Toledo Streets Reimagining Homelessness: Relational Poverty and Building Community less, innovative homelessness intervention programs across the country have shown that combating relational poverty is possible by making ample space for relationship-building. One of these organizations is Toledo Streets, which produced the paper you’re reading right now. Most basically, Toledo Streets helps people experiencing homelessness to earn an income by selling newspapers in town. But the organization also approached Rooster and asked if he wanted to sell tacos at the Lowrider Cafe in downtown Toledo. Coincidentally, Rooster had earned a culinary science degree during his time in prison. He started working at the Lowrider Cafe and eventually became head chef—a position he still holds. Through his work, he was fi nally able to secure stable housing. After selling more than 2500 newspapers over 850+ hours in 2019, Rooster won Toledo Street’s “Vendor of the Year” award. The designation recognized his commitment to his own personal development—but it also lauded his open embrace of community. Rooster’s passion and determination to build a new life would have meant nothing without someone to acknowledge those things and give him a hand up. Aware of this need, Toledo Streets gave Rooster a loving community of volunteers who saw his potential and an easy access point to the broader Toledo community. These resources, while immaterial, enabled him to make and eventually reap the rewards of genuine community relationships. Building an all-encompassing community Rooster’s story is just one story. But countless others have benefi ted from the community-building efforts of Toledo Streets and nonprofi t organizations embracing similar missions. The impact of this work housing insecurity. By: Remy Reya, Princeton University Student Homelessness often gets oversimplifi ed. It’s frequently framed as a problem of fi nancial means, mental health, or addiction. These factors represent important dimensions of many people’s struggles of housing insecurity—but they don’t tell the whole story. There’s one theme that rarely gets discussed, despite often making the difference in a person’s housing status. It can defi ne the line between temporary insecurity and longer-term homelessness; it can even create opportunities for people to emerge from chronic homelessness when all the standard escape hatches seem to fail. Homelessness is a crisis of fi nancial means—but it’s also a crisis of relational poverty (a lack of social capital). Reframing our conception of the housing crisis: people, property, and relationships It’s common to approach homelessness wondering what happened to a person that left them without stable housing. In asking that question, however, we fail to ask what didn’t happen for a person that may have left them acutely vulnerable to This new question recognizes an absence of some fundamental resource that might otherwise have preserved a person’s stability. Oftentimes, that missing factor is a relationship to lean on when a person is scraping by: a friend whose couch they can sleep on, a parent who can help them pay rent for an extra month, or a colleague who can research social services organizations while they work on retaining their employment. Sometimes, social capital even grants access to people who are directly engaged in the relevant work—people who know how to navigate the nonprofi t world, who are connected to offi cials in local government, or who are actually social service providers themselves. But at an even more basic level, reliable relationships provide something that all humans need, especially in times of hardship: compassion. Overcoming relational poverty, one connection at a time Personal connections can go a long way in shortening the lifespan of a person’s suffering. But relational poverty is a complex issue to tackle; after all, relationships can’t simply be regulated into existence. Nonetheprovides subtler, deeper avenues for uplift that often go overlooked. Rooster Tinch’s story exemplifi es the power of the Toledo Streets model. After growing up mostly in Dayton and spending 28 years in prison, he came to Toledo a little over a year and a half ago. A newcomer to the city, Rooster had no family or friends to turn to when he arrived. After spending some time in the Cherry Street Mission, he was put up in the Lorraine Motor Hotel by TASC of Northwest Ohio. But the program was abruptly shut down, leaving Rooster to live on the streets. He got connected to Toledo Streets and began selling newspapers while sleeping outside. He stood on street corners throughout the city for months on end, often courting customers for ten hours a day through all kinds of weather while slowly building up resources. Rooster worked hard to do his job well; his unbridled enthusiasm for his work even earned him a bit of a local celebrity status in the process. Jacob Estrada, a local restaurant owner, had seen Rooster’s grit, persistence, ambition to get the job done. In conversations with the budding salesman, he recognized Rooster’s potential. So, one day, he reaches housed community members, as well. Forging connections with unhoused community members helps us understand the challenges of homelessness in more concrete terms; investment in personal relationships ties collective action (or inaction) to real people’s lives; and stories of struggle and resilience often contradict our preconceptions about a diverse and complex group of people who are working towards a better life. Committing to relationship-building in our work to end homelessness is often less a matter of material resources and more a matter of shifting the collective mindset about the issue and the people behind it. If we envision ourselves as part of a supportive community, we can create that community. Bryan Stevenson, civil rights lawyer and author of the book Just Mercy, has said that “the opposite of poverty is justice.” I want to propose an addition: if the opposite of poverty is justice, then the solution to poverty is connection. Once we dedicate ourselves to tackling relational poverty and accept our roles as part of the collective solution to homelessness, we will move one step closer to that vision of justice that Bryan Stevenson outlined. Step by step, one connection at a time, we will create a society that we can truly be proud of. Page 11
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