City Gospel Mission

Michael Adams, Summer 2016

City Gospel Mission is a faith-based organization that has four major resources for the community. A men’s homeless shelter that houses 74 guys and provides them 3 meals a day as well as breakfast and dinner to the community, a job placement program, men’s and women’s addiction recovery programs, and a youth tutoring service. Throughout my summer with City Gospel Mission I worked in the homeless shelter in a variety of roles and built relationships that helped broaden my perspective on what it means to be someone who is homeless.

The shelter is divided up mainly into men who worked and men who participated in a Day Program. The Day Program offered around 30 hours a week of classes focused on mental wellbeing, physical health, relationship building, and spiritual formation. A typical day at the shelter would start at 6 am for the men when they had to wake up and get ready for breakfast at 7am. From 8am – 12pm there would be classes at the shelter the men could attend if they do not work. Then at 1pm it was time to go to the gym. After an optional afternoon nap, there would be classes in the evening before dinner at 7pm. At 8pm the guys would do their chores in the shelter and then get ready for bed, usually watching TV before they went to their dorms to sleep.

My roles in the shelter were a community facilitator, to pilot a survey for participants of the Day Program, and build relationships with the homeless. The community facilitator role consisted of answering phones behind the front desk, doing a bed checks, sorting mail, and being a gopher for various people. The survey I helped pilot was a quality of life survey that we administered at two separate times to the men who participated in the Day Program. We administered the same survey once, and then again 30 days later in order to compare results and determine how the Day Program was improving the quality of life for those taking classes. The last of my roles in the shelter of building relationships with the homeless was one of the most important in shaping my view of them.

My mindset about the homeless coming into the summer was that I was a lot better than them. I thought homelessness was a matter of having a strong enough willpower to get a job to lift you out of poverty in order to afford a place to live. This was totally wrong. It was a way for me to not be empathetic toward the homeless and make myself feel better than them. The factors that play into homelessness are very complicated and often unique to each person. It has been eye opening to hear how people are now at City Gospel and about the path that has led them here. It required me to not categorize people or judge them, but sit down and listen to their story.