High up my list of impressive is Genny Nelson. I think of Genny as the Joan Benoit of community service. Indomitable. Here’s a Christmas feature from 1993-94. – JDW
GENNY NELSON – A SPECIAL SISTER LEADS THE WAY OFF THE ROAD.
He who oppresses the poor reproaches his Maker. But he who knows Him has mercy on the needy. – Proverbs 14:31
This is the last Christmas story of the season. Count your blessings.
That first day of really winter – cold and windy, snow level down to your butt – where were you holed up?
Probably not in a wet sleeping bag on a loading dock in Old Town, with newspapers tucked under your shirt, trying to survive until morning.
And, what does morning bring, but another dark night?
Genny Nelson serves breakfast here at 133 Northwest Sixth Avenue, between Couch and Davis.
Committed, Nelson serves her community. Lunch, too.
Charismatic, Nelson serves by example. Supper sometimes. Selflessly.
A bleached-blonde woman in a baby blue wheelchair rolls through the front door and tries to bum a cigarette from the first stranger she sees.
Welcome to Sisters Of The Road Cafe. Meals on heels.
“What do you call these people?” I ask, hoping to be politically correct for a change.
“Customers”, Nelson says with an exasperated chuckle.
Right.
“The reason homelessness feels so untouchable to most folks,” Genny counsels, “is because we’ve created a language that allows people to not recognize individual human beings.
“One day,” she recalls, “I overheard a young man say, ‘Don’t call me homeless, Say, this is Peter and he doesn’t have a home.'”
A man without a proper handle does not exist in some very real sense. Everyone who walks into Sisters is called by his or her given name.
“If the Cafe is about anything, it’s about feeling visible,” offers the Cafe’s shy, pale co-founder and Executive Director. “The most profound compliment we get from our customers is, ‘Genny, you know what, I don’t feel invisible in Sisters Of The Road.'”
“Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker, often quoted St. Vincent De Paul, right,” Nelson’s speech quickens when she’s starts rapping for change, “and his quote, this was a really revolutionary kind of man, was to the effect, ‘When they feel your love,’ and he’s talking about the poor, ‘they’ll forgive you for your gifts of bread.’
“Homelessness is such a major issue in people’s heads, even though they don’t want to look at it,” suggests Nelson. “And it feels tremendously overwhelming.”
It was Sisters Of The Road who led the fight for national legislation which allowed the homeless to use food stamps in non-profit dining facilities.
It was Sisters who launched their own meal coupon project, as a way citizens in our community could respond to panhandlers in a positive manner. Each coupon goes to feed the homeless and hungry a hot, nutritious meal.
“We do more than feed people,” Nelson says. “We simply do whatever needs to be done.”
It was Genny Nelson who two weeks ago received the 1993 Lowenstein Trust award. Founded in memory of Steve Lowenstein, first Director of Oregon Legal Services, the Trust honors the “person who has demonstrated the greatest contribution to assisting the poor and underprivileged in the City of Portland.”
No surprise. Living by the example of Cesar Chavez, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi, Genny Nelson walks her talk. She breathes her beliefs.
“Most folks think we’re actually helping people. And you know what, Sisters doesn’t help hungry and homeless people, we create community with them,” Nelson says. “There’s a big difference.
“We’ve always said we’re about good food at little cost. And the food’s gotten better,” she firmly declares. “The menu still gives us a run for our money sometimes because we’re a training program. We try.”
The Cafe – which cannot accept pull-dated food – is ‘a restaurant’, not a soup kitchen or a mission. Sisters abides by the same health regulations as the Hilton or Zefiro’s. The Cafe is not a day shelter. Sisters is about sustenance.
Sisters is based in a non-violent philosophy. Gentle personalism. Dehumanization is disarmed by hospitality. “Sisters is about telling the truth,” explains an almost frail Nelson. the head bouncer in the joint. “It’s about not humiliating anyone, not just the customers, but my co-workers, too.”
A member of the alleged baby boomer generation, Nelson hasn’t lost the fire of her youth. “We’re about dignity,” she continues. “We’re the stuff of the early days, being RADICAL, meaning ‘go-to-the-root change.’ In the early days,” she smiles at the memory burning bright. “I wrote this piece which said, ‘In a world intoxicated with death, Sisters Of The Road Cafe is about life.”
Even more true today.
“It disheartens me, it saddens me,” Nelson concedes, “to have to say to you, yeah, even more so now.”
Sisters began with a $10 donation, a barter on the rent and a strong philosophy. “We’ve had a small business for 14 years now,” Nelson notes. Location, location, location.
Today, Nelson manages a restaurant serving thousands of meals to thousands of the hungry, she supervises a job-training program for the unemployed, she leads a women’s support group, she provides shelter for the homeless. She manages a miracle on a budget of $200,000 a year.
“I knew I was coming back home when we started Sisters, that’s what was happening for me. When we started, my partner Sandy Gooch – you must mention her – Sandy always said, ‘Genny brought the philosophy, I brought the restaurant know-how.’ The philosophy is what sustains me, not the food,” Nelson admits. “Running the restaurant drives me nuts sometimes.”
She’s committed.
“Sisters works because it is all about empowering people to help themselves, not enabling them,” Genny explains. “Both the employees and the customers are working toward the same goals and when they leave here, their stomachs are full, their self-esteem is in place and they have a skill.
“These problems did not occur overnight and they are not going to go away any faster. We have to learn to wait for people.
“Empowerment will not work by service delivery alone,” continues Nelson. “Empowerment has two facets. First, the sharing of tools, and second, the nurturing of the whole person, body, soul, heart and mind.”
She doesn’t operate from a position of self-righteousness, it’s not her place to preach. “I think too often when people get into social justice work, if you will, they are looking at it, as ‘us and them,’ Nelson suggests. “They’re looking at how they can help out. They are not asking, ‘how can we create community with the poor?'”
Life on these mean streets is about common brokenness. “My first experience down here,” recalls Nelson, who at age twenty dropped out of Portland State to work in the neighborhood. “I looked at this guy’s wine sore: here I am a diabetic woman. I know what that sore feels like, ’cause you know what? Wine sores happen because you have high blood sugar. When I get a cut and it won’t heal right, because of my blood sugar imbalance, it feels the same. It may not be gaping and as big as this guy has on his legs, thank god, but I know the pain.
“That’s what I came to understand years ago,” says Nelson. “Here I am, this kid in a drop-in center that’s just opened, first night… “What the hell do I do?” This guy comes up to me and he goes ‘Genny, just say “Hello.” Talk to people.
“So, what do you talk about? “You talk about pieces that are common,” offers Nelson. “I got it. I don’t know if I understood it, but I got it. I got to be who I am in this neighborhood. I got taken for just who I am.”
Genny, Genevieve, for goodness sake, is genuine.
And life on the streets isn’t getting any easier.
“We’re seeing more families. With babies. We created the Children’s Corner to address the fact lots of kids were coming in the cafe. Our commitment to what’s in the Corner will always be based on what kids were coming through, it’s babies. Babies. Never enough diapers, never enough formula. We have a big need for teddy bears. It’s a simple thing, but pretty important.
“The whole separation between the haves and the haves-nots…,” Genny pauses. “Twenty-one years ago when I started doing this work, everyone was talking about that gap. ‘When one group becomes so distant,’ we’d say, ‘so divided from the other, a revolution will happen.’ It was all phraseology back then. And now it’s not so much words, it’s the truth.”
The gap is so far, the distance so vast, the haves don’t even see the have-nots. “The media doesn’t talk about it, of course. Of course, they don’t write about the division, but it’s happening.”
“You know what Woody Guthrie said?,” she asks. “Portland is where capitalists come to die. Pretty apt, I think.”
There’s a great deal more to Sisters Of the Road than Genny Nelson. Just as there’s more to you than your heart. But, try to get along without it.
Surely you get the point. “Turkeys walk in the door this time of year.” Nelson says as she rises to greet personally another donor giving a bird to the poor.
Well, the holidays are over, especially along skid row.
Hunger is solvable, and Genny Nelson could use your help. After all, she just added soul food to the menu.
Happy New Year.
https://sistersoftheroad.org/the-cafe/join-us-for-lunch/
(sidebar) BABES OF PORTLAND.
Every Wednesday at three in the afternoon, a women’s support group comes together at Sisters Of The Road Cafe. What better place for this sorority (Phi We’re Ok) to spend a couple of hours off the road?
Sole sisters sharing.
It’s no man’s land.
Genny Nelson is there.
“Since we started the group in August of 1988, we’ve remained focused on our original and enduring purpose,” Nelson says. “To provide single women and women with children an opportunity to relax in safety, have a cup of tea or coffee, obtain hygiene supplies and make connections with appropriate resources.
“The group fosters a flow of information, a better focus on solutions and a guide to action,” Nelson continues. “Each woman’s testimony of personal experience strengthens and illuminates the collective herstory.”
Most of these women come to Sisters having been battered and abused, used and thrown out. Afraid, yet hopeful for one last chance. Unbroken, hanging to a continued belief in love.
Members of the group offer these thoughts.
“It’s like having a core I don’t have. Going from the group, I carry everyone there with me.”
“I share and discover things in the group about myself. I would have discovered them on my own, but the group accelerated my healing and growth, without setting out to do that. It’s not a therapy session, and that’s good! It’s a women’s friendship group.”
“We could use more networks of women from all walks of life, mentoring one another, sharing resources, it would take a space two times as large.”
“This women’s group is going to help any woman who sticks with it three or four times.”
“I might be more scarred by homelessness if not for the group.”
“As a group we work together, we create images out of our experiences. Being poor doesn’t mean we don’t have amazing resources in us.”
“We are not the down-trodden, we are the warriors.”
Amen.
“If you want an evening of story telling in your house, to learn what Sisters is all about,” Genny Nelson offers, “if you want to host an event like that, that’d be neat.”
The sister’s phone number is 503-222-5694.
Better yet, have a meal at the Cafe. For a $1.25, there’s not a better deal around. [Twenty-five years later, the cost is now a buck-fifty. – ed. note]
Leave a huge tip.
Nutrition never meant so much.
Tell’em Dorothy Day sent you.
POSTLOGUE. Genny Nelson served at The Sisters for thirty years. Here’s an excellent summation of one woman’s service to her community.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2009/12/genny_nelson_served_up_dignity.html