Shelter tries to hold line against worsening homeless problem
By Ashley Luther
January 22, 2008
"Marcia," age 40, lived in Athens for 20 years before moving to a nearby town a few years ago. She was a wife, a mother and an Ohio University employee. "That's how I defined my life," she said.
However, "Marcia" has been staying at the Timothy House, Athens' only homeless shelter, since last Wednesday. She suffers from bipolar disorder, and was kicked out of her abusive relative's house after a domestic dispute. After sleeping in her car for a night outside of a mental-health center near her home, the caretakers there set up her temporary stay at the Timothy House on Athens' west side, where she'll stay with up to 14 other people until she can find her own housing.
The Timothy House is operated by Good Works Inc., a Christian organization focused on helping those struggling with poverty in the surrounding Appalachian Ohio area. They have several other residential sites devoted to serving the poor, and their only public fundraiser for the Timothy House, the Walk for the Homeless, was on Saturday.
Athens County has been ranked the poorest county in Ohio, with 27.4 percent of its residents living in poverty in 2006, according to Athens County Job and Family Services (though those figures are generally presumed to be skewed by the number of low-income, parent-dependent Ohio University students who are included in the numbers).
The Good Works shelter has 15 beds, two bathrooms, a living room, kitchen, two offices, and an eating/meeting room. According to its Web site, Good Works' two most important values are to love God and to love thy neighbor, which founder and executive director Keith Wasserman devoted himself to while in college at OU.
But contrarily, Wasserman didn't grow up serving the homeless. Raised in Cleveland, Wasserman admitted he was addicted to barbiturates, amphetamines, LSD and marijuana from age 12 to 17. He sold Quaaludes (a popular drug of abuse in the '70s) to his classmates during what he called, "a disastrous and destructive" time in his life. The turning point in his life came after he moved to Centerville, Ohio in his junior year of high school and found Jesus. He said he "felt like I was beginning to live again" when he entered his freshman year at OU in 1976.
"I had a paradigm shift about what was important to me... People became more important to me. I began to notice and recognize and perceive things about how people were falling through the cracks, and I began to reach out to them in friendship and then realized I had resources to share," he said.
Remarkably, Wasserman remodeled his Elliott Street house his junior year and began taking in the homeless in his basement the following year.
For his mental-health technology degree, Wasserman explained, he had to do an internship; this was the catalyst to start Good Works. In 1989 he "took the plunge" into homeless life himself, voluntarily subjecting himself to sleepless nights in crowded, unclean and sometimes unregulated shelters across the country for a few nights at a time. He did this for two or three years, he said.
"I wanted to learn what it was like to be on the other side," he said. "Those experiences helped me rethink how we conduct ourselves in this organization."
Wasserman said his experience on the streets enlightened him on the many causes and sides of homelessness.
Homelessness can stem from several different factors including lack of affordable housing, drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, domestic disputes, legal problems and/or money management issues, yet homelessness in Athens and the surrounding nine counties that the Timothy House serves is caused by one overwhelming factor, according to Wasserman. That's economics.
According to the Economic Research Service of the USDA, the average household income in Athens County is $29,785 compared to $43,371 in the rest of Ohio, as of 2007.
According to Chris Linscott of Good Works, an unemployed person living in a rural setting is on average unemployed 20 weeks longer than someone living in a non-rural area. Most people think of the homeless sleeping outside, with an unkempt appearance, panhandling, addicted to drugs or mentally ill. But Wasserman painted a very different picture of the rural homeless, who are seemingly invisible in our community. The lack of industry, public transportation, the increasing cost of living and outrageous health-care costs drive people just under the poverty line. "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer," Wasserman repeated the oft-used line.
Wasserman explained that clients staying at the Timothy House cannot afford to live anywhere in the city of Athens, even when working fulltime. The Athens County Job and Family Services' Annual Report for 2006-2007 stated that the unemployment rate for Athens County was 6.1 percent, slightly higher than the 5.4 percent for the rest of Ohio. This suggests that the poor in Athens County aren't making enough income to surpass the poverty line, which creates a class of the "working poor."
Unlike the prevailing myth, many of the homeless do want to work, and some at the Timothy House currently hold jobs. At the shelter during this reporter's visit, one resident's face lit up when she was told she would be given a custodial-type job working for the university. She has small children and is working on getting her GED.
"Marcia" said that when people ask, "where do you work?" she feels, "about and inch high and very defeated." She's currently on disability, but is eager to get back on the job with permission from her doctor. "I want to work," she said adamantly. "There's no doubt about that."
AFFORDABLE HOUSING is unthinkable for some poverty-stricken families in Athens. Many people who come to the Timothy House stay with friends or acquaintances until they are no longer welcome and are forced to come to the shelter. Although subsidized housing is the most affordable, Wasserman noted that 550 families are on the waiting list locally, and it can take up to a year for them to finally be accepted.
Away from the comfortably heated, yet sometimes dingy college houses, where students shell out big bucks to spend their academic years, one can find the most affordable non-subsidized dwellings, often located in trailer courts on the outskirts of Athens. In these places, tenants, some of them former residents of the homeless shelter, are "renting a deeply depreciated metal building from a slumlord," said Wasserman.
"I was a student; I was out of touch. I think there are very few students who are genuinely in touch with the poverty that is within five miles of where they're living," he said.
THE TIMOTHY HOUSE IS closed for a few hours on the weekends, and "Marcia" described the feeling of being outside, with no place to go as "embarrassing." She said as groups of residents from the shelter leave for the day, some outsiders give them looks as they walk down the street. She said everyone knows what the Timothy House is, and she said she feels a stigma against the homeless.
"[Wealth] effectively insulates us from the reality of poverty everywhere," Wasserman said. "It distances us from the pain of people who are just trying to survive."
He stressed, "Half of homelessness is becoming homeless. The other half is having to live in a shelter, with strangers and rules and structure that you're not used to." Wasserman theorized that it's the trauma of loss of identity and dignity as a result of homelessness that forces some to break down mentally.
Good Works strongly believes in rehabilitation, whether mentally or vocationally. They work as a liaison to other services that put their clients on the right track to employment, drug counseling, proper health care and education. The organization has a strong network of volunteers and staff who also add to the sense of community and compassion in the shelter.
Chris Linscott, an Americorps VISTA volunteer, has been working with Good Works for about six months. Because VISTAs make below poverty wages, Linscott has been living in poverty while attempting to alleviate it. "It's definitely a life-enriching experience to get to be part of serving that unmet need," he said.
Many OU students volunteer regularly at the shelter, including sophomores Allie Thompson and Lorrin Girberd. Both were required to volunteer for a class in the fall, but stayed on for the winter because of their positive experiences at the Timothy House.
Thompson said she most enjoys building relationships with the residents and playing with the children who occasionally stay at the shelter. "It's inspiring to hear success stories; it makes me happy to hear about people working and getting out on their own," she said.
Good Works relies upon the generosity of the Athens community to supply the things the shelter needs. One suggestion "Marcia" made was for more transportation, especially in cold weather. The shelter has a wish list for donations on its Web site, and Wasserman said they served 17,000 meals last year, all with donated food. But like any charitable organization, Good Works still needs money, and it's the Walk for the Homeless this past weekend that brings in the most money.
The walk began Saturday at First United Methodist Church in Athens. The goal every year is to have 400 participants and raise a total of $40,000 for the Timothy House. It takes $180,000 to run the shelter annually, and only $60,000 comes from a grant, so the rest of the money is through donations and fundraising events. Wasserman said the walk is "an ongoing educational experience," where kids and adults can get a hands-on, empathetic take on homelessness in Appalachia.
Wasserman explained that the Timothy House is dealing with peak occupation issues every night; their numbers are up 25 percent from last year. The shelter deals with many difficult people in difficult situations, and he noted that he must continually replenish his own reservoir of compassion. "It's easy to get a hard heart in this work; you need to be exposing yourself intentionally to the needs of people in poverty to keep your tender heart in this."
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