine light on the inequities of our current and proposed public policies. If anyone asks what you are fighting for tell them it is for the survival of our democracy. It is for the survival of our nation’s soul.

TAKE ACTION:  Please call Governor Corbett at 717-787-2500 and urge him to fully fund HEMAP.

You can see a video of Joan's remarks at the rally at our Facebook page — Click here.

A recent article on The Huffington Post is a deeply disturbing analysis of the increase in extreme poverty in the United States.  We at Project H.O.M.E. are constantly discerning these kinds of trends to determine our ongoing mission.  We invite your ideas, your passion, and your concern as we seek to keeping building effective solutions and advocating for a just and compassionate society.

Increase In Extreme Poverty Leaves Millions Stranded

By Peter S. Goodman, Huffington Post

The number of Americans living in communities of extreme poverty — neighborhoods in which at least 40 percent of the population is poor — soared by one-third between 2000 and the latter half of the decade, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution.

The marked increase in so-called concentrated poverty underscores the distress tearing at communities across the nation amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It highlights a stunning reversal of economic fortune since the 1990s, when powerful job growth combined with the expansion of tax credits for lower-income households lifted millions of Americans above the poverty line,…

Click here to read the whole article.