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Overview
"This is a major contribution to the literature on social participation and voluntary action. It is the first systematic ethnographic study I know that treats volunteers and the institutions they create." -- John Van Til, author of Growing Civil Society
"Students and faculty interested in the issue of homelessness will find the book instructive... Recommended." -- Choice
Why do people volunteer, and what motivates them to stick with it? How do local organizations create community? How does voluntary participation foster moral development in volunteers to create a better citizenry? In this fascinating study of volunteers at the Partnership for the Homeless in New York City, Robert S. Ogilvie provides bold and engaging answers to these questions. He describes how volunteer programs such as the Partnership generate ethical development in and among participants and how the Partnership's volunteers have made it such a continued success since the early 1980s. Ogilvie's examination of voluntarism suggests that the American ethic is essential for sustaining community life and to the future well-being of a democratic society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253110206 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/18/2004 |
| Series: | Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 723 KB |
About the Author
Robert S. Ogilvie is assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches classes in community development and urban studies. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. He is the former director of volunteers at the Partnership for the Homeless in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
Voluntarism, Community Life, and the American Ethic
By Robert S. Ogilvie
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2004 Robert S. OgilvieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34423-6
CHAPTER 1
The Partnership for the Homeless:
The Tradition of Churches Helping the Homeless in New York
The Partnership for the Homeless is as its name describes it. It is a partnership of those who work for the homeless of New York City — a partnership of the city of New York, churches and synagogues, church charities, private donors, volunteers, and paid staff. It was founded in 1982 by the late Peter P. Smith in a church basement in Greenwich Village. Its initial purpose was to shelter homeless people. It has since grown to encompass a number of other programs, including street outreach, rehousing homeless families, providing shelter and health care to homeless people with AIDS, and furnishing apartments for rehoused formerly homeless people. Nonetheless, sheltering single homeless in church and synagogue basements continues to be its main function, and this is the task that occupies the overwhelming majority of its 11,000 volunteers.
The story of the beginning of the Partnership for the Homeless is the story of Peter Smith's epiphany. Peter was a well-connected, politically active New York City attorney. He had been an associate in the Manhattan law firm of Shea & Gould, "Shea" as in Shea Stadium, and was described, even in that capacity, as a political operative. Peter was deeply involved in Democratic Party politics in New York State. He was a campaign aide to Robert F. Kennedy when Kennedy ran for president in 1968, and when Kennedy was killed, it was Peter who organized the funeral train from Washington to New York. In 1977, the newly elected mayor, Ed Koch, appointed Peter to be his commissioner of general services. This appointment was, at least in part, payback for Peter's role in lining up support for Koch in Queens, through his close ties to Borough President Donald Manes. Peter's mundane-sounding position was actually a crucial one, as it was this department that handled all city purchasing, leasing, and contracting. Some of Peter's notable accomplishments as general services commissioner were to help create Operation Green Thumb, a program that leased vacant city lots to community groups for gardens, and another program that leased apartments to tenants who were eventually given a chance to buy them for $250 apiece.
Peter's tenure as commissioner of general services was cut short, however, when background probes uncovered his prior embezzlement of $70,000 worth of funds from a client while at Shea & Gould. Peter was indicted, convicted, disbarred, and sent to federal prison for four months. Upon being sentenced Peter was quoted by the New York Times as saying "my life is over," but he certainly didn't act like that after his release. When Peter came out of prison, it was with a new mind-set, one more focused on helping his fellow man. He didn't immediately know how he would do this, but after returning to his home in Greenwich Village, like others he began to notice the increased numbers of homeless people living on the streets of New York. Unable to practice law and unappointable due to his criminal record, Peter needed to find a creative way to work himself back into public life. Enter the homeless situation in New York.
I use the word situation as synonymous with predicament, because by the early 1980s that is what the city was in with the new homeless population. New York had always been known for its "Bowery Bums," older alcoholic men who lived on the street in the Bowery and other parts of the lower East Side of Manhattan who were portrayed with color by Damon Runyon, Joseph Mitchell, and other chroniclers of New York life. By the late 1970s, however, there were homeless people living in the streets in parts of New York where they had never been before. This was a different set of people than those portrayed by Runyon and Mitchell, and instead of being seen as local color, New Yorkers regarded them with a combination of confusion, fear, pity and loathing. A new word, homeless, was invented by the burgeoning advocacy groups to describe this new population, many of whom were deinstitutionalized mentally ill people. They were young as well as old, and men as well as women. New Yorkers were soon demanding action, loudly.
The New Yorker who demanded action in the loudest voice was Bob Hayes. In 1979 Hayes was a student at New York University (NYU) law school who had befriended a number of homeless people who lived on the streets near his apartment. It was in the name of one of these people that he filed a lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey. In this suit, Hayes contended that the Constitution of the State of New York compelled New York City to shelter any homeless man who requested shelter. Rather than spend a lot of time and money to fight this lawsuit, Mayor Koch signed a consent decree in 1981, which created the nation's first right to shelter ordinance. This initial consent decree was later followed by Eldredge v. Koch, which established the right to shelter for homeless women, and McCain v. Koch, which established the right to shelter for homeless families with children. New York remains the only city in the country in which such rights have been established. Mayor Koch later told me that he signed the decree because he mistakenly thought that the additional expense of sheltering more homeless people would not be that great. At the time, the city of New York was already sheltering homeless people at its upstate Camp La Guardia facility, which is now run by Volunteers of America, and at facilities within the city, and the Mayor didn't think that the new ordinance would dramatically increase existing efforts. This turned out to be a serious miscalculation on his part — the DHS, the city agency that would be developed to take care of the vast homeless operations, would grow in 15 years to have an annual budget of about $500 million. This was a decision that Mayor Koch later said he wished he could make again. To ensure that the city respected this new right that had been won for the homeless, Bob Hayes began the Coalition for the Homeless. The mission of the Coalition was to monitor the homeless services that the city was providing and to sue the city when it was deemed that the city was not living up to its obligations.
Complicating the city's ability to deliver on the right to shelter was the severe budgetary situation that New York City was in. Ed Koch had gotten elected in part because of the damage that the fiscal crisis had inflicted on the career of his predecessor, Abraham Beame, and the city now operated under the budgetary oversight of the New York State Financial Control Board, a state-appointed watchdog agency. Even if Mayor Koch had wanted to simply follow the paradigmatic Great Society formula of establishing a massive city agency to deal with this problem, which is what the advocates for the homeless through their use of the courts eventually forced him to do, this did not seem to be an economically feasible option. Neither was it a politically feasible thing for him to do. Mayor Koch soon realized that sheltering the homeless was going to be much more expensive than he first realized, and that homeless policy was to become a political football. He began to look about for some help. Enter Peter Smith.
With Smith working behind the scenes, one of Koch's early responses to this crisis was to challenge the city's churches and synagogues to do what they had traditionally done in New York and get involved in this pressing social welfare issue. Mayor Koch issued this challenge during a speech that he had been invited to give by Rabbi Balfour Brickner at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side. Rabbi Brickner had written Koch a letter asking him to come and speak to the congregation and invited guests on the topic of what they should do in response to the burgeoning homeless crisis. Recalling that day, Mayor Koch said that he told the congregation about what the city was doing to help the homeless, and that he told them that in spite of the fact that there were city shelters, there were still people who would refuse to sleep in them because they were too afraid. These were people who churches and synagogues needed to help. Koch went on to tell the congregation that the Catholic Church was already sheltering the homeless and he asked them why they weren't doing the same.
The rabbi, Koch noted, "was absolutely beside himself with rage at my making such a demand and said ... something like ... having people sleep overnight would be incompatible with the facility." As Koch remembered it, however, this was a turning point. Despite the affront, the people who were there that day were so upset that they weren't doing as much as they could do that they and the rabbi ultimately decided that the Stephen Wise Synagogue would start a homeless shelter. To facilitate this, and the other church and synagogue shelters, the city began to set some limitations, formulate some regulations, and offer some support.
In pushing for the opening of these shelters in the churches and synagogues, Mayor Koch was not advocating the start of something new as much as he was pushing for the reinvigoration of a venerable New York tradition of service to the poor by religious institutions. After getting over the shock of being publicly called out for their inaction by the mayor, the city's religious leaders began to respond to the mayor's call. This meant that in a small way the city could now share the financial, political, and moral burdens of taking care of the homeless with the religious community. But simply asking the religious organizations, which were not yet commonly referred to as faith-based institutions, to help would not get a large scale, church-based response to homelessness. For that to happen, an organization would have to be created that could mobilize the necessary resources, provide support, and link the church shelters into a larger system. This was the role that the Partnership for the Homeless was to play, and with the Mayor's backing, Peter Smith got to work creating this organization.
To educate people about this novel concept of running a homeless shelter in a church, Peter and the small staff of the Partnership began holding a series of what he called Action Days. On the itinerary for these initial Action Days were tours of the shelter at St. Joseph's, trips to the Bowery Mission, a church-based organization in the Bowery that had been working with homeless people since 1879, and lectures on the logistics of shelter operations. To spread the word further, Peter and his early employees went out to churches and synagogues at night and on the weekends to talk about their program and to recruit congregations. Employees of the Partnership for the Homeless continue this practice to this day. Following St. Joseph's, four churches and one synagogue opened shelters virtually simultaneously, and within six months there were 50 shelters operating.
How the Partnership Operates
From its very beginning, Peter Smith developed the Partnership for the Homeless as a nonprofit umbrella organization that drew support from a web of public and private entities. One of the first steps that Peter took was to secure the support of the major religious charities in the city for this new organization. Because he was aiming to open the shelters in churches and synagogues this was a crucial step, and he received the support of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, Catholic Charities, the United Jewish Appeal, the Episcopal Diocese, the New York Board of Rabbis, and Terence Cardinal Cook. Cardinal Cook particularly did the Partnership a great service by sending out letters to every parish informing them of this new organization and urging them to get involved. To help oversee the new organization and to raise funds, Peter appointed prominent employees of Wall Street firms and of the major religious charities and institutions to the Partnership's Board of Directors. This enabled him to use them and their contacts to raise money and awareness. With the mayor's help, he secured funding from Wall Street firms seeking to meet the requirements placed on them by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Building on the mayor's backing, Peter used his knowledge of the workings of the city to appeal to well-placed bureaucrats to get logistical and material support for his fledgling organization.
In conjunction with city officials, Peter began to formulate a program in which the city would cooperate with the Partnership to bus homeless people from central locations (later known as drop-in centers) to a church shelter each evening. At the shelter they would have dinner, sleep through the night, and have breakfast in the morning. The homeless people would be bused back to the drop-in center from the shelter in the morning and would remain there, or do whatever they did during the day, and in the evening they would get back on the buses and go back to the shelters. The shelters would all be run by volunteers, and the city's HRA would supply the cots, the linens, and other materials that the shelters needed. HRA would also supply the transportation for the homeless people to get to and from the shelters. At the drop-in centers, the homeless men or women could wash themselves during the day, get fed, and get the drug, alcohol, or mental illness treatment they needed. The drop-in centers would also be responsible for screening out inappropriate clients from the pool of those who were referred to the shelters. The Partnership for the Homeless would manage this whole system and try to expand it.
After St. Joseph's opened, within six months there were 50 shelters running in churches and synagogues throughout the five boroughs. The first office of the Partnership was on West 13th near St. Vincent's Hospital. This was where the paid staff of the organization, which performed the crucial intermediary coordination, facilitation, and information-sharing roles, worked. In the beginning it was a one-room operation on the first floor with about a dozen employees sharing two phones. The staff of the Partnership for the Homeless also sought out sources of funding, other than city funds, to run its operations. In 1983, the Partnership's second program, Project Domicile, was developed to offer assistance to families, usually women with dependent children, who were resettling in the Bronx or Brooklyn into affordable housing. Once these families were resettled, they would be taken to the furniture warehouse that the Partnership had opened in Red Hook to get furniture for their apartment. This warehouse, which was later to evolve into Furnish-a-Future, was used to hold furniture donated from individuals, hotels, and businesses. For the first year after they were housed, the Project Domicile clients would be visited by volunteers who would make sure that they were managing their new lives well. Despite the Project Domicile program, developing new shelters and running the existing ones was the main task of the employees of the Partnership in the early years.
Bill Appel, the director of the shelter program, described the steps of the shelter opening task as cold calling, going on site visits to do reconnaissance to see if the site looked viable, and then working with the pastor and the congregation to open the shelter. In order for a church to be a viable shelter site, it needs to have both a willing congregation and an appropriate physical plant. This combination of qualities is fairly difficult to come by, with the willingness of the congregation being the prime limiting factor. Bill Appel estimated that there are 1,000 churches in Brooklyn alone, yet there are only 25 shelters there. Very few congregations are willing or able to open homeless shelters in their churches because, as Bill noted ruefully, "there are a lot of churches that are strictly open for worship." Among those that are interested, their physical plant has to be appropriate according to certain city-mandated criteria. In order for the Fire Department, the Health Department, and the Department of Buildings to certify a church room as safe to house people overnight, the physical plant has to be solidly constructed; the area used for the shelter has to have at least two ways in and out and needs proper ventilation; the roof has to be at least eight feet high; and there has to be proper lighting, emergency exit lights, hot and cold running water, and heat. There also has to be one toilet for every six people. In addition to these requirements, the Partnership was also looking for churches that had kitchens and showers. In many cases, the Partnership helped pay for upgrades at churches that didn't meet these standards. Because space is tight in New York, most of the available rooms in these churches are small. This is one of the reasons that the shelters are small; fire codes are another. In New York City the pre-1996 fire codes for rooms that people slept in had a dividing line at 20. Below 20 there were fewer fire and building safety requirements that had to be met. Renovations to physical plants were very expensive and the ability of the Partnership to pay for upgrades was limited. Any money that the Partnership spent on improving the physical plants of churches had to come from private sources, as it was not possible to use government funds for this purpose. These facts limited the amount that the Partnership could spend, so the shelters were limited to 19 or fewer residents. These facts have also limited the number of churches that host shelters. By Bill Appel's estimate, if the Partnership could afford the renovations, another 80 to 90 church shelters could open. In 1996, following the decline in arson in New York, the Fire Department shifted their focus to prevention rather than reaction, and as a part of this new focus they inspected the church shelters and revised their regulations to drop the limit for spaces without sprinklers to 15 people. The older shelters that were started under the old limit were allowed to continue to operate as they were, but any new ones had to abide by the new limits.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Voluntarism, Community Life, and the American Ethic by Robert S. Ogilvie. Copyright © 2004 Robert S. Ogilvie. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Voluntarism and the American Ethic1. The Partnership for the Homeless: The Tradition of Churches Helping the Homeless in New York2. In the Church Shelters3. Why People Volunteer in Church Shelters and Why They Keep at It4. The Mediating Role of the Church Shelters5. The Moral Effects of the Volunteer Experience6. The Church Shelters as Community-Generating Institutions7. Social Architecture: The Art of Building Community-Generating InstitutionsConclusionAppendix: Research MethodsNotesBibliographyIndex