When the weather turns cold, the media turns its attention to the plight of those living on the streets, and often they find the Episcopal Church at work.
Here is an eye-popping statistic from a story about the efforts of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Anchorage, where they really know from cold.
According to a presentation at St. Mary’s, 84 percent of homeless families are headed by single women, 28 percent of all homeless people in Alaska are families with children and 20 percent go from foster care straight to homeless shelters. “That’s definitely the families we are talking about, although some of those are starting to leak into the chronic because they are constantly experiencing it,” said co-chair of the Anchorage Coalition on Homelessness, Trevor Storrs.
And here is some personal testimony from a homeless man in warmer climes, from a story about St. Andrew’s by the Sea in Destin,Florida:
Rick Crews is tired of the homeless stereotypes.
Crews said he has been traveling around Florida looking for work since losing his construction job two years ago. He put his name in the local labor pools, but said he has gotten only 13 days of work in the past two months.
“People classify us as hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts,” Crews said. “But it’s not like we woke up one day and said, ‘I want to live on the street.’ I’d love to have a job and a place to go home to at night and get out of the cold.”
Grace Church, Madison, Wisc., has been in the news for its efforts to shelter the homeless, and Trinity, Bethlehem, Pa., as been at work, too.
Perhaps the most intriguing story of shelter from life’s various storms, however, comes from St. Andrew’s in Astoria, Queens. We’ve mentioned this before, but here is a fuller account:
Since 2002, when he opened the Ali Forney Center, which helps homeless gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth, Carl Siciliano says, he has often witnessed the baleful effects of some religious institutions on some young people. He said he had regularly heard stories about priests verbally or physically abusing youngsters who had come out to their parents, urging them to suppress their sexuality and telling parents to disown their children.
So when the Episcopal Community Services of Long Island contacted Mr. Siciliano about creating a shelter for homeless gay youths, he paused.
But a $200,000 donation later, the charity, and the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, of which it is a part, helped create a new 16-bed shelter at the Church of St. Andrew’s in Astoria. The Ali Forney Center, which is named for a gay homeless teenager who was killed in 1997 and which has seen its budget cut in the past year by nearly $450,000 because of the economic downturn, is partnering with the church in operating the shelter.
And on a lighter note, it seems the Rev. Lois Keen, an occasional commenter here, and a frequent commenters on Thinking Anglicans, recents went to jail:
The priest of Grace Episcopal Church was dragged from her congregation in handcuffs on Thursday to do hard time at the Tuscan Oven Trattoria on Main Avenue.
A participant in the Muscular Dystrophy Association Lock-up, the Rev. Lois Keen served a one-day sentence from the comfort of the Norwalk restaurant.
Her bail was set at $2,400, which she failed to meet. But organizers were so pleased with $1,000-plus she raised for the fight against neuromuscular disease that they let her go anyway.