1992
SUMNER HOUSE
Homeless Self-Help Employment Program, Inc. (HoSHEP), was created in 1992 by the late Ronald Billups, Jr., (a.k.a. Michael Bell), a poet and former diamond carver; James Terrell, a painter and collagist; and Nouk Bassomb, a painter. These were a group of homeless men who, at the time, resided at Sumner House, a men's shelter in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn, New York. Our intent was to help ourselves and others find housing, secure employment, attain self-sufficiency, so that we may move back to mainstream society. Any admission to Sumner House, an employability shelter, was subject to the applicant's willingness to seek employment. As New York Board of Education's Cynthia Nibblelink made her Office of Adult Education available to us, we began writing resumes and cover letters for job seekers not only from Sumner House, but from the community. Occasionally, we made follow-up calls to prospective employers for clients who were shy or too nervous to do so themselves.
To make sense of HoSHEP's work, one must understand the truth of numbers and the fact that HoSHEP takes this truth very much to heart: African Americans, 12% of the American people, make up 90 to 97% of the homeless population. 70% of these 90 to 97% are men, and from 45 to 60% of all homeless people are artists: sculptors, singers, painters, musicians, and actors. This situation is ungodly, unholy, and must stop.
HoSHEP's goal was decided upon from the on-set: To work so that the African-American representation in the New York homeless population falls down to 12%. If successful, our task will considerably reduce homelessness in New York City. This does not mean that HoSHEP assists only African Americans who are homeless. HoSHEP helps every homeless person in need of help. Our policy says simply that African Americans need special systemic attention not to fall, as they do, through the cracks of society and be forgotten there.
This unique angle by which HoSHEP tackles homelessness explains our policy, the course we take, the choices and decisions we make, and our vision.
THE VISION
To attain our goal, we encourage every category of the homeless population to care for its own. Homeless artists must care for one another, and established, successful artists must care for homeless artists.
HoSHEP's central objective is to build or help build, develop or help develop communities of refuge for various categories of individuals within the homeless population: homeless artists, former Moslem inmates, youth at risk, battered women (who account for 22-35% of women seeking care for ANY reason in emergency rooms, 19-30% of injured women seen in emergency rooms, and 25% of women who attempt suicide, and so on), small units or "villages" where members know each other, have a common tie that binds them together, thus facilitates their will to live together and help one another. The essential element in these communities is a building where members LIVE and WORK.
The structure of the building, always the same, needs 5 elements and is as follows:
1) A workspace, the basement for example, to be transformed into a large production area where artists can make art and craftspeople work making or stuffing envelopes, manufacturing greeting cards, toys, clothing, hats, incense, fragrant oils, beads, and jewelry.
2) The shop, preferably at street level. Once an item is judged finished by its manufacturer, he brings it to the shop and displays it.
3) Sleeping areas. Single rooms and apartments are on the upper floors. There members of the community sleep and recollect themselves.
4) A community room for play and social gatherings.
5) A place of worship. The general idea is to develop communities or transition communities where the homeless can live, work and worship before moving to independent living. It's such a community that we have begun developing at the Greenpoint Hotel.
YOUTH AT RISK PROGRAM
Every single night during the winter of 1992, the Sumner armory sheltered anywhere from 300 to 900 men, whose ages ranged from 16 to 55. It's one thing to see a 55 year old man living in a shelter. One may say, "Oh, his life is behind him." It's a whole other story to see a 18 year old boy in there. You want to ask yourself: "What's going wrong here?" As a result, we began developing a resource center for youth at risk, one for boys, and another for girls. The very presence of a 16-year-old boy or girl in a care center for adults says that this young person does not know that some groups and organizations specialize in providing emergency care for young people in his/her situation. When we find one youth at risk, we make it our business to direct him/her to an organization where s/he will find appropriate care.
Our resource center for teenage girls enables us to direct them to places that address teenage pregnancies, abortion, and provide prenatal care. One of such places is CHILDBEARING CENTER OF MORRIS HEIGHTS which Ms. Jennifer Dohrn, a member of our board of directors, supervises.
A young person needs a loving and caring community where s/he can find support and the attention s/he needs to blossom. By drawing the young and the mature together, we believe that our communities (especially our communities of artists where beauty, music and play cannot fail to prevail), will not miss in providing youth at risk with an environment where the young re-accoint themselves with a world of colors and sounds, harmonies and concordances, the best the world has to offer them.
RESOURCES FOR WOMEN
We also began developing a resource center for women which answers questions such as: Where do homeless women go for help? Where to direct pregnant homeless women, battered women escaping their husbands' abuse, mentally challenged women, etc?
SUMNER TRIBUNE
We developed SUMNER TRIBUNE, an in-house weekly newsletter. Beside our reporting on facts and events happening at Sumner House, our editorial policy was to express viewpoints on homelessness. We wished to prove that homelessness is in sociological terms, structural, that is, inherent to the very structure of American society. At the core of the United States of America is industrialism as a definite structural reality. As long as America is industrialized, homelessness shall exist, persist and endure, for there will always be rampant unemployment combined with a shortage of housing. When and where there is joblessness, crime rises up. The penitentiary system takes real control over youth. Cancers specifically caused by industrialization (unidimensional individuals, helplessness, hopelessness) multiply. So, to Sumner House clients who tended to believe that caseworkers assigned at Sumner House perpetuated homelessness, we argued that American civil society did not need any help for that matter. To those case workers who believed that the best way to secure their jobs was to permanently display meanness and inconsideration toward clients, we said that their attitudes only revealed their incompetence. We made clear that the more homeless people go, the more they come from 1) prison, 2) losing their jobs then their apartments, 3) war, 4) abroad (political and economic refugees looking for work and a better life). "Just do your job," we advised the caseworkers; "That's the best way to secure your job. If in the process you can help your fellow human being, that's all the better."
1993
GIVE ME SOME OF YOUR TIME FOR THE TIRED, THE WRETCHED, THE HURDLED, THE HOMELESS
HoSHEP decided as a policy not to fundraise. We had seen it happen so many times that an association begins with a strong commitment to social action, then witnesses its focus drift from serving others to serving self. In the beginning, these groups devote 100% of their time to solving people's problems, repairing wrongs, curing social ills, and helping others. As times passes and money begins to flow in, they end up devoting only 10 to 25% of their time to the reason why they began social social in the first place. Worse, years later, they discover that money has accustomed them to a lifestyle they cannot sustain unless they have (a lot of) funds. As a result, funds, funding, and funding sources become the central tenet, not advocacy or helping others. The frenzy to make money, more and more money, is what deprives others, especially the weak, of the bare minimum for survival. It's one thing to see this attitude prevail in the corporate world; when it becomes endemic in the advocacy circles, then there is ground for pessimism. Capital cannot be the solution to the problems it creates, and greed cannot solve the ills it brings forth.
HoSHEP advocates for the homeless but perhaps most importantly, HoSHEP advocates for a turnaround in social action thinking from both service providers and funding sources.
HoSHEP's message is: "Do the work and worry not about funding. If the services you provide are useful to others, someone will call you one day and another, urging you to initiate contact with one funding source or another, for one reason or another, including the willingness of the company in question to honor your caller's late spouse who was one of its directors, by making a donation to her favorite charity. 'I have chosen you,' she'd shout cheerfully." All the assistance HoSHEP has received in its six years of existence came that way, not in writing proposals or fundraising agressively.
When the public asks us:"How can we help you help others?" we say: "GIVE US SOME OF YOUR TIME." This way, they see the despair with their own eyes and understand that quite often a heart touching a heart can achieve more than all the money of the world.
If you really listen to homeless people, you hear the only (real) complaint they have, which is: YOU NEVER SAW MY FACE. If you really want to donate something to HoSHEP, give us some of your time, so that you may look at a homeless person to see his or her face. This is what you will see: When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of the testimony in his hand (during the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt to Israel which can be equated to (sort of) a state of wandering and homelessness, "he did not know that the skin of his face shone" (Exodus 29); and when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, "behold, the skin of his face shone" (Exodus 30). When you really look at a homeless person (not a street person), you see that glow and you understand that there is a mystery in the face of the wanderer, a mystery that sees only he who really looks to really see.
A NEW ADDRESS
We were expulsed from Sumner House in April-May 1993. The first to go, James Terrell was transferred to Harlem I Shelter in Harlem. Michael Bell and Nouk Bassomb were moved to Franklin Armory in the Bronx. In need of a new headquarters, Ms. Nefertari Ahmose, a civil rights leader in the community, lent us her apartment at 855 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn.
ZEN COMMUNITY OF NEW YORK (ZCNY)
HoSHEP was attracted to Roshi Glassman because he had a strong commitment to social action. "If one of your hands is entering fire, the other hand automatically reaches over and pulls it out. It is spontaneous. The other hand does not think, 'Well, should I risk it? Should I go and get this hand out or not?' When we realize that we are one body, one humanity, there is a spontaneous way of standing up for the rights of others, for justice," he taught.
Glassman was not just talk. He showed his determination by having the organization he created: Greyston Mandala which included, among other ventures, the Zen Community of New York (ZCNY), the Greyston Foundation, the House of One People, redeem abandoned buildings in an impoverished section of Yonkers and turn them into affordable housing for homeless or formally homeless families. This Zen Buddhist monk organizes street retreats all over the world, including Nazi concentration camps in Poland and Germany, to raise consciousness about suffering, homelessness, violence, and AIDS. His ambition is to have participants ask themselves: "What is my personal role in these ills of society? And what is my own next step toward healing these wounds of society?"
GREYSTON RETRIEVAL SERVICES
Greyston Retrieval Services began as the combined effort of ZCNY's Roshi Glassman, Larry Chamberlain, a Vietnam veteran and homeless man who had lived 13 years under the Manhattan Bridge, and HoSHEP's Nouk Bassomb to break the New York homeless population into units or "villages" of 25 to 30 individuals able to sustain themselves. The first step in this work was to provide these "units" with what we referred to as "address capabilities" (mailboxes and voice mail), for those are the two elements a job seeker needs first and foremost to connect himself with the world of work and enable the job market to find him when he is needed. We already had the logistical backing of ZCNY and HoSHEP. We needed a funder and found him in Tom Silverman, chairman of Tommy Boy Music, New York.
1994/1995
1994
TOMMY BOY MUSIC
Tommy Boy Music is a rap (street music) recording label located in downtown Manhattan. Mr. Silverman, an old Zen student of Glassman's, liked the idea and was eager to contribute and give something back to the streets. He provided employment to Larry Chamberlain and Nouk Bassomb. When he did not come through with the "address capabilities" Greyston Retrieval Services needed to become operational, the relationship ended.
It's at Tommy Boy Music that the difference between a "street person" (one who accepts help only if it is on his/her terms) and a "homeless person" (one who accepts help without condition, wherever it comes from) became clear to us.
A NEW ADDRESS
We found a new headquarters in the West End Avenue Manhattan apartment of Ms. Toinette Lippe, a publisher, when Ms. Ahmose found new lodging accomodations.
INCORPORATED
Mr. Peter Rokkos, esq. of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, helped us achieve incorporation.
QUESTIONS OF LEADERSHIP
I take it upon myself to bring forth the following story, which is a hard, complex one, for its didactic value is deep, amazing and very important:
When Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for his literary contribution, he established a scholarship fund for students. Wole Sonyinka did likewise and aided the pro-democracy forces of his native Nigeria. With parts of the Nobel for Peace money, Nelson Mandela boosted the financial comfort of the Mandela Center for Children whose work he prides himself for being perhaps more important than his effort to crush apartheid in South Africa. With her Nobel money, Toni Morrison bought three dwellings, including an apartment in Soho, N.Y.. "I have always been afraid of homelessness," she commented in an interview she gave to Essence Magazine, steering our interest to 1) query about what Nobel Prize winners do with their money, 2) begin a survey which asks Americans of all walks of life what they'd do with an unforecast million dollars (4 of 5 African Americans would buy a house to Mom or themselves if Mom is no longer with us; 3 of 5 American Jews would support Israel and 5 of 5 WASPs would buy a business), and 3) wonder about leadership, especially in the African-American community. What does the fact that African Americans, 12-13% of the American people, make up 90-97% of the homeless population say about the African-American leadership?
One might ask, as many have done, "Whether as a university professor or as a celebrated writer who commands a million-dollar advance per book, this woman knows she can never be homeless in America? What's going wrong here?" A sense of precariousness runs deep in this people because American history has inflicted great damages on the African-American psyche.
What then is the solution to this problem? We thought that if we, or anyone else, are interested in fighting homelessness by bringing the African-American representation in the homeless population from 90-97% down to 12-13%, we must start talking leadership to youth, not adults, and not seniors Ms. Morrison's age.
Moses obliged his people to wander forty years in the desert so that a whole new generation born and brought up in total freedom in large spaces comes forth. This is the solution. A human being, or a people, as it's known, would recreate the conditions of bondage and the symbols of his bondage if that's the only reality she has known. The shackles of one mortgage are bad enough; the sister wants to be caught up in three, and car payments, and children's tuitions, and the hairdresser bills, and all the unnecessary frienzies of this consummer society... In the meantime, WE are homeless. The desert must be created, whether material or else. A black Moses must take us there. We need only ONE. The solution is in 1) investing in children, the future of a people; 2) (a) education, (b) education, (c) education, for only education gives a people a new perspective so that they may establish a new, better, learned, more effective leadership, so that the people, individually or collectively, may have the right priorities
and make the right choices; 3) involving the whole community in raising one and every child; and 4) investing in the "WE" not the "I". There is a world of difference between "[WE] have always been afraid of homelessness" and "[I] have always been afraid of homelessness." Certains solutions to certain common problems must be thought together and found together. In the African-American community, homelessness is one of them.
1995
MASJID AL-FARAH
Our friendship with Shaykh Nur Al-Jerrahi proved very useful to our work. By opening the Masjid Al-Farrah to us, he introduced us to a world of Divine Mercy.
Masjid Al-Farah is a circle of the Jerrahi Dervishes in the Lineage and Love of Ashki and Nur. Its leader at the time, Shaykh Nur al-Jerrahi (born Lex Hixon, a Russian Christian) was completely committed to humanity and to the human struggle. Like Roshi Glassman, he understood that homelessness, as a plague, must be understood then tackled from the spiritual angle. "Because," he argued, "if you get focused just on the surface and start fighting for justice, though you may be supporting some ideological point of view that might [be designed to] help the masses or whatever, still you are definitely going to get trapped in the surface and you won't even be much of a help. You will be part of the problem."
Shaykh Nur is the first white person who ever looked at us in the eye and stated that "over 90 to 97% of the slaves brought to North America from West Africa were Moslems. Unless that historical fact is acknowledged and taken into consideration, the black problem in America shall not be solved." HoSHEP wished to team up with him to develop communities of refuge for former Moslem inmates but time and/or death did not allow that. Shaykh Nur Al-Jerrahi was recalled in December of 1995.
1996
A GHOST IN THE NIGHT
Nouk likes to tell the story of how as he wandered Central Park West late one night, a homeless woman approached and began walking alongside him. "The more they have, the worse they are," she said after a few minutes. "Who are you talking about?" Nouk asked. "Those who live up there," she said, showing the highrises with her hand and, a few minutes later, added: "especially the black folks." This lady, black herself, continued: "They are ashamed of me... When they cried out estagfiru'llah, I heard. When I give them, they don't give me back. They never see my face. There shall never be unity among black folks as long as they do not achieve oneness with me first." Then into the night, she slid silently as she appeared.
For one who looks superficially at life, this was total delirium. But according to Nouk, these words had a profound resonance in him for, in Africa where he was born, as Malidoma Some reports in his book, "Of Water and Spirit", page 4, his "experience of the other world has led him to understand that anything that crosses from that place into this one is seldom beautiful as if anything spiritually potent must look ugly and smell bad in order to work." After that, Nouk insisted that the words: "...I was homeless, and you provided me with a home...Everything you did for the least of my people, you did to me..." be taken literally. It's also around that time that he began talking about establishing "AFRICAN UNITY DAY" as primarily a celebration day to 1) promote oneness with the Creator-Mother, and 2) foster unity and individual responsibility for collective security in our communities.
INTERFAITH ASSEMBLY ON HOMELESSNESS AND HOUSING
The government broadly defines homelessness as a lack of a fixed residence. To better understand the Federal, state, and city governments' relationship with the homeless segment of the population, we worked closely with the Interfaith Assembly of Homelessness and Housing.
The Assembly is a coalition of organizations and individuals working with and on behalf of homeless, poorly housed, and at-risk individuals. The Assembly was founded in 1986 and operates under the tax-exempt umbrella of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Since 1990 it has participated in and/or coordinated the establishment of three life-skills programs designed to assist men and women who have been homeless to recover from the trauma associated with their homelessness. Its offices are located at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The Assembly's central tenet is that decent affordable housing is a basic human right.
What we learned in our work with Mr. Marc Greenberg, the Assembly's Executive Director, is how to keep a watchful eye on public policy (Federal welfare legislation for example) and how to react to it, for it affects the lives of millions.
POVERTY AWARENESS COALITION
Poverty Awareness Coalition is an organization established to assist men and women who are homeless and who identify themselves as artists, to gain the tools, skills and opportunities necessary to support themselves. The Coalition is committed to believing that art can be an effective vehicle through which to communicate the message that within the homeless community is a wealth of talent and depth of expression, and that the showcasing of this art can engender a significant level of public awareness and support for innovative programs to assist this population. A central objective of the Coalition is the establishment of the first national gallery of art created by homeless people.
Some of our artists, members of HoSHEP, have been showcased in the following past events of the Coalition's art exhibits:
1) The Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing, 10th Anniversary celebration, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. November 19th, 1997.
2) The City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, February-May, 1997.
3) New York County Lawyers Association, November 5-14, 1966.
4) Halloween Party, the Hampton's, October 26, 1996.
ACQUISITION OF TAX-EXEMPT STATUS
HoSHEP'tax exempt status [501(c)(3) corporation] is recognized.
1997/1998
1997
ARTISTS WITHOUT HOUSING
After receiving a $15,000 grant from the Levin Foundation, the association Artists-Without-Housing (AWH), approached HoSHEP to help in their outreach work. With ambitious plans, AWH, for instance, wished to hold a homeless art show at Penn Station, N.Y.; then in a collaborative program with Amtrak, have this very exhibition travel to every Amtrak terminal throughout the country. What attracted HoSHEP to AWH's efforts was their intent to develop a community of refuge for homeless artists. This aspect of the work brought Praxis Housing Initiatives on board.
PRAXIS HOUSING INITIATIVES
Social action arm of the Episcopalian Church, Praxis Housing Initiatives controls at least six "single room occupancy" hotels in New York City. Interested in the vision of establishing communities of artists, Praxis agreed to start a pilot program at the Greenpoint Hotel, in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn. HoSHEP began moving in its artists in July of 1997.
THE GREENPOINT HOTEL
The first thing HoSHEP did at the hotel was to establish a COFFEE-SHOP, a gathering and open-mike event where artists and poets are welcome to express themselves. A census conducted by HoSHEP revealed that there was already over thirty artists living at the hotel with no occasion or medium to express themselves. The "Coffee-Shop" caught up steam quickly and a lack of support from the parties involved failed us in providing the artists and craftspeople with a workspace.
HoSHEP is still attracting artists to the Greenpoint Hotel, a facility with 180 rooms. As these lines are written, the community is 43-artists strong.
If at that point, someone asked us the one donation that would have helped us the most, HoSHEP would unequivocally have responded: a space for our entrepreneurial, art, and youth programs to settle in and develop. This space would have been turned into a studio-gallery-shop. This almost happened in the summer of 1997, as all three parties tacitly agreed upon, for Greenpoint Hotel has a few rooms that would have accomodated us. What went terribly wrong was that AWH found itself incapable to afford a $1,000-dollar rent that Praxis requested. HoSHEP's disappointment ran deep and our relationships with both Praxis and AWH soured as a result.
INTERNET ACCESS
It's a homeless person, Mr. Kevin Cameron, who introduced HoSHEP to the world wide web and gave us internet knowledge and access. A computer wiz, he thought us everything we know about the internet. So that we can teach others: HoSHEP 1) built a homepage that makes all its data available to the world, and 2) developed a virtual community of people with an interest in homelessness.
1998
NATIONAL STATIONARY SHOW, (Javits Convention Center, May 16-19)
HoSHEP's Art Program was present at the 1998 National Stationary Show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, N.Y., to present our greeting cards ideas (which celebrate Christmas, Kwanza, Judaica, weddings, and other celebrated holidays and occasions) to an international audience. We have the products, not the capital. Our intention is still to trade some of our products for funds that will enable HoSHEP's Art Program to establish itself. We benefitted by meeting face-to-face with essential, key-level decision makers, build new leads, sharpen our industry awareness, and develop networks with over 1,400 industry peers.
AFRICAN UNITY DAY (Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, July 19)
HoSHEP is the lead organizer of AFRICAN UNITY DAY, a spiritual, peaceful, educative and not-for-profit event that intends to call attention on 1) Africa's economic community and 2) the economic empowerment of African Americans as the next civil rights frontier.
Our ambition is to establish the biggest homeless feeding and stage the biggest homeless art show in the world. Once a year, at a location selected by HoSHEP, we plan to gather all homeless artists to come and show their art to the public while all homeless groups and advocates network, educating the public about homelessness, and feeding the homeless.
BACK TO YONKERS, NEW YORK
When Interfaith Organization of Unity in the 21st Century (IOU-21) opened its door in June of 1998, we inquired if it was possible for HoSHEP to use a corner of their office to implement a new HoSHEP chapter in Yonkers. They agreed. As a result, we move back to Yonkers.
IOU-21 is the brain child of Mr. Gordon Powell, Sr., a.k.a. Siddiq Khalwati, Imam at the Masjid al-Farah. We grew acquainted with him back when we worked with Roshi Glasman, the Zen Community of New York, Shaykh Nur Al-Jerrahi and Masjid Al-Farah.
Himself an ex-addict, Imam Siddiq Khalwati addresses addiction and substance abuse in this empoverished community of affluent Weschester. HoSHEP helps this population and others in the community in their employment search.
IOU-21 is working to erect the Sandra Jishu Holmes Halfway House for People in Recovery in memory of Roshi Glassman's beloved wife who was recalled this year. HoSHEP helps in this worthy project.