Interfaith collaboration cares for community's homeless

Interfaith Winter Shelter is the one shelter where Ray Jordan feels comfortable laying his head. With volunteers such as Hildy Sherwin, 83, who greet every guest at the door, most of them by name, he’s with people who care.

Interfaith is a temporary home where a pregnant 19-year-old, Tiffany, seeks maternal guidance from Violeta Chandler, an Interfaith guest and a woman who Tiffany and about 40 others call Mama V because she keeps them in line.

It’s a faith-based organization in which  volunteer Anne Jones said she strives to do God’s work with the guests she serves, but also where IU senior Jason Deer said he still feels comfortable lending a helping hand even though he doesn’t consider himself
religious.

It’s a welcoming environment in which people from different creeds convene under one roof to give and receive.

Now nearing the end of its fourth winter season in March, Interfaith has grown from a one-church effort to a community-wide operation.
 
The organization was born in a Trinity Episcopal Church vestry meeting in 2008. The Trinity congregation saw the community was in need of a winter homeless shelter because other shelters in the area were frequently at capacity, and it recognized it had the means to fulfill it.

“The parish was ready for something like this, and it didn’t come overnight,” said Rev. Virginia Hall, Trinity’s assistant rector.

The vestry decided to open the church’s Great Hall to homeless individuals in the community. It was to be a place where guests could get a good night’s rest seven days a week in a warm, safe and hospitable environment.

Anne Jones, volunteer and trinity member, said the idea for a winter shelter had been talked about “since God was born,” but gaining the support of the parish was a challenge at first.

The vestry wanted to make the Trinity Winter Shelter a low-barrier shelter, meaning it would require no breathalyzer test and would ask for very little personal information from the guests. The founders were criticized for this decision, and some even suggested a low-barrier shelter would only enable bad behavior. But the vestry ignored the doubters.

“That’s the population that’s not being served,” Hall said. “They’re not at the place where they can make a plan to get out of homelessness, so punishing them by forcing them to sleep on the streets is counterintuitive.”

The volunteer-based Trinity Winter Shelter opened its doors in January 2009, operating seven nights a week for three months.

But the nightly grind to maintain a clean and safe environment became too big a task for Trinity to carry on alone. The mission seemed too important to abandon, so the church turned to its Bloomington faith community for help.

Hall recalls inviting pastors from around town to a Saturday-morning breakfast after the winter shelter closed for the 2009 season. The Trinity vestry asked people to support the cause, and its prayers were answered.

After forming a new board and renaming the organization Interfaith Winter Shelter, the community set to work developing a cohesive and fluid structure.

Now in its fourth season, the shelter has four current physical sites that rotate responsibility throughout the course of a week: First United Methodist Church, First United Church, First Christian Church and Trinity Episcopal Church.

But the community collaboration doesn’t end with the site sponsors. Although they provide the location for the rotating shelter, a handful of additional churches in Bloomington provide donations, volunteers, food and time.

On any given night, about 12 to 15 volunteers filter in and out of the respective shelter site for three-hour shifts, working to set up check-in stations, sleeping mats, blankets, pillows, food tables and storage check-in.

Volunteer Gayle Hart said she was looking for a way to expand her life last year, and through friends in her neighborhood and an article in the local paper, she discovered Interfaith.

“I had time, and I just wanted to make more of a contribution to the community, and this fills a need,” she said.

Now she is the food coordinator for the Trinity site Wednesday evenings. She has gone above and beyond to stretch her allocated weekly budget by partnering with local restaurants to provide hot meals for the shelter guests.

Hart said the community has been overwhelmingly helpful. Chipotle, Darn Good Soup, Subway at College Mall, Pizza Hut on Pete Ellis Drive, Dominoes on South Walnut Street and Bloomingfoods–Food Works on South Washington Street have all contributed to the shelter this season.

The City of Bloomington also contributes, giving Interfaith 50 percent off Bloomington Transit bus tickets so its guests can avoid the cold while traveling from shelter to shelter in the winter months.

Shalom Center, which has been involved since the shelter’s inception, washes all the blankets and pillows from each site daily.

Interfaith’s reach stretches beyond Bloomington businesses and churches. The organization trained more than 400 volunteers just this year, and about a quarter of them were students.
 
“We depend on IU,” Hall said. “We depend on the larger community as a whole.”        

The shelter is open from Nov. 1 to March 31, and Hall said that by the end of the five-month season, volunteer fatigue is apparent. But it doesn’t stop them from coming back week after week, year after year.

“I like helping people, and when I came here, it was the first time in the U.S. I had helped people in this sort of way,” IU bioinformatics masters student Tejaswi Koganti said.

“I liked how everyone reacted and was really grateful, and I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I should do this every week.’”

Many students who volunteer at the shelter use the quiet-hour shifts from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. and 3 to 6 a.m. to work on homework while they supervise the guests.
 
For Trinity member Hilary Hamilton, volunteering is a way to use her nursing experience to give back to the community she loves. She and Rev. Connie Peppler, Trinity deacon, are registered nurses.

Once a month, the women provide foot care for the guests. They wash and massage their feet, examine them for medical conditions associated with diabetes and hypertension, and even paint the women’s fingernails and toenails.

“These people can’t take care of their feet as they could if they had a home,” Hamilton said. “It’s a great time to talk about their health and get to know them.”

Peppler, the site coordinator at Trinity, said it’s about developing personal relationships and giving the guests the respect they deserve.
 
“I really love the people,” Peppler said. “I mean, the guests, they are sort of like your children. You get to know their quirks. You get to know when they are having a bad day, their ups and downs. You get to know them and love them for what they are.”

Universal respect is a common theme among the volunteers, and Jones said it is not their role to judge their guests’ personal decisions.

“We’re not going to let our brothers and sisters sleep outside in the rain,” Jones said. “The time to help someone with drinking is not at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night.”

The interactions among the guests and the volunteers is a testament to the genuine goodness that Interfaith represents.

Chandler (Mama V), who has been in and out of homelessness for two years, said Interfaith has given the homeless community a place to congregate as a family.

“I found a home,” she said. “I found a family. I fit here. I’m not happy being homeless. I’m not proud being homeless. But it makes me thankful for what I have. Homeless people are not bad. All that we want is someone to look at us and say hi and respect us.”