Paul Schroeder is the author of “On Social Justice: St. Basil the Great,” and the creator of Building the New City, a curriculum on homelessness for faith communities in use by congregations throughout Portland.
Schroeder currently serves as Faith-Based Resource Coordinator for JOIN, a Portland-area non-profit supporting people in their efforts to end their own homelessness.
He is also an organizer around the Day of Homelessness Awareness with social-service agencies and churches throughout the community, including Street Roots. (The event is taking place tomorrow on Tuesday, November 16. Find out more.) He recently sat down with Street Roots to talk about the broader faith-based movement in Portland.
Israel Bayer: The faith-based community is very engaged with homelessness and poverty issues. Can you talk about what the faith-based community is already doing beyond the upcoming event?
Paul Schroeder: There are a lot of things happening in the faith community. All of the family warming shelter beds that exist in the city are being provided in partnership with the faith community and churches. There are a lot of churches involved in the Daybreak Shelter Network and offering meals, the list goes on and on.
One of the things I would like to emphasize is that there are a lot of ways that faith communities can become engaged just by developing relationships with people who are sleeping outside. I used to be the priest the Holy Trinity Greek Orthadox Church here in Portland and we started a Greek cooking class that is still going on. Doing things like this is a great way of breaking down barriers for people on both sides and building authentic community.
I.B.: Can you talk about the Daybreak Shelter Network to give readers some context?
P.S.: It’s a network of congregations throughout Portland that provide shelter to families on a rotating basis one week at a time. I believe there’s about 25 or 30 people that have accessed shelter through this network. There is also a variety of other congregations involved in providing meals and other services through the network. It’s an amazing thing.
I.B: I think sometimes people take for granted the amount of work and organizing the faith-based community is doing around these issues
P.S.: There’s not a real clearinghouse for the faith-based community to know exactly how to engage in things like the 10-year plan to end homelessness, or ending poverty, but that’s changing.
At a basic level we are working to draw attention to what’s being done so people can look at something and say, yeah, I can do that. We then work to educate people on what then is possible. If you look at the one night street and shelter counts the past two years there’s about 2,500 people who are sleeping outdoors. Maybe the real number is twice that, close to one percent of the population of our city. But the really good news is we’re working at engaging over 500 congregations in Portland. If we could get every congregation to engage on this issue and create authentic community we could transform the reality of homelessness in this city.