Invocation for Dallas Furniture Bank’s 11th CHAIRity Event

On Wednesday, February 17, 2016, I was honored to offer the invocation at the Dallas Furniture Bank’s CHAIRity Event. The text of the invocation follows:

Thank you for the honor of offering the invocation today. The Dallas Furniture Bank is an essential and vital partner in our homeless response system. Now, you may think that this is because the Dallas Furniture Bank provides furniture for our formerly homeless neighbors. No. It is because they do much much more.  Allow me to explain.

The ancient rabbis of the Talmud tell us that, “a beautiful dwelling… enlarges a person’s spirit.” Before I worked in the homelessness arena, I don’t think I really understood what that meant. Now I do. Just imagine, you wake up not far from here, in the tent city under the I-45 Bridge, and you know that today you are going to be housed. Your case manager picks you up, and with your few belongings you arrive at your new home. With a sense of hope and some trepidation you slowly open the door… to an empty or almost empty, blank looking apartment. You don’t need to be a great scholar to figure out what your feeling would be, but let me quote one anyway. Dr. Iain De Jong, a world renowned expert on homelessness, writes: “If you leave the apartment unit blank looking, it is going to feel more like a prison cell or place where they may have squatted than a place to call home.”

 

On the other hand, what happens if with the help of the Dallas Furniture Bank, that moment that you open the door is fundamentally different? Listen again to Dr. De Jong. This is more like poetry than research: “A lot can be said for the new tenant having a say in the furniture that goes into their unit, rather than them just being handed furniture that they had no say in… While I have seen many a chronically homeless person be overcome with emotions on the day of move in when they get their keys, I have seen more actually break down and weep with joy when the furniture that they picked out arrives, and they have a say in where it is set up in their place. Powerful.”

I sincerely believe that what Dr. De Jong describes is what the ancient rabbis meant. A beautiful dwelling does not mean that the structure, the four walls, the ceiling, the floor, look beautiful. A beautiful dwelling means a dwelling that you have filled with furniture you picked out, and household items that you have chosen. This is what enlarges the spirit. And do you know what this “enlarging of the spirit” really means? The Soncino Talmud English translation tells us: “Increases self-esteem.” Wow.

That is what the Dallas Furniture Bank really does. The vital homeless response system solution they provide is not merely furniture.  Oh, no. They enlarge the human spirit of our neighbors; they increase their self-esteem above and beyond what might seem possible. That, my friends, is something truly beautiful. And in the Jewish tradition, we have a blessing that we recite, upon observing things of great beauty, like the Dallas Furniture Bank: (Hebrew then English) Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, who has such beautiful things in his world.

Housing Movements – Large and Small

Over the weekend I noticed two great pieces on housing movements, one in the Huffington Post and one on NPR.

The Huffington Post highlights a phenomenon that most people working in the housing space are well familiar with, “Affordable Housing Initiative Demands Action for Historic Rental Crisis We Can't Ignore”. Check the full article here: www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/14/home-matters-campaign_n_6678274.html. They specifically cite Home Matters, which you can check out at www.homemattersamerica.com. Home Matters points out that, “There’s a housing crisis in the United States. More than half a million people in the United States do not have a home – a quarter of these individuals are children. And over half of all Americans have had to make at least one sacrifice in order to pay their rent or mortgage. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods in the country lack simple services, such as afterschool programs for children, affordable cultural activities, sufficient legal enforcement and other amenities that make a stable, safe living environment in which individuals and their families and friends can thrive. Home Matters is a national movement that’s redefining the American Dream and Home. We believe the New American Dream is one where every American lives in a safe, nurturing environment with access to quality education, healthcare, public spaces and community services.”

NPR highlights co-housing in Europe, specifically in Spain and the United Kingdom, in an article titled, “Not A Group House, Not A Commune: Europe Experiments With Co-Housing”. Check the full article here: www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/02/16/385528919/not-a-group-house-not-a-commune-europe-experiments-with-co-housing. The first thing I saw in the comments section online was that this idea is one that exists here in the United States too. Check out www.cohousing.org, which is a national organization that promotes this idea. The latter site explains that these arrangements typically have some common facilities, are managed by residents, feature a participatory non-hierarchal structure and method of decision making. The community typically shares some meals together, and members serve the community and are served by it. It sounds very similar to the more modern iteration of the Israeli Kibbutz.

The HuffPo piece highlights the broad nature of the problems we face in housing, and how solving this problem demands action across our country. The NPR piece reminds us that there are original ideas out there, beyond the standard solutions we often hear about.  Together, they serve to remind us that while we at MDHA and the Dallas area CoC concentrate on ending homelessness, this is no substitute for a deliberate and concerted affordable housing policy and practice here in the Dallas area and across the nation.