Introduction:
Hope is a topic that always springs to mind when we think of housing homeless people, so it is particularly appropriate that today’s Rooph Awards will be
presented during Hope Week. Our guest speaker is an award-winning hope specialist. Wendy Edey is a university lecturer, and a counsellor at our local
centre for hope studies, the Hope Foundation of Alberta. She is known for her ability to make hope practical.
What a marvellous time it is to be talking about hope. I’ve been studying and talking about hope for years, and sometimes it’s hard. But following in Obama’s wake is like riding your bike in the suction of a speeding greyhound bus. Phew! How Obama engaged the imagination of the world is the summary of whole libraries of hope research. It has been such fun to watch him create hope by talking about hope, revisit history to collect the hope, gather the people around hope in bigger and bigger circles, and then reap the rewards as they start to do things differently. They would even vote for an African-American president. You see, people always do more things and do them differently when they have hope. You can have hope and reality at the same time. You can talk about them together and still have both. Obama did it the easy way, he talked about the hope first. He knew reality would be there anyway. What is it that we can learn from Obama?
I’ve been a hope psychologist for years, creating hope in a counselling office by talking about hope, having hope to give. And then, in 2007, people began coming in to my office—poor people, desperate people with no place to live. And I knew I should write to the government, I knew I ought to give them hope, but I had little hope to give them.
When we have a shortage of hope at hope house we eventually start asking questions. What is sucking out all the hope? What are the hope suckers?
The media was a hope-sucker. Every morning at breakfast my husband would read me another article, another ad. Houses were selling for a million dollars, people were rushing in at the last minute and bidding them up another ten thousand! I had a house, and it was going up, but the only thing I felt was fear. I couldn’t go to work that scared. “Stop reading this stuff to me,” I said. “I know this is happening and I don’t need to hear it every morning. If there’s something I need to know, I’m pretty sure the information will get to me somehow.” One hope-sucker was a little smaller.
Helplessness is a hope-sucker. Even without the newspaper the fear persisted. People were coming in for counselling, people whose dingy apartments were being sold as condos. And sure, the owners had a right to make a profit? But what about my clients? I felt utterly helpless! I couldn’t go to work every day feeling like that. And then one day I saw something I had overlooked. We were actually subsidizing market rent down to an affordable level for three people. I just hadn’t noticed it because they are my relatives. And then when I looked around I saw that others were doing it too, some for friends as well as relatives. We weren’t helpless. It’s easier to be leaders when you start out as people who are doing something. “Some property owners are helping,” I said to my clients, and I knew it was true. Another hope-sucker had just got a little bit smaller.
My neighbourhood was a hope-sucker. We recently moved to the river valley, but my neighbour lived there in the 1940’s. He loved Dawson Park back when it was a garbage dump. Now that it is a beautiful park, he walks in it every day with a garbage bag and picks up garbage. He marks bush trails in little symbols to delight all of us. No wonder he got upset in 2008 when tent after tent was set up along the trails, when people in the tents told him to get off their place, when he could hear stuff every night outside his open bedroom window, when so much garbage and filth appeared that a dumpster couldn’t even make a dint in it, let alone a garbage bag. No wonder he got upset when he called to say that the tent city hadn’t closed after all, that it had simply moved into his backyard, and the people on the end of the line said, “We know. We’ll come and give them notice to move, but they’ll just move a few feet.” Fear gripped us. Hope-suckers in action. We needed to make a bigger circle.
A group of neighbours asked the parks people to join us on a tour of the park. The parks people graciously agreed to come. There were about a dozen of us. We didn’t walk the whole park, only a tiny section. Nobody knew exactly what to do, but it felt better, being together. Together we saw a lot of tents and a lot of filth. But some of the most prominent tents were missing on that morning. Where had they gone? Well, my neighbour, the one most distressed, the one who loves the park, had paid them a visit, to warn them. “They’re nice people,” he said. “I didn’t want them to lose their belongings. They don’t cause any trouble.” The parks people brought in many dumpsters. They worked weekends and cleaned up unimaginable filth. They said the Mayor’s ten-year plan for housing first would be coming out soon. They said the committee had a really broad range of representation. The circle of people doing something had just got bigger. “My neighbours are helping,” I said to my clients, for I knew it was true. Another hope-sucker had just got smaller.
Housing first, says the Mayor’s ten-year-plan. It’s such a sound idea that nobody can argue with it. And yet, A billion dollars needed screamed the media! In a single word the community was split down the middle, caring do-gooders against victimized taxpayers. The hope was sucking out so fast you’d think they were testing a new Hoover vacuum cleaner. Already a paralyzing fear was taking root. The man on the street was saying, A billion dollars. Yeah right! The good story about Charles Guick got second billing. He got a house first and turned his life around, but it takes a lot more than one story on one day to offset the hope-sucking effect of a billion dollars.
Now this is hope week and today we are presenting four awards to celebrate the excellent work in the housing circle. What would we be doing differently if we put a hope first theory into practice? Could we ask the media to print a great story about an award-winner each day for four days? That would be reality. That isn’t Pollyanna! It’s news, news with hope first. Could we change our working approach a little, resist all efforts to categorize us as either do-gooders or taxpayers? Many of us are already helping. We are helping in very concrete ways. A hope-first approach would put that message out there every single day until just about everybody wants to get on the bandwagon just because it’s the thing to do, the way the food bank does it at Christmas! Could we advertise hope-first homeless tours of the streets and parks, showing the reality and the vision of how those same streets will look in ten years? Can we keep telling the taxpayers about the things that are happening and the difference it is making until they want to help too? That is reality. That is putting the hope first. Can we engage the imagination? Can we make the hope-suckers a little smaller, the hope a lot bigger? This is what we can learn from decades of hope research. All of us, community leaders and even the media can put hope first. Obama’s shining example of a relentless focus on hope first, and the food bank at Christmas have proven that. We can do it. Yes we can! Happy hope week! Thank you.
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