The First Words...First Impressions (Project Homeless Connect)

I usually have no idea which direction these blogs will flow. A thought sometimes resides somewhere in my mind’s cobwebs and I attempt to explain my perspective on a situation that happens to orbit my frontal lobe long enough to catch on. The previous 48 hours have been a blur for me even though they were a reality for more than 500 people who ventured out to the Project Homeless Connect event held at our administration center on Thursday and Friday. I am a novice at this; a rookie who anticipated a fastball but was thrown a slider. I have worked with non profits for more than 10 years in some form or fashion and learned the more I think I understand, the reality is that I’m often mistaken because people are not statistics chained to a clipboard or entombed in demographic patterns. Project Homeless Connect was another opportunity to expose some light on a situation facing all of us.

Want or need? The discrepancies between these two ideas are more hotly contested than numerous arguments… Beatles or Stones, Yankees/ Sox, John Locke versus Jack Sheppard… there is a fine and well respected precedent for any decent argument: there must be contention and a possible remedy. The clients who came to PHC battle social stigmas every day. Stereotypes are easy to apply because they absolve us from intimacy. When we are able to make a generalization it allows us the freedom to remain subjective on an impersonal level. A widowed mother and her 6 year old become ‘those people,’ and a homeless veteran is a member of ‘they.’ It is not exclusively a ‘want or need’ that we sought to provide. It was both.

You can learn so much by just looking into the eyes of another person. Words aren’t necessary for communication and sometimes they mislead us and manipulate the purest of situations. Entire stories are told in a glance. Plans and schemes can be hatched while heartbreak and hope teeter behind the pupil and long to be freed without the clumsy mismanagement of vowels and syllables. I looked into a lot of eyes over the past two days and each one told a separate tale. Pride and embarrassment mingled with wishful anonymity and brazen outrage. There is a need in this valley that transcends communal partisanship and social indifference.

So, what was accomplished during PHC? Hundreds of people received council and direction from numerous social service providers who united under a single banner and laid ideology aside for a few days. Mental and physical needs were addressed and hot meals were served. Volunteers graciously assisted the clients through the mazelike apparatus constructing our setup. But at the end of the event…after we switched off the lights and bolted the doors…what was really accomplished?

Badly used analogies irritate me more than my neighbors at midnight on the 4^th of July. They are tacky and lazy ways to piggyback off the creative work of others. So here goes: There is a Mumford and Sons song with the following lines: Now darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think? And yet it dominates the things I see. This sums up my thoughts quite well and I hate that I am now plagiarizing British bands.

Please don’t mistake what I am saying. I believe PHC was successful because it allowed us to provide some tangible needs to amazing people. People were treated with dignity and hopefully doors were opened that will enable many to move from various levels of victimization to empowerment. Data was gathered to help address the current level of needs and perhaps stymie future issues. But this event was not the conclusion of anything. The landscape is still dominated by a system that ensnares people and marginalizes them into oblivion. The harsh reality is that most of our PHC clients left the event with some great resources while everyone else left with a life much less unencumbered.

Consider doing me a favor. Most of the time I wonder who even reads this blog, so I would like to hear from you. If you were a client or received services, or if you volunteered or were a provider… or even if you just have secondhand information from a reliable source who was at PHC… tell me about it. Email me at curt_samaritanhouse@yahoo.com  (there is a tricky underscore in there, so be careful!) and tell me your story. It doesn’t have to be long or elaborate or polished. But I want to believe that the Flathead Valley cares as much as I hope it does. I will have some other articles dealing with various aspects of PHC up soon but I wanted this to be the beginning of a larger narrative.

It would be so great to hear from you.