Austerity Street: the Bethel Homeless Ministries conference
“If you found yourself homeless tomorrow what kind of help would you want?”
It’s a blunt question. And it brings a moment of hush to the crowded hall in the City Mission Church up in Ladywood.
I’m here at the Bethel Homeless Ministries conference on homelessness. Here, packed around the tables, with flipcharts, pens, blutack and a tonne of compassionate experience are good people determined to end the moral emergency that scars our city. Here is the Bishop of Bethel United UK, along with faith leaders, charity leaders, volunteers, faith groups, and businesses who engage with homeless people.
Their goal is to start a new dialogue; a conversation between leaders of statutory services and community leaders about how we together ensure that homelessness in Birmingham is reduced.
No-one is under any illusion about what’s at stake. Because we begin with a two-minute silence for those who have died as a result of homelessness.
“One death is one too many’ said one from the makeshift podium at the front; ‘it’s time for change”.
But what does change look like? To help answer that, those out there on street volunteering find it important to ask, “If you found yourself homeless tomorrow, what kind of help would you want?” This is something each group discusses as a way of understanding how best to intervene in a crisis. The answers differ somewhat, but they’ve one big idea in common: we have to support people so well, they can begin the journey to living independently.
In a confessional way, faith leaders take some of the blame (unfairly in my view) for where we are; “Why are faith groups not signposting the homeless people they are helping to local authorities and other groups?” asked one. Indeed, there’s an anecdotal worry things are too insular within church groups, both within denominations and individual churches.
But while this crisis is forcing change on the ground, with churches and different faiths working together, people feel the government is not responding.
There are no easy answers here. People recognise that councils are stretched to the point they can barely provide essential services. Their budgets have been slashed so deeply by austerity cuts that they cannot provide all they would want to those most in need.
I say a few words about why this political struggle is personal for me. About the moment I was trying to persuade a homeless neighbour to come into shelter only to realise he was self-medicating trauma in exactly the way my father did during a life-long struggle with alcohol. A struggle he lost.
But what stuck me hardest as Ieft was a sense of both anger and relief. Here were different people from all walks of life rallying together to reweave a social fabric that was strong enough it could catch people falling headlong through the massive gaps in what’s left of our social safety net. This is the coalition of kindness at work. But good grief, it shouldn’t have to be like this.
One death is too many. It’s time for change.
