Questions and Faithfulness

Yesterday, in a meeting at the Department of Human Services, we discussed policy implementation and ideas for making the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) more effective and efficient. While it was interesting to sit through a meeting with city officials, and other non-profit providers from the city, my mind was racing with a collection of questions about the work we do here at Bread and across the City Government and NGO world:

How can you meet the level of need in the District of Columbia?

There is so much institutional racism that I never saw before this year. How can we help educate others and come up with solutions that begin to tackle this racism?

Is case management the answer? Why do some of us need case management while others do not?

How do we give people incentives to work? Incentives to stop relying on public assistance and move towards self sufficiency? Is self sufficiency only a concept for middle and upper classes?

Are we imposing our own ideas of success on others? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Can we make a program like HPRP actually help people reach their goals and become truly independent?

Does Social Work help? What does that help look like? Is Social Work helping us or is it helping the clients?

Why are so many people “disabled” in the District of Columbia? Are they all disabled? What helps some people work despite their pain and yet makes others want to stop working? How do people with their disabilities?

How do we show our wealthier members of society that these people aren’t just lazy, but that they are dependent because we’ve made them dependent?

How do we add job training and improve our education system so we don’t have so many people without any skills or work history?

How do we help people realize the skills gifts they’ve been given and encourage them to make some impact with those?

How can we meet the level of deep seated need for our poorest members of society?

Questions such as these and more spun through my head as I walked out of the meeting at DHS. Sitting in the meeting, I began to feel thoughts of hopelessness – can we really make an impact when the need is so great?

When I was in college, I realized that there is a state of American Hopelessness that persists in our society. In college, this was viewed towards the lens of middle and upperclass suburban adults who for whatever reason have become hyper-individualistic. And in some ways, I felt elements of hopelessness after I walked out of the meeting with DHS – with a need so great and such limited resources, is it truly possible to make an impact on others, to make some sort of positive social change?

I think this is another hopelessness that is occurring though. It is the hopelessness in many of the clients served by these programs. It is hopelessness that leads these clients to become dependent, to feel as if they cannot improve their lives and thus are trapped in their current situation. They are trapped because of both their hopelessness, and because of the structures of society that keep them trapped and hopeless. It is a cycle that is, for many of our clients, impossible to escape.

I would be a hypocrite, though, if I didn’t remember the words of Fr. Greg Boyle, when he quotes Mother Teresa. I will never forget, when asked how he is able to persevere through so much failure, his response: The key is to not measure in success, but in faithfulness.

Yes, Fr. Greg and Mother Teresa, you are right. It is true that we must measure in how faithful we are to our work, and how faithful we are to God. For this faithfulness will sustain us when we feel as if we are hopeless, as if the need is too great, and as if we are stuck not making any positive social change.

So then, remembering this thought, I take comfort in knowing that I have stayed faithful to my clients and to my work this year. It is my hope that as I continue to work here this next month, and head off to school after, that I will continue to see myself as a faithful servant. For me, as a task-minded, goal-oriented person, interacting with a system looking for quantifiable answers, it is sometimes hard not to get discouraged. But… when I change my perspective and look through the lens of faithfulness, suddenly success isn’t so hard to find.