Cindy, a victim of domestic violence, escaped her abuser with her three children and $50 to her name. She used it to pay the cab fare to a safe house.

After being beaten by his stepfather and losing his mother to suicide, James saw his crack addiction spiral wildly out of control, sending him out on the streets.

Challenged with a learning disability and mental illness, Lisa tried to piece together a life for herself and got her own apartment. After a couple of weeks, she came home and found her belongings on the curb. Her landlord kicked her out after discovering her medication for bipolar disorder because he didn’t want “crazy people” living in his house.

These are among 13 stories of homelessness in the new book Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing, published by Fordham University Press and edited by Fordham University English Professor Susan Celia Greenfield, who conducted hours of interviews with each contributor to help distill their stories.

Describing their life experiences in raw and vivid detail, each storyteller talks about their journey to homelessness and how they healed with the help of faith and community found in a life skills empowerment program for homeless and formerly homeless people. Many of the memoirists graduated from Education Outreach Program (EOP), founded in 1989 by New York Catholic Charities and the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing (IAHH). Today, there are several similar programs in the New York area.

“Telling my story is freeing,” said EOP alumnus Dennis Barton to an audience of nearly 250— including 12 of the 13 contributors—at the book launch at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on December 3.

“I’ve touched base with all of my secrets,” Barton said. “Now this book is out there and can help the sick and suffering.” The Bronx native talked about years of using and selling drugs, being incarcerated, and getting severely beaten by a group of teenagers while asleep on a park bench.

But Barton, who had taken college classes while incarcerated, sought help; in 2002, he graduated from the EOP, something he views as a real accomplishment. “Until that moment, I had never finished anything in my life,” he said.

Barton has since reunited with his family and became an ordained deacon at Middle Collegiate Church. He is a member of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing Speakers Bureau and has been a peer facilitator at the Panim el Panim life skills empowerment program. (Panim el Panim is Hebrew for “face to face.”) He now works as a workshop facilitator at Planned Parenthood of New York City.

“I give back because you can’t keep it if you don’t give it away,” he said, referring to the love and support he received throughout his journey that he now wishes to pass along to others who are struggling.

Sacred Shelter memoirist Michelle Riddle, who graduated from the EOP one year after Barton, told the standing-room-only crowd that she recently celebrated 20 years in recovery. She also volunteers as a life skills empowerment program mentor to give back what was “freely given” to her. “I was strung out and embarrassed, and slowly committing suicide,” she said about her drug addiction. “God rescued me from myself.”

All of the stories chronicled in Sacred Shelter are about serious traumas and crises—mental illness, addiction, and domestic violence. A few storytellers spoke of child abuse and molestation—one was chained to a pole in a filthy basement, another was sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend, and another was routinely beaten by his alcoholic stepfather.

“The most shocking thing to me was the consistency of the trauma,” says editor Greenfield about the interviews she conducted for the book. “It was story after story of gender violence, abuse … and the preponderance of that kind of suffering.”

Another common thread Greenfield sees among the stories is the love and generosity the storytellers showed others even in their darkest moments. She pointed to Riddle, who once gave all of her money to a mother she met on the street with a hungry child, and Barton, who often helped the elderly in his neighborhood carry groceries and clean up.

“It’s so beautiful that even in the thick of it, they were thinking of other people,” said Greenfield, adding that their compassion for others continues in their volunteer work today. “They took the suffering and turned it into an engine of love.”

Also sharing his experience with homelessness at the book launch was James Addison. Despite the horrors of living on the streets and in the Fort Washington Shelter—nicknamed the “House of Pain” among New York City’s homeless—Addison was the recipient of many acts of kindness.

“I was on 34th Street one morning standing in front of a donut shop,” he recalled. “I was so hungry, I hadn’t eaten for days. An employee from the shop came out and handed me a bag of donuts. Those were the best damn donuts I ever ate in my life.”

Barton was also the recipient of kind acts. “People in the neighborhood helped me, gave me food and clothing,” he said. And it wasn’t only strangers; when he reached out to his daughter while in treatment after being estranged for years, she drove from South Carolina with her children to pick him up so they could spend Christmas together—another moment when Barton says that “God showed up for him.”

In their opening remarks, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham; Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky; and Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, talked about the importance of helping others.

They also pointed to the power of the life skills programs for the homeless that run in different churches, temples, and organizations throughout the city, and of the 13 people who shared their stories for Sacred Shelter, who are living examples that change is possible.

“To the 13 very brave men and women who chose to tell their stories: … We are in your debt for reminding us about the dignity of human beings,” said Father McShane.

Added Monsignor Sullivan: “Homelessness is not hopelessness.”

–Claire Curry

Hear Professor Greenfield with memoirists James Addison and Dennis Barton on the Brian Lehrer Show and on Fordham Conversations on WFUV, parts 1 and 2. 

Cat Fernando, a rising sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is on a mission to make sure warm, dry feet are not one of them.

Fernando, a native of Old Bridge, New Jersey, has been giving away socks to the homeless since last September, as part of an effort she’s dubbed Socks in the City.

Thanks to recent efforts of the Fordham community, she won’t run out of supplies any time soon. At an end of year reception held May 11 at the Rose Hill campus by the Fordham University Association, nearly 600 pairs were donated to Socks in the City, along with $93 for additional purchases. More socks collected by the Office of Mission Integration and Planning put the number at nearly 800.

Fernando, who aspires to become a social worker, has been helping the homeless since she was 11. She started out by giving sandwiches, but after talking to the people she encountered, she learned that what they needed most were socks, as well as toiletries.

“When there are clothing drives, people always think of coats and shirts and pants, which are very important. But socks are something that people take for granted,” she said.

Up until May, Socks in the City existed as a single donation bin in Fernando’s residence hall. Fernando herself keeps an assortment of 20 pairs on her at all times in case she encounters a homeless person during her daily routine, and also gives them to residents of the Ned Coughlin, S.J., Men’s Shelter in the West Village, where she volunteers twice a week.

The donation bin eventually led her to the Fordham University Association, which promotes engagement between faculty and staff. One of Fernando’s floor mates attended a résumé-building workshop run by Alby Tello, director of career development at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS). When the subject of including volunteer work on a résumé came up, Tello said he told her about Fernando’s Socks in the City project.

“I’m always hosting events at GSS and with the Fordham University Association (FUA), and we’ve been trying to get more involved with the community. I don’t really believe in coincidences; I think this was totally meant to be,” Tello said. “It was like love at first sight. [Fernando] is so endearing, and so sweet and so smart, so we started working together.”

Tello said she was particularly impressed that Fernando took the time to learn what the homeless actually need.

“In social work, we call that a needs assessment,” she said. “We have our own ideas as professionals, but talking to community, she found out that they really need socks,” she said.

For Fernando, the FUA’s “Soul to Sole,” reception held on May 11, was a roaring success. Her first fundraiser, a student viewing of the movie Sex in the City, had netted just 60 pairs of socks; the FUA gathering netted 584 pairs of socks.

The socks are in boxes in Old Bridge, but Fernando plans to give them out when she visits New York City in the summer, and on regular basis when classes resume in the fall. She also makes a point to introduce herself when she offers socks, and asks the recipients if they’d be willing to share a fun fact. A journal she keeps currently holds 200 answers, culled from the 600 or so people she’s met.

“I’m giving people what they need but I’m also aiming to re-humanize people who’ve been ignored a lot of the time. Remembering people when I see them again is very important, and having a fact to associate with them helps me remember them better,” she said.

“I once met a man in the park named Charles Jackson, who was about to get housing. He was telling me how he works so hard all the time, and he’s learned so much through experiencing hardship. He said the real learning happens after graduation, because the whole universe is your university.”

Hanna Tadevich, FCLC ’15, is completely invested in the therapeutic power of the arts.

A graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA program in dance who double majored in English, Tadevich says that the arts have long informed who she is “as a person and as a humanitarian.”

But her experience in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps is what truly solidified her decision to “commit my life to fostering community and justice by using music, dance, creative writing, and the visual arts.”

As a Jesuit Volunteer for the past eight months, Tadevich has been working at the McClendon Center in Washington, D.C., a day program for adults with severe mental illnesses or who are recovering from addiction. Tadevich facilitates creative arts-based therapy groups there every day.

She is one of 15 Fordham graduates working locally in urban and rural areas across the U.S. as well as in Belize and Peru, through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) and JVC Northwest. Both organizations place volunteers for one- or two-year stints in communities that are tackling some of the world’s greatest challenges: homelessness, hunger, mental illness, crime, and poverty.

A common thread among the Fordham volunteers is their participation in the University’s Global Outreach program, which brings students on cultural and service trips that focus on economic, environmental, political, and social injustices around the world.

The program’s director, Paul Francis, GSAS ’03, GABELLI ’10, explains that, much like JVC placements, Global Outreach’s one- to two-week service-learning trips “focus more on solidarity than charity.”

And they inspire many students to make a commitment to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps upon graduation. At least eight and often as many as 20 Fordham graduates volunteer for JVC each year, not including those who volunteer for JVC Northwest.

That was certainly the case for Tadevich, whose experience on four Global Outreach trips—two to Ecuador, one to the Dominican Republic, and one to Camden, New Jersey—prepared her for JVC.

“I was always interested in service work, but I didn’t have a social analysis framework to understand the systems, the issues, or even the marginalized populations I would encounter,” Tadevich says. She got that through Global Outreach. “It was an overwhelming experience to understand that charity only goes so far, and also to see that it was feasible to commit your life to something beyond yourself.”

She’s doing just that as a Jesuit Volunteer at the McClendon Center. “It’s been an incredible blend of my arts background and my love for human relationships,” she says.

Tadevich, a Chicago native, hopes to stay with the center for a second year, something she believes will be beneficial for her patients while also giving her more practical experience before she pursues a master’s degree in social work.

Patrick “PJ” Brogan, FCRH ’15, who double majored in American studies and economics at Fordham, also got interested in JVC through Global Outreach.

“Global Outreach lets you learn about a place in a particular sort of way that you don’t get to in a classroom or as a student,” says Brogan, who is originally from Philadelphia. His service-learning trips to Kentucky, Alaska, Detroit, and San Diego sparked his interest in working with people experiencing homelessness. Through JVC Northwest, he’s working at the Poverello Center, a homeless shelter in Missoula, Montana.

“It’s a population that doesn’t get enough attention, people who live without a safety net and receive a lot of repression and stigma,” he says. Since volunteering with JVC Northwest, Brogan has decided that he is “definitely interested in pursuing this kind of work professionally.”

Working with the mentally ill and homeless can be challenging. But all Jesuit Volunteers have a built-in support network of fellow volunteers—roommates and those placed nearby—who are doing similar work and share their values and their experiences.

“Having people I can talk to about work and process what my day has been like, it’s been a great resource,” Brogan says.

For Tadevich, “it’s an invitation to deepen your reflective life, no matter your faith and to engage with other people constantly. That intimate bonding and support is part of what makes it such a transformative experience.

“I feel that the people I live with and work with will be influential characters in my life for years to come,” she says, ”because we have the ability to bond so intensely.”

The students and graduates who participate in both Global Outreach and JVC “aren’t out to fix the world,” says Francis. But by forming these deep connecting with people and communities, “they learn firsthand about what’s happening in the world, hopefully transform their own lives, and make a real impact locally.”

When she had signed up for Susan Greenfield’s course on homelessness this semester—an English course with 30 required hours of service learning—she was as ready and willing as any Jesuit-educated student to serve the community.

But when she showed up to volunteer at a Bronx shelter for women and children and was told that there was no need for her, Shilo was at a loss.

“When we fulfill a need, we feel important, we feel irreplaceable, and we feel satisfied,” Shilo, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said during Greenfield’s Friday morning class. “When . . . this need-based satisfaction was taken out of the [equation], I began to question what my motive was in doing service.

“Am I serving simply to feel good about myself, and is it okay if I am, as long as the result is the same? Am I doing it as a type of ‘humble brag,’ making sure everyone knows that I am a socially conscious, ‘good,’ and caring individual?”

Feeling conflicted about service

These are the tough questions that Greenfield, PhD, a professor of English, wants her undergraduate students to be bothered by. Her course, Homelessness: Literary Representation and Historical Reality, uses a literary approach to examine the complex issues surrounding homelessness. On the reading list are texts ranging from classics such as The Grapes of Wrath to contemporary memoirs such as Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street.

On the experiential side, students have heard stories firsthand from formerly homeless individuals who spoke to the class. In addition, the students are required to complete 30 hours of service in an organization that serves the homeless—a fairly easy quota to fulfill when you live in a city of more than 59,000 homeless men, women, and children. (In fact, this estimate is extremely low, because it does not include the number of people living on the street, nor the number of women and children in domestic violence shelters.)

The service component, it turns out, has prompted a healthy amount of internal conflict.

In response to Shilo’s predicament, another student in the class shared her ambivalence about the idea that volunteering helps the privileged become more aware of and sympathetic to those in need. “It’s service, but you’re just ultimately serving yourself,” she said. “I don’t have an answer to that dilemma.”

That may be, but educating and inspiring those who do service can still be useful, suggested another student. “Look at an organization like Part Of The Solution (POTS),” he said. “That’s how POTS began—[the founders]had an initial experience of service and then began that organization, which really does make a difference.”

The desire to “make a difference” is often what draws students to service, Greenfield said. In class, however, as they’ve begun to consider that desire, the students are learning that “making a difference” is a nebulous goal. Moreover, there seems to be a tacit power dynamic beneath their good intentions.

“Someone needs and someone is needed. Being needed feels good; being in need doesn’t feel so good,” Greenfield said. “That idea, to me, is important. Is there a way to do service that fosters equality rather than replicating the power problem that created the situation in the first place?”

One way to achieve that is to respect the autonomy of whoever is being served, she said. “Even a simple gesture [such as]saying ‘Can I help you?’ rather than ‘Let me help you,’ is a political change. It’s a move from ‘I’m going to do this’ to ‘Do you want me to do this?’ That’s how you can make a difference on the local level.”

Heroism and homelessness

Literature is an entryway into these kinds of conversations, Greenfield said. Many texts, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exalt homelessness rather than view it as a social failing.

“The characters who fall socioeconomically ultimately rise as human beings. They become even better people,” Greenfield said. “There’s a certain nobility and integrity that comes from ending up at the bottom. It becomes a kind of heroic act to have fallen.”

And yet, that hardly serves as solace for someone living the trauma of homelessness. It still overlooks the question of whether one can ever alter the power struggle in the service dynamic—or, as Shilo wondered, whether it even matters if the end result still benefits the person being served (or at least does not cause harm).

“I always find when I teach this course that there’s a place at which my brain just stops. I can’t get beyond some of these questions,” Greenfield said. “It’s not like reading literature and discussing, where you have a eureka moment and reach some kind of conclusion.”

There’s no clear-cut answer, unfortunately. Greenfield cautions her students about this upfront: “Unless we ourselves have been homeless, we cannot presume to understand the trauma,” she wrote in the course syllabus. “But we can open ourselves up to learn about it and to work toward social justice.”

Sometimes, forming relationships are the only option available. To that end, stories are a good start.

“Literature is an exercise in imagining another person’s experience and being open to it,” Greenfield said. “To bring that kind of awareness and openness to people who you might normally just pass by and not even notice, it does change things.”

To help the city offer them better services, in the early morning hours of Tuesday, Feb. 10 members of the Fordham community joined other volunteers with the NYC Department of Homeless Services for its annual HOPE count. Citywide some 3,000 people volunteered for the one-night tally of persons living on the streets. The HOPE teams, with the aid of city police officers, offered those they encountered a ride to the nearest shelter.

The Rose Hill count drew 75 participants covering several Bronx neighborhoods and was coordinated by the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice.