Obama Is Right About Something

Because of the brouhaha over the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s injudicious threat to Senator Obama, not much attention has been paid to the issue that was being discussed by Mr. Obama; the expansion of President Bush’s faith-based initiatives. That is a pity, because these initiatives work and I hope Mayor Bloomberg will not dismiss them in his efforts against homelessness.A Sun reader who is a parishioner of Sacred Heart Church in Glendale, Queens, wrote me when she discovered that the church’s homeless shelter had been closed. Sacred Heart had one of the longest running church-related shelters in the city. She wrote: “All the workers are volunteers i.e. cooks, overnight security etc. The guests want to come to our shelter because it is safe, clean, and pleasant. In fact, many of the guests actually request this shelter.”I spoke to the pastor of Sacred Heart, Father John Fullum, who clarified the story. It is true that the shelter, for the moment, is closed, but he said it only operated in the winter, because the shelter is located in the church basement which gets insufferably hot in the summer. The church received “guests” who were referred to it through a screening process performed by the Partnership for the Homeless, whose funding has now been cut. The actual work at the shelter was done by over 200 church volunteers.He referred me to John Ciraolo, who explained how the shelter operated. The Partnership for the Homeless has drop-in centers for those individuals needing shelter and a meal. Guests would be screened and their needs analyzed before they would be referred to the Sacred Heart shelter. Typically these were people with low-paying jobs, not the ones sleeping in boxes on the street or those with substance abuse problems. He spoke of an example of two recent guests who are college students left homeless when two of their other roommates left for one reason or another. Unable to afford the high rents in the city, they were left homeless.Mr. Ciraolo said that he understood why the mayor is trying to realign the homeless agency, but he said, “We’re not dealing with commodities or something that can be solved with a business plan. We’re dealing with people, individuals who have different needs, personalities. Many of our guests have jobs, and are high-functioning. They’re just down on their luck temporarily.”I then spoke to Zoila Torres at the Partnership for the Homeless. When I expressed dismay at the lack of affordable housing in the city that I consider the root cause of the homelessness, Mr. Torres concurred.Mitchell-Lama is a program that provides tax incentives to developers if they provide some housing for low-income families. It made it possible for my husband and me to live in Waterside Plaza in 1975 in the East River complex. The program was selective and we qualified because my husband was in the entertainment industry and we “fit in” with the other high-end renters in the surrounding buildings.Many of the homeless guesting in these church shelters will not qualify for Mitchell-Lama housing. Warehousing the homeless in city-run facilities may get the homeless out of sight, but it’s the faith-based shelters that provide them with dignity, inspiration, and hope.This weekend at the Algonquin Theatre, 123 East 24th St., there are two performances of a choreo-poem called “Every Soul has a Song” by J. Fitzgerald. The playwright is a former homeless man. He’s now clean and sober thanks to help he received through the faith-based initiatives.These programs work. Why cut them?acolon@nysun.com

Obama Is Right About Something

Obama Is Right About Something

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