The Homeless Services Grassroots

Behind the big shelters and agencies, tiny do-gooder groups keep people alive.


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Published: Mar 5, 2008

the charitable impulse

Mark Stehle

DAY TO DAY: Eric Dorsey (center) doesn't worry about policy fights. He just feeds the hungry.

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On the corner of Girard and Columbia avenues is a whitewashed building with black trim; a hand-painted stencil over the doorway reads, "Brotherhood Mission." In front there's a rickety pink table piled high with loose clothes, which two underfed white addicts rifle through halfheartedly. There's also a hustle and bustle around the front entrance: Foot traffic intensifies around lunchtime as haggard homeless men gather for a fiery sermon and a meal. Past the folding table that acts as a front desk and around a corner there's a door with a crudely hand-painted crucifix and the phrase, "If I be lifted up, John 12:32."

Sitting inside is the mountainous minister Eric Dorsey, a charismatic Mission intake specialist, who looks like he'd be as comfortable on a defensive line as at his desk. His office is a tiny area blanketed with papers and boxes, leaving space for only a single chair opposite his that's usually occupied; the minister is constantly fielding requests and hearing gripes from a line of men queued in the hallway. When asked to say something in response to The Philadelphia Inquirer's three-part series on homelessness, he smiles broadly, and asks with a laugh,

"Am I allowed to say we need money?"

Last week's Inquirer series focused on the macro-issues of homeless policy, and the big agencies — what might be called "Big Homelessness" — that grapple with them. But far from City Hall, dotting the landscape of Philadelphia's outlying neighborhoods, are dozens of micro-level community-based agencies like Brotherhood Mission. This is the grassroots of homeless services, and though these outfits rarely see even a cent of the $1.6 billion per year distributed nationally by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (money that local Big Homelessness relies on), they are responsible for supporting and sustaining a tremendous volume of the city's homeless — often filling in the gaps left by the bigger players.

Brotherhood Mission, for instance, doesn't receive city funding, but feeds about 100 men per sitting, three times a day, and puts up a lot of stragglers from the city's often overcrowded Ridge Avenue Shelter. It does this with in-kind donations of food and clothing, the goodwill of volunteers and by keeping administrative costs low.

"Most of the money we get, we put it out there for the people," Dorsey says. "Clothes, shoes, winter coats, that kind of thing. Sometimes we struggle to keep the lights on, struggle to keep the heat on. We don't get grants, no government funding."

In fact, he says, he doesn't even explore those avenues, because he doesn't want to compromise his core mission: evangelism.

"We run a spiritual program here," says Dorsey. "We're a faith-based organization."

Across town at Ridge Avenue's Mary Jane Home Enrichment Center, Edna Williams is doing similar work. Standing behind her kitchen's glass deli counter, Williams looks tiny. She has close-cropped snow-white hair, and wears bright red oval glasses with a strong prescription that magnifies her eyes. She moves quickly and talks fast. A tall, thin man in dirty, slept-in clothes lets himself in and stands before the counter, blowing warm breath into cupped hands.

"It's cold, Miss Williams, it's cold."

"You ready to eat?" she asks. "How many bananas you want?" She pulls one from a pile on the countertop.

Williams was around before there was a homeless problem. In 1972, when Ridge Avenue was a bustling commercial strip, she housed widows and ex-offenders in her hotel, and fed anyone who couldn't afford a meal in her restaurant's kitchen. The city approached her in 1977 about starting a program to feed and house the rising number of homeless from the crack epidemic. Back then, Williams explains, there was no bureaucracy; she submitted requests for funding directly to the mayor's office, scribbled on brown paper bags. Eventually, though, the city began sending her thick, complicated forms, and Williams decided she preferred to run the kitchen and hotel (which houses 50 and is always full) on her own.

Though the efforts of outfits like hers often go unsung, Williams is no stranger to newspapers. She displays her clippings right behind her counter — most were published in late December. Like clockwork, she says, reporters show up around Christmas to feature her feeding efforts. This year's offering was a Daily News story titled "Ladles of Love." A spurt of donations tends to follow this annual coverage. This year, the architect of the Borgata stopped by to hand-deliver a $500 check.

"Then it disappears!" she cries, throwing her arms up as if baffled by black magic. Like Dorsey, she spends the rest of the year struggling to scrape by; donations of food, furniture and clothes go out the door as fast as they arrive, and the informal payment arrangements she has with tenants — "They give what they can," she says — don't cover costs.

"If I didn't own the building, I'd be in trouble."

If there's a complaint about groups like Williams', Dorsey's and the similar Soldiers of the Lord Ministry in Kensington, it's that they assist the homeless without working to end homelessness: People come in, eat, sleep and unless they're taken with a sermon, receive no other services.

It's true that the macro debate articulated in the pages of the Inquirer over whether to treat a homeless person's mental health or substance abuse problems before or after placing them in an apartment, is foreign to these do-gooders. But the fact is that the homelessness grassroot groups are cooperating in the city's broader efforts: Dorsey takes overflow from Ridge Avenue; Williams has clients who stay at her place while receiving mental-health services from city agencies. They're the support structure.

That's not to say, of course, that for someone like Williams, just doing what she does isn't enough. She's happy to help Big Homelessness. But to the faith-based grassroots, serving the poor and spreading "the Word" is the policy directive.

"I do like Jesus Christ did," she says. "I just feed people, give them what they need."

(j_deeney@citypaper.net)