This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its authentic location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/opinion/columns/2026/06/14/opinion-column-lawrence-brown-hyannis-homeless-shelter-josephs-opposition/90474769007/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
New Bedford House of Hope affords assist to the homeless
House of Hope Director Robert Hughes, who’s approaching 70, stated he was saved at 19. “I dedicated my life to God. That’s why I’m here.”
As the summer time of 2015 drew to a detailed, I observed a flood of letters to the editor, largely by vacationers, who complained that that they had come to Cape Cod to flee the realities of city life and located the presence of homeless individuals virtually an affront. There was a uniform nastiness about it that frankly shocked me on the time.
I used to be nonetheless feeling the shock when college opened at Cape Cod Academy. I used to be educating an eighth-grade pictures seminar that fall. When I provided, the youngsters jumped on the likelihood to go to homeless shelters and create a gallery: Faces of the Homeless.
It appeared then and it appears now that folks comfortably housed see homeless individuals as some type of abstraction… not an “us” however a “them.”
St. Joseph’s House was referred to as the Noah Shelter then. When we arrived on the appointed day, the director pulled my youngsters apart and instructed them that nobody actually needed to have their {photograph} taken. The residents, he identified, have been at tough factors of their lives and did not really feel terribly photogenic. But pizza was being served and if the youngsters want to have lunch with a few of the residents, that might be simply nice.
As the pizzas disappeared, I observed every of my eighth graders was deep in dialog with at the least one of many residents. Finally, and this occurred with every one of many conversations, the homeless residents instructed my college students they did not need their tales hooked up to their pictures. But they’d prefer it if the child they have been speaking to took their portraits.
Here’s what occurred, and it will occur once more when the youngsters visited Champ Homes and once more with Homeless not Hopeless. The residents began off anticipating a bunch of personal college college students fulfilling some college requirement. They discovered as an alternative 5 youngsters whose hearts have been opening quickly, who had are available with one set of expectations about homeless individuals and have been quickly altering their minds, dialog after dialog.
“At first,” younger Dylan wrote, “I thought they were homeless because of bad decisions they had made. I didn’t know that you could become homeless without being able to stop it. I realize that anyone can become homeless, even if they didn’t make any bad decisions.”
Eventually, the gallery received made. Matt Pitta interviewed the youngsters on the radio and a neighborhood TV station turned their gallery right into a video, displayed on varied web sites across the Cape. Cape Cinema put it up on their large display screen earlier than a film. My 5 younger photographers have lengthy graduated from school and may be beginning households of their very own.
Years earlier than I did the homeless gallery with my youngsters, I had a senior scholar from Osterville whose household state of affairs had turn into so painful that he was sleeping in different individuals’s sheds, underneath their porches, even in unlocked vehicles parked in individuals’s driveways. He was child who hadn’t performed something flawed, whose mother and father had numerous cash, and but, there he was, curled up shivering on the ground of any person’s shed with the rakes and the lawnmower.
I’m telling you this story now as a result of the primary shelter we ever visited has a possibility to maneuver into larger quarters on West Main. Let’s be clear about one factor; if individuals are unhoused, they are going to be someplace. If St. Joseph’s can transfer to greater quarters, there will probably be room for the Duffy Health Center to arrange a satellite tv for pc main care hub proper there within the constructing so individuals who want therapy can get it. That’s what the Duffy Health Center does.
The outdated shelter on Winter Street was by no means designed for the aim it has served all these years. At 460 West Main St. there’s lastly room for daytime applications within the constructing, discovering long-term housing, job placement, medical care.
Understandably, some individuals within the neighborhood are involved. Property values would possibly go down. There are colleges close by they usually fear a few of the new neighbors may not be protected firm. Signs are up on individuals’s lawns.
My household lived for years inside 100 yards of the outdated Noah Shelter with no issues in any respect. The Cape Cod synagogue was proper subsequent door and their congregation cooked Christmas meals for the shelter residents so the common employees may benefit from the holidays with their households.
There is not any query that homeless individuals are going by way of probably the worst occasions of their lives, however that does not make them criminals. It would not make them morally wicked any greater than having a house makes the remainder of us saints.
This is an opinion web page, and I’m simply providing you an opinion. I see the St. Joseph’s transfer as a possibility for the remainder of us to take part in one thing good. There is a lot anger within the air lately.
There will at all times be individuals down on their luck. Are we to think about that the remainder of us will probably be higher off in the event that they don’t have any housing? If they don’t have any prepared entry to counseling and medical care? If they don’t have any daytime programming to offer them someplace helpful to be, and to help them in taking their subsequent steps into extra everlasting housing?
Catholic Charities, Duffy Health Center, and the Housing Assistance Corporation are a part of the beating coronary heart of Cape Cod… educated, charitable and good. I hope this transfer occurs. I hope native parishes attain out. I hope native individuals come go to.
“After this project,” wrote 13-year-old Maeve, “I recognized that the people we interviewed and photographed were not just “the homeless.” They have been actual individuals with actual tales to share, deserving of affection and acceptance.” I hope the remainder of us can see it that method too.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at [email protected].
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its authentic location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/opinion/columns/2026/06/14/opinion-column-lawrence-brown-hyannis-homeless-shelter-josephs-opposition/90474769007/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
