Feeding the hunger for community – by Simon Dwight

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On the Friday before Christmas, I hurried from my office to our church’s outreach meal. Over the past two decades, my work life has focused on ways to help people overcome homelessness.

However, as my career and the issue of homelessness have become increasingly interconnected, I’ve naturally moved away from the ‘front line’. This has meant I have had to take intentional steps to connect directly with those in housing need. After a long day of staring at a screen, I eagerly anticipated reconnecting with people.

Full

Typically running late, I had to park several streets away from the venue. As I walked past various office party revelers and a soup run handing out food to a large group on the street.

The venue was already intimidatingly full, with people flowing in and out of the door. The outreach meal had been serving food every Friday night to anyone who came by for almost 30 years. Most weeks, it served around 50 people, but that night, the count had swelled to nearly 70.

I recognized most of the attendees; they had been coming longer than I’d been volunteering. The overwhelming majority were not sleeping rough, and most of them weren’t actually hungry either. I spoke to a regular who mentioned he had just come from the soup run, and this was his fourth full Christmas meal of the week.

As he continued to talk, my thoughts began to wander.

Expressing love

Distributing food was how our church expressed love for the less fortunate. It was also how I sought to reconnect with my own sense of purpose, maybe even with God.

However, we were providing food to the same people every week and there was little progress to be seen. Occasionally, someone’s housing status changed, but they still had nowhere to go.

The act of giving out food wasn’t accomplishing what we believed it was. It wasn’t creating the “oaks of righteousness” (Isaiah 61v3) we so often prayed for. Instead, we were inadvertently contributing to a subculture that was difficult to escape, a system that warehoused people rather than helping them advance.

Loneliness

I remember a conversation with a man who used to sleep on the streets. Each morning, he’d find food and coffee left for him, and while he appreciated the sustenance, he felt a tinge of sadness and deep loneliness. He wished the person who left the food had stayed for a conversation, allowing him to feel “normal for a little while.”

People are lonely. Years after they stopped sleeping on the streets, they kept coming to our street outreach meal, not for food but for community, contact, and a sense of normalcy. Frankly, we weren’t designing our provision with this in mind.

Re-think

I think we need to re-think our approach. Drawing inspiration from Jesus’ Parable of the Banquet (Luke 14), I suggest three ways we can do this:

1. Target our help at those who need that need help: In the parable the master tells the servants to go to highways and the hedgerows (Luke 14 v23) and invite those on the margins of society to the banquet. Faith and community groups have an incredible ability to reach the most marginalised in society without barriers to entry. Our efforts should focus on those whom professional agencies are struggling to engage with or cannot assist effectively.

2. Provide community: the banquet was in a home not handed out of a window for people to eat on the streets. People sat together and looked at each, talked and listened to one another. Our assistance should foster a sense of community and should humanise people. It shouldn’t be focused on the number of meals handed out. People should be invited in and connected into a mixed community of support and progression, instead of an “us vs. them” dynamic pushing out food at arms-length. We should consider who is at the ‘table’.

3. Offer opportunity: In the parable the banquet was a place where business could be done and connections made across social groups allowing for progression. Our outreach efforts should serve as a point of connection, guiding people to the services and support they need to escape their current situation. This is not about people coming to us for years but rather about helping them become their fullest selves.

Let’s not blindly revert to old ways of helping the homeless. Yesterday’s solutions might not be suitable for today’s problems. Instead, let’s pause and determine how we can best prevent people from returning week after week, not because we do something poorly, but because we do it well. Our outreach meals and shelters should be stepping stones that propel individuals back to where they belong.

Let’s base our actions on people’s underlying needs, their deeper hunger for purpose, meaning and community and focus on what they are truly looking for.

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Also by Simon Dwight:

• Homelessness Ends in Community
• Confronting beauty & bulls**t on the road to Santiago