Didn’t write much for the Portland Downtowner because the editor hated me.
Like we’d had a terrible marriage in a past life and she still wasn’t over it.
From February 26, 1990. – JDW
‘There’s got to be an empty, heated warehouse somewhere in Portland.’
He had been looking forward to his turn to serve as host at the shelter.
It’s a rewarding experience, so Frank Shields was feeling pretty good, despite only five hours of sleep. Five-thirty a.m. and he was sitting on a chair in the boiler room, deep in the bowels of the Sunnyside Methodist Church where he serves as pastor. In his lap, he held a four-month-old infant whose mother was busy elsewhere trying to calm her toddler and Frank was, well, getting nostalgic.
“I was rocking and cooing and trying to get that sweet little boy to go back to sleep and I started to think about when my own two children were his size. And that felt good. Then I started to think that, ‘hey, we are making a difference here, I am making a contribution.'”
Shields pauses for effect, shaking his head in self-amusement. “Just then, the little rascal puked all over me. And reality set in.”
Reality is never far away. In the last five and a half years, along with nearly one hundred (100) volunteers from Sunnyside United and neighboring churches. Shields has helped to house more than eleven hundred (1100) homeless people for more than three hundred (300) families, given away more than ten thousand (10,000) hot showers, and provided two (2) square meals per day.
All at no cost to the taxpayers.
The program began in 1984, when Shields noticed a family living across the street, right there on the corner of Southeast and Yamhill. A family of four (4) and all their worldly possessions were scrunched into an old jalopy.
“It was more than I could stand,” he recalls. “Right outside my own church. I knew we had to do something.”
What reverend Shields and his congregation did was open Portland’s (indeed, Oregon’s) first homeless shelter in a church. They took an unused basement Sunday School room, five bunk beds and a crib, organized volunteers, and called it a shelter.
And it was.
Having created the model – through Shield’s efforts – another nine (9) shelters have been established in the city, another half-dozen statewide. There’s a crying need for many more.
“In the summer, I bet there are twenty (20) living in Laurelhurst Park. I see them crawling out of the bushes every morning.”
You get the impression Shields knows he bears a distinct resemblance to the little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dike to stop the leak.
In 1990, there will be 11,500 homeless children in Oregon. Forty percent will be under the age of five.”
Tonight there are a trio of children at the shelter, none of them older than three. Talk about your innocent victims.
The baby Frank rocked in the boiler room? Grandma threw him, his sister and his mom out of the house because she felt it was time her daughter “learned to stand on her own two feet.”
The teenager’s husband – she claims to be married – only comes around when he wants something from her. Like money or cigarettes. The rest of the time, “he just wants to be a kid, not a father.”
The other child in the shelter has a dad. Not her natural father, but a man who cares about her and her mother and the sibling who is on the way. They’re married.
“I’m just in a slump,” the man says. And you believe him. A good man, a hard-working auto and fork-lift mechanic with a warm heart and a decent head on his shoulders. He might be described as plucky. He loves his wife, he maintained a good credit rating, he’s clean and sober… He’s just fallen on hard times.
Nothing he can’t bounce back from, if given half a chance.
Which is all he is asking for. Which is what VOLUNTEERS FOR FAMILY SHELTER provides. Which is what Frank Shields is all about.
“We have a church that has decided we no longer have the luxury of finding the ideal solutions to society’s problems,” says the man who has come up with one of the best solutions for these times of increased need and scarce resources.
“We must feed the hungry, we must house the homeless, we must make low-income transitional housing available so families can stay together and become productive members of society again. We must take care of these children. And they can’t wait around until we’re ready.”
Shields wasn’t ready. His church is small with limited resources. Yet, because he operates with a philosophy that could easily be the motto for this organization – “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly” – VOLUNTEERS FOR FAMILY SHELTER has been successful.
“We provide all that we can provide,” he points out, “and we don’t go on a guilt trip about all we can’t do.”
Shields remains haunted by the two families of seven who were recently turned away. No room at the inn. One of those families was lucky enough to have a 1975 Pinto in which to live.
Such images have caused the Reverend to take his message to more than a hundred (100) churches. A few have opened shelters, others continue to examine the possibility.
Warner Pacific University is one example that such services need not be limited to the religious community. Shields smiles wistfully when he talks of his hope that a business will step forward with a spare room. There’s got to be an empty, heated warehouse somewhere in Portland. Think of the tax implications.
Shields has.
“The city estimates that the services provided are worth about $500,000,” he notes. “Per year. It costs local officials some $9,000 for each unit of housing, we do it for less than $3,000.”
And then there’s another consideration. Even with sufficient funds, government can’t – or hasn’t, or isn’t willing – to meet the demand.
“We are a human family that had darn well better start caring about one another before it’s too late,” Shields says without a trace of despair. “Fortunately, there are a lot of people who now care. They only need to live out their compassion in tangible ways.”
Such compassion is rewarded many fold.
The homeless who are served at Sunnyside United are not substance abusers, they are not alcoholics, they are not violent. These are not the sterotypical alienated urban males, transient rogues who refuse to work and seem always to be looking for a handout to buy their next bottle of Night Train.
No, this is different.
Imagine the Waltons losing their farm.
They are moms and dads and babies and brothers and sisters who enter the shelter at 7 p.m. and leave at 8 a.m. They don’t hang around the neighborhood. During the day, they normally return to the social service agency that screened them originally.
“We get families here,” Shields explains. “They’re part of the millions of people in America who had jobs, had homes or apartments, paid taxes, but found themselves caught in an economic decline. They lived where they worked in a mill for twenty (20) years and all of a sudden the mill closed down.
“If those people made any mistake in their lives,” he continues, “it was that they thought the American economic system was big enough that it would be able to take care of them not matter what happened, that they’d be able to find a job somewhere. But our economy is shrinking because we’re exporting jobs, even as we’re importing more and more of the products that we used to make here.”
By some standards, the small room in the basement of Sunnyside United should never have become a shelter.
In an ideal world, homelessness would never be a problem.
And Frank Shields would be in his own home, asleep with his wife, instead of sitting in a boiler room before dawn, rocking another man’s baby.
Epilogue. I spent the weekend in this shelter. Knowing I had a home to go back to.
I learned all the homeless are not hopeless drunks who brought it on themselves.
Especially the children.
If we do nothing, what will homelessness be like in 2021?
