Denise Zhang Geog 331 March 4th, 2014 Final Paper

Poverty and Care at the Union Gospel Mission

The Union Gospel Mission is a non-profit organization founded in 1932 as a church-backed soup kitchen to feed and aid the homeless men during the Great Depression in Seattle, Washington. The organization was established by clergyman, Peter McFarlane from the St. Paul Mission in Minnesota who worked with other clergyman in the Seattle area to establish UGM. The missions first-year budget was less than $1,500, which included rent, supplies, utilities, and the directors salary but nonetheless, the mission still fed over 18,000 men that year. (Amundson, 2009) More than 80 years later, the mission is running on a budget of $16 million and operates both a mens and womens shelter, runs a drug-andalcohol recovery program, a youth center, a legal-aid program, and a dental clinic as well as many other resources. The organization receives funding from individuals and has developed consistent relationships with churches, businesses and other organizations that have provided them with constant support throughout the years. In order to have more autonomy and customize their programs and remain flexible to attend to the needs of the homeless, the Union Gospel Mission does not accept any government funds. The organization advocates to help and provide immediate care to our poor and homeless neighbors who are often unacknowledged in the community. UGM strives to provide the homeless population with the fundamental resources and care they need that they would otherwise struggle to obtain such as food, shelter, and medical aid. The organizations mission statement tackles to provide care and help not only the homeless, but at risk youths and those struggling with addiction.

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(Mission Initiative, 2014) The services at UGM are incredibly important to the community especially when the population of homeless people continues to rise in Washington State with a 5% increase in 2013 compared to 2012. (One Night Count, 2013) Volunteering at UGMs mens shelter this quarter has forced me to come to terms with the homelessness in our neighborhoods and the role I play in the community. I struggled immensely during my first day of volunteering; I was nervous about being the only girl in the mens shelter and I was guilty of applying societys stereotypes to the homeless population. Born with privilege and growing up as a member of the middle class, I have been exposed to an environment in which the face of homelessness is an African-American man and the status is associated with crime, violence, alcoholism, and other negative stigmas. From the bat, I went through an internal battle of attempting to destroy these preconceived notions and to see these homeless men for who they really are: human. I realized that service learning was going to provide me with a different perspective on the homeless and bring forth new meaning to the concepts of poverty and care ethics through understanding what they mean to the individuals fighting poverty. Whats a beautiful young lady like you doing in a place like this? was a question I got asked several times by the homeless men during my service. Im here to help. I would reply with a smile. Most would smile in return and thank me for my service but sometimes, Id receive a much less positive response. Youre here to help huh? Youre a privileged girl and youll never understand people like me, does it make you feel like a better person to come here and help? I had no answer. He was rig ht. I am privileged and I didnt understand what it was like to be homeless and worst of all, volunteering did make me feel like I was a better person. It felt satisfying to be able to give back to the community and provide care for these individuals but from a more selfish perspective, it helped me deal with the overbearing amount of guilt I harbored from years of ignoring those pleas of help on the streets. I was
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no better than the rest of society who dehumanize the poor. Throughout the quarter, we have dived into the topics of poverty and care and it wasnt after being exposed to service learning at the mens homeless shelter that I could fully grasp the concepts we had discussed in class. It wasnt until I was placed in a new and uncomfortable environm ent that I was forced to address the problem and presence of poverty in my community. It caused me to reflect upon how privileged I am to live a stable and healthy life with easy access to all the necessary resources I need. It made me feel disgustingly hypocritical that while I am passionate about my future career path in the Public Health field, I was guilty of turning a blind eye when it came down to acknowledging a public health problem that is pertinently there in my very own community. Yes, I admit that I am an individual with the desire and passion to help people but I have a major flaw. I choose to help my spatially distant neighbors (Massey, 2005) in developing countries and fail to pay any attention to spatially proximate strangers (Massey, 2005) who are struggling right next to me. I think a lot of us fall into this category, of naively thinking that poverty is only a problem in the global south and maybe its because like myself, we struggle to accept the hard truth in fears of it distorting o ur perception of our perfect world and in fear of being depressed by reality. Were scared and dont know what to expect. We dont want to admit that there are such stagnant problems right under our nose and so we like to believe that poverty only exists in poor countries. During my time at the shelter, I got the opportunity to hear personal stories from some of the mission guests; they told me about the daily struggles they had to face before coming to UGM such as constantly looking for food and shelter which led them to engage in criminal activity and other behaviors frowned on by society. They told me about how difficult it was to get any help from the community and how alienated and segregated they felt from the rest of the population. These men eventually found their way to UGM which helped reinstate hope that they are still individuals who are just as important
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and human as everyone else. It was uplifting to hear some of these men tell me that UGM helped them realize that their status of homelessness doesnt define who they are. However, what they told me about feeling isolated hit me hard; it was difficult for me to imagine what they felt and experienced. Once again, I was overcome with guilt knowing that I was one of many responsible for making them feel alone. Miss, sorry to interrupt is how they usually begin and what theyre interrupting is not so much the song were listening to or the book were reading, but our idea that they simply dont ex ist at all. Just as how we have discussed in class, these men were made invisible and categorized as others (Lawson, Week 5, Slide 17) and as much I wanted to tell them sorry, sorry that I was one of those people, my simple apology cant erase the pain theyve felt. For many of us, the homeless have become ghosts weve trained ourselves to no longer see. We see them as an exotic other seemingly too different to understand, so we simply choose to ignore them. Ive come to realize that its cyclical reasoning: we dont engage with the homeless because we dont understand them, and because weve never attempted to reach out, well never understand them and so the cycle keeps on turning with no end. While ignoring the homeless may seem relatively harmless on an individual level, it has a significant effect on public policy. As the government talks about making cuts on spending, welfare and statesponsored homeless shelter will be the first to go. It was estimated that these upcoming cuts in homelessness programs are set to expel around 100,000 people from homeless shelters. (Randall, 2013) The homeless cannot lobby the government, nor do they have the money or resources to get their voice across, which means its up to the voters to make leaders care about these issues. Its up to people like me to hear these voices and help close the gap that exists. Just as how I have heard personal stories from mission guests, I have also learned about how members in the drug and alcohol recovery program found their way to UGM. David, one of the fellow
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program members I work with told me about how he became an alcoholic and soon realized that he was out of money to fuel his addiction and that he was beginning to lose control of his life. (Linkman, 2013) He lived in California during that time and didnt know where to seek help because he was ashamed of himself and was sick of hearing people tell him that his addiction was his own fault. He talked about struggling to get out of a vicious cycle: of wanting to change his behavior but then immediately feeling discouraged and hopeless only then to give up and go back to his alcoholism. What was interesting to me was hearing David rant to me about how fed up he is with society blaming the poor for being poor and believing that it was up to the individual to fix and reform themselves back into the community. This is exactly how the discourse of residual poverty is still prevalent in society, as we explain poverty to be the result of internal deficiencies of the poor; flaws of individual character (Lawson, Week 2, Slide 13). David then continued to tell me about how he heard about UGM from a friend and so David made his way up to Seattle where for once, he wasnt faced with rejection and was welcomingly accepted into the recovery program. David has been with UGM for almost a year now and although he has gone through relapse a few times, he tells me that it is because of organizations like UGM who constantly care for him that he keeps on fighting to overcome his addiction. Although UGM attempts to challenge residual poverty by viewing the homeless as members of society who are trapped in a cycle run by uncontrollable environmental factors such as social stigma, there are still elements within the organization that promote residual poverty. UGM gives the homeless the necessities to survive such as shelter and food, but to a certain extent, the homeless are still expected to take advantage of these resources and get out of poverty themselves. UGM isnt holding their hand every step of the way, theyre just simply pushing them in the right direction but ultimately still implying that it is their responsibility to fix themselves. As Joan Tronto suggests, there is a preexisting moral relationship between people and so the question becomes, How can and how do I
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personally meet my care responsibility? I analyzed how care ethical UGM is through Trontos care ethics model which consist of four phases that are considered the fundamentals necessary in order to demonstrate caring: caring about, taking care of, caregiving, and care receiving. (Tronto, 1993) As a volunteer at the Welcome Desk, I am one of the first faces these men see when they walk in and I provide them with care through recognizing and hearing what they need and being attentive to that. I recognize their need for food and shelter, and/or the need for access to other resources that UGM offers. I, along with the staff acknowledge our responsibility to respond to and meet these needs and so through our actions of caregiving, we essentially take care of the homeless men. In return, we see this care come around full circle when the men come back to the shelter to tell us they have successfully acquired a job or that they have been drug/alcohol free for months. This allows UGM to assess the success of their services and preserve the relationship between the organization and the community. So while on the frontier, it may seem that UGM meets all four elements of being care ethical, there are factors that led me to conclude that the organization wasnt. Additionally, effective caring requires certain attitudes and skills in combination with the four elements and it is the presence of all these factors that determines whether or not someone is being care ethical. This includes attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness of the care receiver. (Tronto, 1993) First, attentiveness entails the detection of the individual need and so if I, as a volunteer fail to recognize the needs, the individual will not experience caring. At UGM, I was challenged to step out of my comfort zone and my personal sphere to take up that of the homeless men so I could better understand their real-life situation. An example of the way UGM implements this is through directly asking the men about their needs when they come in to the shelter. However, attentiveness is something that I have observed to be inconsistent at UGM. The shelter works on strict rules such as only offering services when the welcome center is open at 9:30AM. I have been forced to turn away men
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numerous times (as directed by the staff) because of this, and during those moments, I found myself questioning how the shelter operates. Secondly, there is no ambiguity that volunteers and staff members have a responsibility for helping out the homeless but the extent and scope of their caring is unclear. Like I have mentioned, the shelter is responsible for handing out food and supplies among providing the men access to other resources, but what is their responsibility beyond that? Does the organization have the responsibility of furthermore helping out the homeless in obtaining a job or permanently finding a home? From what I have experienced, they do the bare minimum as I have witnessed staff member kicking guests out after their meal for reasons I fail to understand. The third skill is competence. Good care requires the competence to individualize care to give care based on the physical, psychological, cultural, and spiritual needs of the individual. (Vanlaere & Gastmans, 2011) Its hard to say how effective this is at UGM as the length of interactions between volunteer/staff and the homeless are rather brief and to the point, not allowing enough time to understand the individual on a personal level besides the fact that he is homeless and in need of care. The final element is the individuals responsiveness to care. As mentioned before, this is displayed at UGM through the men directly telling the staff how the organization has helped or lacked to help. I have experienced this through the men thanking me for volunteering and providing care as well as through witnessing the men being upset and angry when their request for care was rejected. It is through analyzing these elements and skills that led me to my conclusion that UGM isnt care ethical. It frustrated me greatly that the while one of the main purpose of UGM is to provide care to the poor, the staff is okay with kicking the men out and blatantly denying them the care they came to UGM specifically for. Who is UGM to say that an individual is undeserving of care? This is incredibly hypocritical given the fact that their mission statement stresses that under God, all men are created
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equal and should have access to the help that they need. (Mission Initiative, 2014) Through class and service learning, I have learned that caring is a vital skill and that although it is indispensable to every human, it isnt easy. Nakano-Glenn classifies care work as relationships and activities that are involved in maintaining people on a daily basis and inter-generationally NakanoGlenn, 2010, pg.5) while Tronto says cares is the work of maintaining, continuing, and repairing the world, versus the pursuit of pleasure, creative activity, production, destruction (Tronto, 1993, pg.104). Just from those two definitions, we can see the vast amount of caring labor that is needed and performed in the world. For me, caring looks like interest but it spans far beyond the surface. Not the kind of interest that stares only just long enough to cast a shadow of attention, but the kind that looks deep into another individual to figure out what theyre made of and take the time to understand what they need. Caring is sharing yourself and your entire realm of being with another, to reach out to them and let them know theyre not alone. Caring is genuinely expressing concern for the innate pieces and parts that make up anothers existence. Caring is seeing someone past the way they are presented to the outside world, past whatever stereotypes society might have stuck on them and see them for who they truly are. Caring requires a lot of skills and emotional investment; its not easy. With that being said, it is unfortunate to say that care is greatly devalued across the globe. We take care for granted and the people who provide care. Care work as we know is largely excluded from economic analysis and the political sphere. Ironic how despite the universal importance of care, it has been treated in the American society as a private affair, as something that operates in the background in homes. Even though I do volunteer at a mens shelter, it was refreshing to see care in action that challenges the historical view of care as a womens responsibility and duty. In conclusion, both this class and my time doing service-learning at the Union Gospel Mission has greatly opened my eyes and affected the way I look at poverty and care both globally and locally. I have
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been placed in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations that have forced me to come to terms with how I personally view and explain poverty as well as how I deal with the presence of it. It has not been easy to admit that I, as a public health major with the intentions of making a difference on any level, was guilty for embracing parts of residual poverty discourse and Othering the homeless. This class has made me more aware of the inequalities that exist in society such as care labor being undervalued and Nakano-Glenns argument of being forced to care; both being things that really stuck with me that challenged me to think more critically and analytically bout the way our society perceives and handles both poverty and care. Bibliography

"2013 results." One Night Count. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2014. <http://www.homelessinfo.org/what_we_do/one_nigh_count/2013_results.php> "5 key areas of service." Mission Initiatives. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2014. <http://www.ugm.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_initiatives>. Amundson, Mavis. "Union Gospel Mission (Seattle)." HistoryLink.org. N.p., 27 Dec. 2009. Web. 4 Mar. 2014. <http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=9248>. Gastmans, C. (2006). The care perspective in healthcare ethics. In A.J. Davis, V. Tschudin, & L. de Raeve (Eds.), Essentials of teaching and learning in nursing ethics (pp. 135-148). London, England: Livingstone Lachman, V.D. (2009). Ethical challenges in healthcare: Developing your moral compass. New York, NY: Springer Lawson, Victoria. (2014) Geography 331: Global Poverty and Care. 4 Feb, 2014. Lawson, Victoria. (2014) Geography 331: Global Poverty and Care. 14 Jan, 2014. Linkman, David. Personal interview. 19 Feb, 2014.t Massey, D. (2004). Geographies of Responsbility Georgrafiska Annaler 86B(1), 5-18 Nakano-Glenn, E. (2010). Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Randell, Kate. "World Socialist Web Site."US mayors' report: Hunger and homelessness rise as aid programs are cut -. N.p., 13 Dec. 2013. Web. 11 Mar. 2014. <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/13/conf-d13.html>.
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Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. New York, NY: Routledge. Chapters 4 and 5. Vanlaere, L., & Gastmans, C. (2011). A personalistic approach to care ethics. Nursing Ethics, 18, 161-173.

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