Open Doors Kalamazoo

Building Relationships, Overcoming Homelessness

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Homelessness: Who is most at risk?

If our incomes fall below what is needed to rent an apartment we may become homeless. This can happen to anyone.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) says in their report The State of Homelessness in America 2012, “The odds for a person in the general U.S. population of experiencing homelessness in the course of a year are 1 in 194.”

But certain demographic groups are much more likely to experience homelessness than the general population, according to NAEH. Upon release from prison, the odds are 1 in 13 that a person will become homeless. A person who is living doubled up with someone else has a 1 in 12 chance of becoming homeless.

The people with the greatest risk of homelessness in this study were kids aging out of foster care. One of every 11 young adults who age out of foster care becomes homeless.

Behind these cold statistics lies a great deal of suffering.

 

 

 

 

The Importance of Relationships

Our tagline at Open Doors is “Building Relationships. Overcoming Homelessness.”

We offer emergency and affordable long-term housing to people without homes. But housing is not enough. We also need to offer personal support. We need to be willing to be in personal partnership with the people we serve.

In 1970 our founders felt that to really help someone you need to get to know them. So they organized the Open Door as a way to get to know people and learn how to be helpful neighbors to them. I admire our founders for this insight, and I’m happy to say that I think we are continuing to live by it.

This commitment to relationship presents us with challenges. As we grow and so many more people live in our housing, how do we keep building personal relationships with each resident? How do we help those relationships become deep and meaningful?

Relationships take time. We get to know our partners by listening to stories from the past. We also need to be available to hear about the challenges and successes our partners are experiencing now. And our hearts need to be open to our partners’ dreams for the future.

While relationship-building challenges us, it is also part of what makes our life together at Open Doors so rewarding.

Imago Dei

In a recent conversation with a young woman I noticed she had Imago Dei tattooed on the inside of her wrist. For me this tattoo is deeply moving.

The Hebrew scriptures speak of human beings as being made in God’s image, that is, in the Imago Dei.  I don’t know what that means exactly, but it points me to the great mystery of the value of human beings and the close connection of human beings and the holy.  To say the obvious: it is profoundly affirming to describe someone as an image of God.

One way to describe what we’re about at Open Doors is that we seek to honor this mystery in the human beings who come our way for emergency housing and affordable homes. Unless we have some sense of this mystery in our brothers and sisters we are missing something critical about them. And whenever we sense this mystery it gives us joy.