Jackie Goldman: Praise for the unnamed volunteers who made the Providence emergency shelter happen

"I have so much respect for the council members who made this happen, but I have much more respect and admiration for the people who made this work..."

I have been thinking a lot about the emergency shelter many of us pulled off this week. I do not usually write about things like this, but I would be remiss if I didn’t.

While the credit will largely go to the members of the City Council who pulled it together, I want to pull back the curtain for a moment:

City Hall staff, service providers representing several orgs (Project Weber/Renew, Better Lives RI, Matthewson Street Church, the DaVinci Center, and certainly others), and volunteers were the backbone of the shelter. As I walked into ProvidenceCity Hall on Tuesday night, I was impressed to see that policy and communications staff became volunteer coordinators and shelter managers. Constituent services staff (some of whom had direct services backgrounds) were truly serving constituents and provided much insight into how to get this operational.

Despite already being asked to do too much with too few resources, many service providers were running on overdrive. Outreach workers were up all night walking around the City and getting folks inside. They brought supplies, trained people to use Narcan, and ensured those with less experience could do their part. One staff member at the DaVinci Center, Norma, pulled two all-nighters to keep the shelter together and ensure the space was ready for all of the other essential programming they do.

Let’s talk about everyone else who stepped up, the everyday people who were in no way deputized or compensated to do this work but did so anyway. I helped wrangle several dozen volunteers who staffed the shelter from 6 pm - 7 am for three nights. I also fielded dozens of messages from random Providence residents who had things to donate to the shelter and went on shopping trips. Many of these are folks I have come to know through Palestine solidarity organizing, mutual aid work, anti-fascist organizing, or some combination. Some of these people pulled multiple all-nighters staffing the shelter, driving shelter residents where they needed to go, figuring out where to put excess supplies, and ensuring that folks were safe. There is still a group chat of us trying to think through how to keep this going. This is the kind of action that we need as we face the rise of fascism in this country.

While politicians came for photo ops and media appearances or showed up at the shelter only to talk with each other, people whose names will never appear in a newspaper did the work. I have so much respect for the council members who made this happen, but I have much more respect and admiration for the people who made this work—and did so not for glory but because how could we not?

So I sit, with the dissonance of being comfortable in a home I own while others are still freezing to death, with some questions:

1. How do we make an effort like this sustainable for the long term? This is necessary because our government has shown that it will not invest the long-term resources needed to shelter and house everyone.

2. How do we get people to give a fraction of the effort they put into these three days all the time? So many showed up for a crisis fresh and ready to go, and some of us already facing high burnout are just burning faster. How do we spread this effort and energy?

3. How do you move people from agreement that there is a problem into action? It is not enough to hold outrage without action.

Now that I have shared my (unsolicited) opinions, it is time to rest and fight another day. The world is on fire; people are freezing to death. Governments would instead fund the police, the military (the single biggest polluter on earth), and genocide than take care of the rest of us. We are all closer to being homeless than we are to being millionaires.

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This piece originally appeared on Facebook and is presented here with permission.