On Thanksgiving Day, as most of us settled in for a day of comfort and warmth among friends and family, 175 people lined up outside Real Change for winter survival gear. Mountains of warm things were gone within hours.
It is one thing to know that more than 2,000 people are literally on the streets of Seattle each night. It is another to see them in front of you, on Thanksgiving Day, in a line going down the block and around the corner, hoping for a decent sleeping bag and some clean, dry socks.
There are some things to which we should not grow accustomed
The first time Real Change did a winter gear giveaway, we were completely unprepared for what occurred. When we set up on City Hall Plaza at 8:30 am, the crowd that had started to build two hours earlier eyed the limited supplies behind the table and became a frantic mob. The police arrived and helpfully stood by while we regained control.
This time, we had it down to a science. One hundred and forty sleeping bags were stacked into a mountain of nylon cylinders behind our vendor window. Dozens of volunteers staffed our lobby, with socks, mittens, boots, hygiene kits, coats and chemical hand warmers arranged into stations to achieve maximum flow. The needy, five at a time, were let in one door and out the other. Line monitors were in touch with event coordinators via walkie-talkies. The average wait, we calculated, was just 45 minutes.
For people who would be mostly left outside during the unseasonably cold and wet Seattle weather of Thanksgiving Day 2010, the 175 that we helped over those few hours were grateful beyond all reasonable measure.
As this season of giving draws to a close, and along with it our Winter Fund Drive, this scene still haunts me. Our efficient charity reminds me of another story that, for more than 20 years, has stuck with me.
Kip's River of Babies
At the tail end of the 80s -- a decade during which the numbers of homeless quadrupled or quintupled in cities across America -- a Boston urban minister named Kip Tiernan inspired me toward a career in homeless organizing. She was a gravel-voiced, chain-smoking force of nature who was among the unreconciled.
"Situations of cultural acceptance," she would say, quoting theologian Walter Brueggemann, "breed accommodating complacency." Nearly every time she spoke, Kip would tell her river babies story. I've embellished a bit.
One day, in a small village where life is mostly good, someone notices a basket floating down river. A woman wades out and finds a baby. Arrangements for care are made and the problem is quickly solved.
The next day, more baskets arrive, and the day after that, the flow increases even more. Soon, more babies are floating downriver than anyone thought possible. At first, the village despairs, but good people with good intentions find a way. Women Allied Against Hopelessness (WAAH!) is formed.
Over time, WAAH! gets really, really good at the logistics of rescue. There are teams that can pull baskets out of the river in any weather and hardly ever miss. This matters, because the rapids are just a half-mile down river.
Churches build cheerfully painted baby adoption centers. Volunteers show up daily to mash and spoon-feed donated bananas, apples and peas. A recycling plant pulps the baskets to manufacture biodegradable diapers. This is adopted as a best practice in hundreds of other, similarly besieged, villages.
From time to time, commissions are formed to investigate conditions upriver. The root causes, they find, are complicated and difficult to resolve. WAAH! finds that most discussion of where babies come from makes people blush and gets in the way of fundraising.
The decades float by. The sight of baskets drifting downriver has become unremarkable. Fences are erected around the more congested areas. The villagers grow used to this as well. The babies never stop coming.
Charity is never enough
Over the past 16 years, Real Change, too, has gotten very good at what we do. On a typical month 350-375 vendors earn the money they need and find supportive community by selling our weekly paper. They pay thirty-five cents a copy, sell it for a dollar and keep the profit. With tips, they make about a buck and a quarter for every paper sold.
Does that end homelessness? No.
When our vendors sell the paper, they find that Real Change readers and supporters are different from most people. They do not gaze through them as though they were made of glass. They do not suddenly become interested in the sidewalk as they walk by. They smile. They nod. They stop and talk. They acknowledge that here is a person, deserving of interest and respect.
This is where the work of ending homelessness begins.
When our readers open the paper, they learn about their community and the people and organizations that are making a difference. They are sometimes surprised at the quality of our award-winning journalism. They often tell our vendors that Real Change is the best newspaper in Seattle.
This makes our vendors proud. For many of our vendors, this is the first time they've held a job they can believe in. For many, this, along with the people they meet, means more to them than the money.
This is how social change movements are built
Real Change tells the truth and organizes across lines of class, race and issue to take on inequality and defend human rights.
Our tireless work on ending sweeps of homeless encampments brought us an award from Washington State Jobs with Justice for "Leading the Movement for Social Justice."
Our work to stop construction of a new municipal jail connected the dots between poverty and racism, inequality and incarceration. We stopped the jail.
Our work to oppose the criminalization of poverty killed a bad law from passing and won us the Seattle Human Rights Award for 2010.
Have we ended homelessness yet? No. But we're doing the work that needs to be done: fighting for economic justice in a time of radical inequality, and making real differences in the lives of the poor along the way.
We need your support
With a little more than a week left to our Winter Fund Drive, Real Change is only about halfway to our audacious $175,000 goal. Our past year has been one of enormous growth and change. We've tended to our core and shored up the infrastructure that will see us through the hard times ahead.
Your gift will bring us into 2011 with the resources we need to be at our best. Please support human dignity and economic justice today by making on online gift at realchangenews.org, or mailing your support to Real Change, 219 1st Ave. S., Ste. 220, Seattle, WA, 98104. With your help, change happens.