Loaf
& Fish CEO Fernandez was profiled in the July 29 issue of the Sacramento Business
Journal. In the piece she is quoted telling homeless-averse business people
what they want to hear. The first and
third paragraphs in the profile follow [emphases mine]:
“Loaves and
Fishes is the heart of downtown,” Sister Libby Fernandez said. “It’s a
welcoming place for the very poor and homeless, and gives them a place to be
during the day. We serve an average of 650 poor and homeless people each day,
and if they weren’t here, they would be at other places downtown. ”
…
“When people
who are homeless are here they can use our restrooms, our showers, wash up, get
their clothes cleaned,” she said. They can use our telephones, sit in our park
and just be, without disturbing
other people and other businesses. They can socialize here, and get services and help here.”
In his book Managing
the Underclass in American Society[1]
John Irvin wrote about how the REAL effort in many metropolises is not to help
the poor or homeless, but to corral them, to run them around in circles, to
waste their time and to keep them out of public view. Police -- prompted by politicians who are
prompted by business people -- in metropolises where such a polity, called
“Warehousing the Rabble,” is extant endlessly roust the homeless and otherwise
keep ‘em out of “nice neighborhoods.”
Does that sound like Sac’to to you?
Yep.
And you know it’s true:
Homeless people in Sacramento get ticketed and arrested for conduct and
actions that conventional citizens, doing the same activities, would never be
bothered about by the police. There are
laws on the books that exclusively or near-exclusively are there targeting the
homeless to make us behave like cattle.
Libby, with her quotes in the Biz Journal, proves her fealty
to the Warehousing the Rabble
philosophy and the business community, in opposition to suffering homeless
people. She is certainly NO friend of
the homeless. It’s all a charade. She shows
that she does not support the right of the homeless to be treated the same as
conventional Sacramento citizens.
Make no mistake, Libby is well known for delivering
radically differing messages to suit the different audiences she
addresses. It’s called duplicity and
Libby is shameless at it. To the
business world, she’s dutiful at keeping the stinky homeless away from the
genteel public. To donors and
volunteers, she is Mother Teresa aiding the wretched. To the homeless, she pretends to be a
champion of the poor. And to other
groups, like the employees at Loaves & Fishes, the Jesuit volunteers, and
the L&F Board of Directors, she has yet other masks.
A change at the top at Loaves & Fishes is overdue. It is time, too, to end the duplicity and for
Loaves & Fishes to embrace a new policy:
one of compassion and genuine interest in helping homeless people find
meaning in their lives and opportunities to better their circumstance.
Comments
For starters, I have to turn your question around. The compassion HAS TO COME FIRST. The actions then come as a direct result of empathizing with the circumstance of being homeless.
So, new people on the Board of Directors of L&F is probably an unavoidable first step, resulting shortly thereafter with new management personnel.
Excellent management of Loaves & Fishes would be demonstrated with these hallmarks:
Reliable metrics of giving good service would be kept and reported with actions resulting if investigation shows that excellent, reliable, efficient service isn't being provided.
Homeless adults would be treated like adults, and just as they would be if they were 'conventional' Sacramento citizens.
Loaves & Fishes would not see it as its role to keep homeless citizens away from 'nice' neighborhoods. BUT, would instead, see its role as one of giving each homeless person as open an opportunity as is possible to have a robust meaningful life.