Doing Good Christian Community On North Side Puts Values Into Action By Working With A Social Service Net That Helps Needy Families With Daily Tasks
A half-dozen times this fall and winter, nameless North Side families have swept some good will into Marjorie Childress’s life.
The first time, brown leaves had gathered in sticky piles in Childress’s yard. Childress - 70 and disabled - doesn’t have the stamina to swing a rake. Her fixed income - half of her deceased husband’s Social Security payments - makes hiring help as likely as a trip to Disney World.
After a call to an Indian Trail church group called the Caritas Center, four smiling volunteers appeared in her yard and swept the leaves into bags.
A couple of months later, after a snowstorm, her walkway was plowed. Her driveway got the same treatment in January. Last month, the walls of her West Francis house were painted - light peach in the halls, the kitchen sky blue, off-white in the basement and living room.
“It boosts my faith in humanity,” said Childress. “It’s kind of hard to get one person to volunteer and they had 10. And they didn’t even want anything to drink.”
The Caritas Center is part of a North Spokane church-run social service net that covers the holes between shrinking government assistance and destitution. The only qualification for most kinds of help is need.
The social service net is organized into three separate centers - Our Place in West Central, the Outreach Ministry in the Emerson-Garfield Area (OMEGA) and Caritas in Indian Trail. Each has at least 10 neighborhood churches giving money or labor.
The groups pool Catholic dollars with money from Quaker and charismatic congregations.
“It brings the Christian community together without doctrine,” said Brian Wozny, a Caritas volunteer. “I believe it is the type of thing we are called to do in the community.”
The centers concentrate on the needs of people in their neighborhood. All three offer help with rent or bills.
Our Place, which caters to an area with the highest welfare rate in the state, has used clothing racks that would be the envy of some vintage clothing stores and a food cellar filled with cans, diapers and pounds of frozen ground turkey.
Blankets, food and clothes are available to the poor in any part of the city. Our Place gave away 5,068 pieces of clothing in November and gave 21 families some form of financial aid that same month.
“You’d be surprised how many come in here without soles on their shoes,” said Elizabeth Grebe, 87, a volunteer at Our Place.
OMEGA and Caritas also offer assistance to the elderly and housebound. With a phone call, volunteers will sweep, clean, mow or paint.
“When a volunteer goes out, they take a lot more than the lawn mower,” said Caritas director Sue Robinson, her office crowded with rolls of toilet paper.
“It tells them, someone in their neighborhood knows you, someone cares. It really causes people to get hopeless when they can’t mow their law, do their clothes.”
On her desk is a log of volunteer hours. “Drove to dentist appt. - 1-1/2 hours,” one entry confesses in tight, shy hand-writing.
“This is a very low-key type of thing,” said Wozny, who asked that a reporter not accompany him when he took a housebound, elderly couple on a Saturday drive to Lake Coeur d’Alene. “It is the unseen part of the community that needs help.”
Center directors say that part of the community is growing, in part because of a cut in government money. A key federal program which gives heating-bill money was cut 35 percent, according to according to Margaret Belote, energy director for the Spokane Neighborhood Action Program, which distributes money for the grants.
Because an increased demand for bill assistance, OMEGA, which has a $20,000 budget for services, ran out of cash this winter. Our Place and Caritas are both being tight-fisted.
“I’m concerned that we are doing what we can do now and our resources are strained to the limit now,” said Craig Bartmess, director of OMEGA. “It might mean we are forced to turn more and more people away. I hope not.”
That would be disastrous for Virginia Brown, a West Central mother of two who asked Our Place for help with her heating bill.
She moved to back to her native Spokane in January to escape an abusive boyfriend in Colorado. She mistakenly thought heat was included with her $295 a month rent on a one-bedroom West Central apartment.
She learned last week that heat was being shut off and she would have to pay $110 to get it turned on. She came to the only place she could - Our Place.
“I’m home, no bruises, my kids are happy,” said Brown, with a shirt for her 12-year-old boy under her arm. “It’s just a speed bump along the way. These people are so great when you need help.”
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