City with Dwellings

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

Stories of hopelessness turned into hope. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. You hear from ordinary people instilled with an extraordinary passion.

Together we explore the stories of men and women who take what they love and let God turn their passion into kingdom pursuits. Now, live from the Truth Booth, your host, Robbie Dilmore. Well, you would think this would be Robbie Dilmore and you'd be wrong. This is Bill Mixon.

I'm filling in for Robbie Dilmore. Robbie is leading a men's retreat this weekend, and it is a great pleasure to have two exceptional people on Robbie Dilmore's Kingdom Pursuits this morning. These ladies, along with their fellow co-workers, are true superheroes. Some of the most wonderful people I've ever had the pleasure to get to know. During the last few years, most of us, and most churches, hid ourselves from COVID. Yet there was a small team of dedicated, wonderful people in our community who heroically worked through the COVID storm. These superheroes worked to take care of a community of our neighbors, neighbors most of us would think would be the most likely to catch and then pass on a virus.

These superheroes did this through a period of time when most of us were apprehensive and scared for our health. This team lifted up and supported and loved on some of the most vulnerable of our neighbors, our brothers and sisters without roofs. As Jesus put it, the least of these.

Jesus said, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. From my personal observation, the staff at City with Dwellings, a center to address homelessness, and The Dwelling, a community church located in the same center. They are able and brave, caring and cheerful, compassionate, dedicated to helping others, energetic, innovative, helpful, kind, knowledgeable, patient, polite, respectful, special, supportive, and talented.

You might realize I really think a lot of them. When the response to COVID hit, the organization were superstars. They realized that the most fragile of the homeless, our neighbors in need needed extra protection. They had to deal with the astronomical problem that there's just not enough low income housing space in our community across the nation. In partnership with the United Way, these heroes at City with Dwellings and the church, The Dwelling led a group of volunteers to create new housing while the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters waited in very basic hotel rooms.

With me this bright and beautiful morning is Kristin O'Connell and Emily Norris. They are a few of the spectacular leaders from City with Dwellings and The Dwelling. Emily, please tell us a little bit about the effort that was made to create additional housing for the homeless. Yeah, so it really was in response to a collaborative effort between the City of Winston-Salem, City with Dwellings, myself as the pastor of The Dwelling, and our city in response to COVID in, I think it must have been April, was it April? We started rallying, Bethesda Center for the Homeless was also a partner in this. We sheltered about 65 of our city's most medically fragile neighbors.

It was at the Ramada Inn on the north side of town. But what was really special about the way that this program worked was that it was really a model for wraparound care. So not only was there shelter that was being provided through this hotel, but there were also folks that were getting reconnected to physical health, right, to their mental health. Every single person who entered into this program received a housing plan, meaning that they started to have caseworkers that were the prioritized group that their case managers were then working to do housing. So the idea wasn't that they would just be sheltered during this pandemic, but they would move from shelter to housing.

And that's the way that our city has to work is that there's just not enough resources. So they prioritize groups in a normal world. That happens through the VASPDAT scores, the vulnerability index, all of that kind of stuff. But when you have a particular group that you're focusing on, they kind of rise to the top. So this vulnerable medically fragile group became the priority, which is all well and good. And you can go through the process, you can get vouchers, you can have people that are approved for housing and there's funding to pay for it and to support that. But on the other side of it, if there's not housing, then it's a completely moot point, right? So as we focused our energy on this selected group, we realized that that's great if everybody got their housing vouchers, but there still isn't enough housing.

So Karen Britton, who is the Landlord Engagement Specialist through the United Way, had developed a relationship specifically with a neighborhood called Northwoods. And they had a desire to fill their units, but they had a lot of down units. So they had about 40 units at least.

I don't know whether we should explain down units or not. I mean, we can get into the weeds on it if we want. Let's put it this way. You could not financially repair those places. The only thing you could have done was to set fire to them. And yet somehow we repaired them. Well, because of the volunteer labor. Because the volunteer labor. So the agreement became that the property owner paid for the majority of the material. And then we generated a ton of volunteers to come in and actually help physically generate the stock of affordable housing. And some of them were easier than others. Some had holes.

Some of the volunteers or some of the rooms we were fixing. Yes. The answer is yes to that question. Yeah. I mean, some of them were just simple, needed new flooring, needed some plumbing repair, needed some paint and you could, and that was pretty much good. Others looked like the scene from a horror movie. Some of them, I just figured that if I survive 30 minutes in this room, COVID is nothing.

Yeah, COVID has got nothing on you at that point, which is very true. So yeah, we were able to do that in total. During that kind of sprint, we ended up doing 23 houses and then those homes were guaranteed for those residents that moved from that shelter, from the hotel shelter into those properties. But we've been able to continue our work there through the dwelling and another organization called Spark who helps to manage our volunteers and the engagement over there. So we've got groups almost every week that are still out there working on homes. This summer, we've got at least five weeks of young people from across the country that are coming to help work on those homes as well.

So that work did not end. So in communities across the state that aren't in Forsyth County, one thing they might want to consider if they're trying to figure out how to come up with some more affordable housing, there may be some large apartment complexes that are catering to the poorest of poor that have units that just are not economically feasible for them to fix up and some nonprofit might be able to step in and say, well, if we come together and help you, they might be able to do what Forsyth County did and create some new space. Yeah, I think there's that's absolutely an option. The other thing to look at is private owners that can't afford to get their housing back up to code. So I think there's a lot of actually like single family homes that if we were creative and we started looking at the stock of that and could work out that similar deal will help actually like do the work, the physical labor of getting it back up to code.

I think that that's another option as well. And if you're listening to this and want to try to figure this out, whether it's right for you, if you want more information, I know that the people at The Dwelling would love to talk to you and share some information and think about some ways to think outside the box and do a little bit better. The faith community, the churches have to figure out a way to stand up and to make a difference. If all of us took care of our families and I got to say, there's some out there that are just too much need, too much care for some families. But if all of us could do what we could to take care of our own families and I've got some extended family members that have some some issues, the some mental health issues. Most families out there have some mental health issues in there. If we did that and then we looked after our neighbors and our church helped not only take care of our own congregation, but adopted a congregate, adopted a community in our poor parts of town, we could make a huge difference in our world quickly. I know a couple really great churches that do that.

They've used the community centers in some very low end areas and help the kids change their lives. We will be back in just a second. Come on back. Let's talk about homelessness. We thank you for tuning in and coming back and spending some time with us this morning on Kingdom Pursuits. I've got a couple of the people that I respect the most in the world on the show this morning.

They are superheroes in my my opinion. I had a chance to stop in at this community and help just a little bit and found out more and more and more about how difficult it is to go from homelessness to your life back together. And there were people that I have met that have what you would think would be a really simple problem like my car broke down and then it got towed and I couldn't make it to work. And then somebody stole everything I had.

And you just want to cry sometimes. There have been numerous times when I've asked somebody, you know, how are you doing? And they said, you know, I got all these problems. And I said, well, if you talk to somebody and they just light up and they say, yeah, Krista is working with me. Krista is taking care of me.

And you could tell that it just made all the difference in the world to them. And I want Krista to sort of talk to you about what happens, how difficult it is to go from no support system and a small problem that turns into a big problem and then turn in that that car around. Well, I kind of feel like there are no small problems, it feels like, that come to City with Wellings.

When somebody loses their wallet, that's a great place to start, when somebody loses their wallet, they lose their ID, their social security card. I'm sorry. Yeah, we've got a microphone with a little trouble.

If you will start over again, please. Yeah. Yeah.

So I was saying I kind of feel like almost no small problems come to City with Wellings. Losing a wallet, getting all your stuff stolen, the first place you got to start to get any of your stuff back is getting your ID, which is not easy either. Even if you've had a North Carolina ID before, you have to either go down in the DMV or now to order it online, a duplicate online, you have to know your ID number, which actually a surprising amount of folks know, but there are also, I don't know my number.

Yeah, I would be out of luck. And so if you have no transportation and no income and no anything, even for a dollar to get to the DMV, you know, it is no longer as easy as, oh, I'm just going to go to the DMV and it's going to be kind of a pain to wait in line all day. It took me two hours the last time I went and I finally said the heck with this and drove all the way over to Mocksville to get mine done. And I was there a half hour before they opened.

Yeah. Growing up, we would go, everybody went to the Yackenville DMV and, and if you are someone with no transportation and the buses don't go to Yackenville, so you're just kind of stuck. Um, and then getting a social security card is equally as difficult because either I don't know, they were closed. You couldn't go there and get it done. Yeah. The, the office is still closed as far as we know.

Um, we've heard it's going to open up back up sometime in April, but, but no hard date yet. We got really lucky that, um, Bree Ferguson with the empowerment project was able to, um, kind of get a backdoor in. So we'll gather paper applications and folks either have to turn in a hard copy of their ID, turn it in with their application and be without ID for a week or bring medical records in to turn in with that application. So if I showed up at the social security office and says, I really need a new social security card because I can't get a prescription filled. I can't go for a job interview.

I can't do anything at all without a social security card. And they say, great, give us your driver's license. I said, well, that was stolen too. They'd say, sorry. Yeah, they would. And, and more likely than not right now, they would tell you, you can't even come in. So, um, yeah, you're, it is really difficult if all of your stuff gets stolen and for like income based housing, you've got to have a copy of your ID, your North Carolina ID, not expired, your social security card and your birth certificate to get a birth certificate. You often need an ID so it can be this kind of, you know, what, what is the easiest thing to get first that might puzzle in to get all the rest. So if I don't have a birth certificate and I wasn't born in Forsyth County, then I've got to go all the way to the county that I was born and ask them for a birth certificate.

You know, that'd be cool if somebody had the resources to do that. But the people we see, no, we, um, just go online and there are two ways. You can either mail in an application or do it. Each county is a little bit different, what they require and what website they use. Some counties have their own, but a lot of ones use, um, a bigger site called Vital Check and some, every, every place requires different things. Some of them you have to include a copy of your ID.

So if you don't have that, then we're kind of back where, what part do we start at? Um, others, you don't even have to have any form of ID. You can just order it and they, I guess just assume it's really you, which, which is really great.

I know it sounds kind of sketchy, but it's so helpful for the folks that I work with that often don't have these, any of these documents. Like some places you can use a bill if you don't have your ID, but they don't have any bills in their name. And there are two different types of birth certificates. There's official birth certificates and then I guess unofficial birth certificates. Sometimes one works where another one doesn't work.

Yeah. So it's certified and uncertified for affordable housing. Luckily, um, the uncertified work works and uncertified is always going to be cheaper. But social security, um, it's actually to get, if you've never had a North Carolina ID before, the easiest two things to have are your birth certificate and your social security card.

But for the DMV, it's gotta be the certified copy. So the point I want everybody listening to understand is you've got absolutely nothing. You're trying to figure out where to get a meal. You're trying to figure out where to get a shower. You're trying to figure out how to get some clean underwear and you've got to figure out the steps and then all the different things you need and you need to figure out how to get to where you're going and you need to figure out where the webpage is. Can you imagine doing that? I got to tell you, I've been helping and I can't imagine how to do that.

Well, and just making sure it's not a scam website to like a lady came in last week saying she was trying to order her social security card online, which you can do, but they were going to charge her $20 and it's because she wasn't at the dot gov website. So there are all these things that are, you know, trying to profit off of the confusion that is just natural to like, oh man, I need to get this thing that I think any of us, no matter how, you know, frantic we are in need of it or just in life, we know we need our social security card could easily fall for. Now, you know, something that really amazed me is that a lot of the folks that I've met, I've seen in this situation at city wood dwellings are some of the nicest, sweetest, most reasonable, look after other people types of loving.

I mean, I can't imagine going a week without a bath and you really don't want to be around me. I, I, as hard as I would try to be a good Christian without a meal in me, without a shower in me, without having some idea, you know, the church, the dwelling is just spectacular. We had, I got to see two people, uh, accept Christ and get baptized last Sunday. Um, we had a minister from the Methodist church come in and devil deliver an awesome message. And the week from that we had a Bishop from the Lutheran church come in and do an absolutely spectacular message. And all of you that get to do a sermon every once in a while, I want you to picture somebody stopping you in the middle of your sermon and tossing questions at you.

Good theological questions. They just weren't on point with the sermon. I often joke that every pastoral intern should have to come and preach at the dwelling just once, because if you can preach there, you can preach anywhere. You know, your congregation is full of folks that have, um, next to nothing. And then the community that it's in, you've got people that live in housing that come and enjoy your meals too. But it's really a spectacular, I mean, I've been in churches and seen fights break out over spending money on a vacuum cleaner. Right. We don't see that too often.

You don't, you don't. Um, the dwelling is a remarkable community. I am certain that it is what the kingdom of God looks like. Um, you've got every kind of person that's walking through that door. Um, and it is, I think what's really, really powerful is that as the church, it recasts the narrative around what marginalized communities look like.

And you do see folks that have nothing and that are downtrodden and that are trying to figure out where they're going to sleep that night. And yet when they gather for worship in that space, that's not the identity that they have, right? We get to say really, really boldly that you are a child of God period and all of these other things that you are experiencing, whether that be mental illness or addiction or recovery, that's a, that's a symptom, right? Of being human, but that's not who you are.

And so I think it is this break and it's why you don't see fights about vacuum cleaners, right? Because you're just showing up to be God's people and we're showing up to be in community. Actually, I was having this conversation with a pastor friend yesterday and he said, how should I preach the text this Sunday? Which is, um, you know, you're always going to have the poor among you. And I said, I think that the difference that the antidote to poor is actually community. And so I think that that's what we do as the dwelling. And I think that City with Dwellings fosters that also because we can look at poor as in a lack of resources, but we can also look at poor as a lack of fullness of spirit.

Right? And so the antidote, I think then to being poor is that you actually gather in community together. And I think that's what we do at the dwelling. We've got some folks with some real challenges when we come back and see what our opinion is on how many of the folks have a mild or serious mental illness that goes along with their, the problems that they're dealing with.

But yet some of these folks are just absolutely spectacular people and are a pleasure to get to know. We hope you'll turn back in after the commercial. We're talking about homelessness this morning on Kingdom Pursuit.

Welcome back after that break. This is Bill Nixon filling in for Robbie Dilmore on Kingdom Pursuits. We've got two wonderful guests, Krista O'Connell and Emily Norris. They work with the homeless here in Winston-Salem through an organization City with Dwellings and a church that's in the same space, The Dwelling. And we were talking about how difficult it is to go from having next to nothing to having a place to work out of, to live out of, to love life a little bit more. Krista is a dispersion specialist, and I still have not had that explained to me adequately, but her job is to try and help people get from point A to point B.

And the different things she does are just absolutely bizarre. When somebody steals all that you've got, but people just come in and ask for help in all kinds of different ways, what are some of the things that you've dealt with recently? We do a lot of bus tickets for folks that get stuck here, like if oftentimes having two big hospitals in town that have psychiatric help and the wards, you know, if you need a stint in the behavioral health unit, a lot of folks end up in Winston, especially from like the surrounding counties that are smaller and maybe don't have those resources. And so they get out of the hospital, you know, maybe after 10 days, and they're just here. You know, the hospital's not helping them get that. I remember one week, they put them in an Uber and they sent them over to City with Dwellings with an oxygen machine and a blankety-blank machine wasn't even working.

Yeah. Yeah, we get a lot of, you know, showing up in cabs and Ubers and all kinds of crazy situations that just aren't necessary because it's folks that do have somewhere to go home that they are going to be inside in that place and they have community support, family, friends, whatever, and they just find themselves stuck here because they don't have the money to get a Greyhound ticket back home. So we do a lot of that, you know. We don't just stick them on a bus to get off a bus somewhere else like some people in the United States government does. We actually have seen us get on the phone and try to find some loving and caring and compassionate family member or... Yeah, we always talk to whoever it is they say they're going to stay with. We have them get on the phone with them and then we talk to them just to confirm, you know, that they can stay there indefinitely or until they're stable or very occasionally folks have come in that they actually have an apartment in another place.

They're just stuck here. So maybe we get on the phone with their landlord, you know, all kinds of, you know, just double checking so we're not sending someone from one homeless situation to another because at least here we know the resources that are available to folks. We also see people needing help finding resources to pay rent or that are trying to find housing after they've gotten an eviction on their record and... Go into that just a little bit, how much more difficult it is to get housing after you've had been kicked out and evicted. Yeah, it's infinitely more difficult, especially the longer the evictions been on your record, supposedly the better it is. But in North Carolina, it never goes off of your record.

So even 20 years from now, it's on your record and you just, you know, there are some landlords that have zero tolerance for an eviction. So that knocks you out of maybe, you know, 50 properties in town that you no longer have even the choice to rent from if you can't afford it. Right now, are there 50 pieces of property in Winston-Salem that are vacant?

Is somebody making... I'm certain there are 50 properties that are vacant, but probably not for rent and definitely not at an affordable rate for most folks. A handful of places under $800?

Maybe a handful, yeah, but it's not much more than that. What I'm seeing personally, just looking around like all the places I would look if I were going to rent, which a lot of folks that we see unfortunately have barriers and don't even have access to those same properties, which is pretty ridiculous. I'm not seeing much for less than $625,650. And so you need to make three times the rent. So if you find a place for $600, you need to be bringing in on paper $1,800 a month.

So it's not looking good. I was in insurance for a long time, and I'd have somebody call up and they'd just chew me out, give me a fit, and I'm going, all I did was say good morning. And we'd get into a conversation, and what it amounted to was they just didn't have enough money to go around. And they got that one check that bounces and then that $20, $30 fee, and then the next check bounces and you got that $20, $30 fee, and then they don't have the money to make the rent and they don't have the money. In absolutely no time at all, the smallest little problem in the world has dug this great, big, huge financial crater and you've lost a place to live.

Yeah. What kind of my dream is, because that one little thing can happen to anybody, any of us in this room. And my dream for things would really be there to be a mediator required before a landlord files eviction papers and that you two can come together with the mediator and work out what can we do.

And I also think there should be a mediator required after the eviction filing too, because there are folks left with all these back rents that not only do you have an eviction on your record, but you owed back rent. And with that combination, you pretty much can live in a rooming house or you might find a private landlord that feels for you. In my life, there've been times when I had next to nothing. We bought a nice house, we stretched it, got something just a little bit out of what we could afford, and then the backyard caved in.

We had this great big pipe that point being we had a $2,000 bill that we just never expected. Now, luckily for me, I had people that I could go to and people that I could count on. I had a support group that could get me out of those emergency situations. And a lot of us, there are a lot of us out there that think that all you got to do is go find you a job.

All you got to do is apply yourself enough and get a decent enough job. All these problems go away. But that's coming from a place, from a group of people that have four or five folks they can pick up the phone and say, I got to have $2,000.

I got to have it right now. If you don't have that community, if you don't have those support groups, then the smallest problem in the world can turn into an astronomical problem. Now, what I would like to see is that those of us that claim Christ is our Lord and Savior, that we're looking after our family and our extended family and our neighbors. And then when we come across people that need help, that we stop and we ask, how can we help, without actually passing out $10 bills to everybody we see on the side of the road, but to say, how can we help?

And when a problem's bigger than we can handle it, we pray about it and we find all those other people that we're connected to and help people find the solutions they need. And then we need organizations and congregations that reach into communities that we don't normally spend time in. If all the churches worked in a community center in a low-income housing area, and we had a group of our church members going in and spending time with those kids, and we became a resource to the families, we could change this place in no time. And there's some churches out there that do that.

Now, unfortunately, through COVID, there are a lot of churches that used to do that, that aren't doing it anymore. And we need to pray about that. We need to pray, how can we get connected back into the areas and make a difference?

Now, one of them is you can go on Kingdom Pursuits, our webpage, and there's some links to City with Dwellings and The Dwelling, and you can see what they're doing. And if you're in our community, you need to get connected. Krista, when we come back, Krista's going to talk to us about some of the things that you can do to make a difference and to support these organizations. And remember that you can go online. They would love to answer some questions to help set up something similar in your local community.

But we need to be praying for the homeless and the least of these, that we come in contact with each day. Thank you for coming back. I've got the chance to fill in for Robbie Dilmore this morning on Kingdom Pursuits. And two wonderful people joined me this morning, Krista O'Connell and Emily Norris. Talk about some of the, just the names, some of the other folks at City with Dwellings. The Moravians loaned us one of the brightest and best among them to lead the forces.

They did. Pastor Russ May. And he is just spectacular.

He's probably the reason that I ever got in this. They used to do something across from our library in an open field and try to do this out of that field. And then Ruth, Ruth Burke out. She was on the board, one of the board members.

And so she actually left the, the hierarchical hierarchical, I can't say that word, the big places in the Moravian church and came to be the executive director at City with Dwellings. And then Mimi Harding is a Miracore. Mimi is part of the AmeriCorps program to end homelessness, I believe is the technical name of it. So we've got Mimi for a few more months with us there.

She did two years with us, which is pretty awesome. There's just a whole staff of people that just are great big hearts walking around, trying to do their best with next to nothing to solve all the world's problems. Understand that there are a couple of the folks that work there that go home crying on a regular basis because they weren't able to take care of somebody. But they solve so many problems. They make such a big difference in so many lives that it is one of the neatest organizations I've seen. But there are also a lot of churches, congregations that have picked up and helped and made a big difference. What are some of the congregations and denominations that have made a big difference in the last year? You know, City with Dwellings, the winter overflow shelters provide huge opportunities for community churches to be involved. We see a lot of Moravian churches that are part of that. Calvary Moravian is a really good partner.

They drop off sugar and coffee and creamer regularly. Hospitality is definitely one of the key tenets of what happens at that community space that we steward. Augsburg Lutheran operates as one of the shelter sites, so we've got a lot of Lutheran partners that are part of it. We've got St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, which hosts our women's site during the overflow. So we've got partners in the Episcopal Church. We've got some non-denominational partners that will come and be a part of things. But really, you know, City with Dwellings started as an ecumenical effort led by Pastor Russ May, who is a Moravian, about almost 10 years ago at this point. And it really was a lot of our downtown churches that rallied to shelter folks, and then from that have just remained good partners as it became incorporated as a nonprofit. You've got a lot of the individuals that have come through, too, especially with the construction of those apartment units. Have you done a count or a wild guess or just make up a number?

Oh yeah, I don't even have to make it up. So our overflow shelter season, I mean, we probably have 600 different volunteers that come through during that. We had over 800 unique volunteers that have come through, and that was actually just during that big, big stretch to do the affordable housing. That doesn't count any of our summer participants. We'll have over 400 people this summer, different folks that will come and do that. We've got folks that come down to the Community First Center and are partnering down there.

I would say there's probably a handful, 30 or so. Plus we've got Wake Forest medical students as part of their rotation and some of their requirements come down as well. So there's a really good cross-section of folks that can come and be involved with our neighbors.

Thank you. Yeah, one thing was I got to help with the foot clinic. If you've got diabetes, you've got to pay just unbelievably close attention to your feet. One small problem there just, and they had a group of, must have been 20 doctors that came down and they washed the feet. They fixed any minor medical problem.

They checked on major medical problem. And then there's a, there's a organization in town that sells shoes and provides free shoes, Fleet Feet, provides shoes for all the homeless in our area. There are lots of programs going on. Krista, talk about how many homeless we've got in Forsyth County. Mark's got what, 300 people mapped out?

Yeah, yeah. We are close to 300 of folks that are living on the street. And there, there will definitely be some crossover of those folks with those in shelter just because of the nature of, you know, being in and out of shelter and getting in a shelter environment and finding out that maybe, you know, for whatever reason, whether that's mental health or anything, it's just not right for you. But yeah, we're close to 300 folks. How many homeless are housed in Bethesda Center and Samaritan and there must be another hundred that have roofs over their head on a? Yeah, probably.

Yeah. Well, real quick, what are some things that we can do? If I want to help, if I want to make a little difference, I could put a box in front of my minister's door and put in the newsletter that we can use cleaning supplies, rain ponchos, reading glasses, sugar creamer coffee, soap and socks and shampoo.

You can call and ask what you can do to help. And you can pray for city with dwellings and the dwelling, city with dwellings and the dwelling. And remember, we're supposed to be Jesus's shoulders, Jesus's hands. We're supposed to be speaking out for the least of these and making a difference in the lives of those that we come in contact with. Our churches should be making a difference in the lives of those around us.