Holy Cross Hope House: Caring for our city’s poor

During the summer of 2019, when I first started as the priest at Holy Cross Episcopal Church, we received a small donation of $13,000 to aid in housing the homeless. With that money, we began to house 20 people.

The process was simple. We identified people whom we thought would be successful in the program. They needed to have some kind of income. And they needed to want off the street.

Once people were identified, we paid for their upfront costs, such as security deposits, electrical deposits and water deposits. After this burden was met, we partnered with the Renesting Program to furnish their new homes.

Once the person was situated in their new home, they agreed to attend monthly case work sessions. We provided one month of case work for each year that someone was homeless. We also required attending a series of classes designed to teach them life skills, such as paying bills on time or opening a bank account.

Two years later, of those first 20 people, 18 are still in the housing we helped them acquire without any additional financial assistance from Holy Cross. One of the two people no longer in the housing we acquired moved in with family.

Programs that aid the poor and homeless, like Holy Cross Hope House, are necessary to meet immediate needs. But long-term planning is required to assist people in climbing out of homelessness. Programs like this will not work for everyone, but they will work for a lot of people.

It not only helps people in a more just way, but it also costs less money. I mentioned this program at a recent listening session with city officials. I’d like to encourage our city and her people to take a more active role in caring for the city’s poor.

At the end of the day, homelessness exists because we as a society have collectively decided that it is acceptable. I say, no more. Justice demands that we do more than simply bandage those wounded by our societal indifference, though it demands this as well.

For around $500, we can house one person in sustainable, long-term housing that isn’t a group home, but a place of their own. The success we’ve had with this program is owed to our donors, the staff at Hope House and the formerly homeless who sought our help.

But imagine what we could do with a sustained, organized effort to truly care for those who live on our streets. Rather than approaching them as a problem to be solved but as people to be loved, I believe we can truly do some good.

The only way to solve community problems is as a community. And my prayer is that more in our community will understand, as Lutheran theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”