The Old Testament tells a story of a powerful woman of Israel named Deborah who one day saw the terrible oppression of her people and set out to raise an army of 10,000 to combat it. In her song she says that the "villagers in Israel would not fight; they held back until I, Deborah, arose—a mother in Israel."
When in 1985 a group of between eight and 10 "founding mothers" came together to fight for the city of Chicago's homeless women, they called the first overnight emergency shelter they improvised at a North Side church gymnasium Deborah's Place.
Starting at 7 p.m. on June 12, 2015, at the Harold Washington Library, Deborah's Place will mark 30 years spent in a relentless battle to end the cycle of homelessness that affects an estimated 12,000 Chicago women annually—56 percent of whom are reported to be victims of domestic violence, 7,200 of whom have experienced more than one occurrence of being homeless.
Audrey Thomas has been the CEO of Deborah's Place for 11 years. She started as a volunteer for the organization in 1986 and continued on to eventually providing direct service and management. Thomas has seen more than 4,000 women empowered regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity by the employment training, access to education and healthcare, case management, permanent, interim and subsidized community-based housing offered by the organization, in addition to its Safe Haven program for women with severe mental illnesses.
Thomas told Windy City Times that when she joined Deborah's Place, homeless women were the most ignored and undervalued population in the city. "There weren't any services for women only," she recalled. "Most of the shelters that had beds for women housed many more men so women were forced to be in these unsafe environments. Many were choosing instead to sleep rough."
In 1985 the Community Emergency Shelter Organization ( CESO ) had engaged in a study of service gaps for Chicago's homeless population. Highest among those gaps were those for women. Philanthropist and activist Patricia "Patty" Crowley held a brown-bag lunch at her home to discuss the results.
"These women became what we call our 'founding mothers'," Thomas explained. "Within a few short weeks they pulled together their resources, contacts and networks and started welcoming women into the gym of Immaculate Conception Church. The founding mothers were also the volunteers. They had some mats on the floor, they brought in food for dinner and went out to the streets approaching women who were sleeping there and into shelters where women had to stay among men."
Crowley and the rest of the founding mothers offered them an alternative. Within a year Deborah's Place had moved to a larger space and continued to grow services and programs exponentially.
"The founding mothers created an organization with a strong governance structure," Thomas said. "So eventually they were able to start a daytime shelter in Wicker Park and a transitional housing program. There have been challenging times but because we had such a strong foundation we have always had diversified funding and the ability to protect our core mission as we grew or as we made tough decisions."
As a volunteer during the organization's formative years, Thomas was also going into the shelters where women were housed with men. "I just wanted to bundle them all up and take them with me," she said. "They would come to our day shelter and say 'I would be dead if I couldn't be here'. The vulnerability and unsafe conditions for women and people who identify as women should give us all a sense of accountability."
Yet while other advocacy programs and shelters centered around and for homeless women have developed along with Deborah's Place over the past three decades, Thomas believes that nationwide attitudes toward the population have not changed.
"These women have complex issues, problems and stories about how they came to be homeless," she said. "Society in many ways is unforgiving of women who are unaccompanied. There are the issues of white privilege, racism and poverty that we haven't addressed. But a common theme among homeless women is that they lack resources to pay for the housing available. There is a dearth of affordable housing in the city. There was housing that needed to be improved but the response instead was to destroy it and not put anything in its place."
By 2004, Deborah's Place leadership realized that simply providing emergency shelters was not a solution and instead decided to focus on long-term stability for women in terms of housing, health, income and ultimately self-determination and a control over their lives.
The Deborah's Place Safe Haven program, which today works with and houses 15 chronically homeless women who suffer from a severe mental illness, was named after Dolores, who came to the organization in 1986 and remained there until she passed away shortly after the turn of the millennium.
"She was older and she had a mental illness but she was very private," Thomas remembered. "There were staff with her all the time and she was never alone. I remember one day she said she had never been to the Planetarium. So they went. This was a woman who was in her 60s who had lived in Chicago all her life who had never been to the Planetarium. It might as well have been a thousand miles away. She didn't believe she had access to it. That's how poverty and homelessness isolates people."
Deborah's Place Learning Centers help women connect to the rich diversity of arts and culture that the rest of Chicago's residents and tourists take for granted, whether that is tickets to a play, museum or Cubs game. "You might be dealing with homelessness but you are a citizen and all citizens have a right to what author Earl Shorris called 'the life of the downtown'," Thomas said. "Homeless people feel isolated from arts and culture. There are financial and emotional barriers—the feeling that they don't deserve it."
There are many women whose faces and lives will forever be burned into Thomas's mind. One named Bau who was staying at the day shelter in 1987 had a particularly strong influence over her. "She saw me running around there one day and she came up to me and said, 'Honey, taking care of humanity is not like selling jelly donuts'. It's something I've never forgotten. This isn't an assembly line job. You have to stop and treat each person as an individual. You have to listen and understand where they are and what their issues, concerns and problems are. No solution is the same. Deborah's Place has always been somewhere that meets women where they are and begins a journey with them."
One commonality among each of the women Thomas and the rest of the staff and volunteers of Deborah's Place have seen over the years is shame.
"I hear them talk about the shame of their poverty and being homeless and the way that they are viewed and treated," Thomas said, struggling to contain her emotions. "They feel they ought to be ashamed of themselves for the situation they're in. Some homeless women have had children removed from their care. Some have been victims of abuse or were part of the sex trade just to survive. Yet people are very unsympathetic about that.
"The thing society hasn't got past is deserving poor and undeserving poor. People who have a disease or children or stray abused animals are deserving of compassion and care but someone whose lives have led them to poverty are considered undeserving. It's been said that people are responsible for the choices they make but society is responsible for the choices they have. We have expectations of the choices people who are homeless or live in poverty make that comes out of a white, middle-class idea. When people look at someone who is homeless they don't understand how time consuming it is and how much energy it takes just to take care of your day-to-day needs."
The generation who lived through October 1929 and the years which followed knew well that homelessness was just a bad day at the stock market, a small series of or even one change in fortune away for any individual no matter how high their economic status or social standing. Thomas said this remains true today, although it is so widely unacknowledged that when it does happen to someone the reaction is akin to physical shock.
"We had one woman called Angela who had come through our interim program who couldn't believe she was there. She just couldn't believe she was homeless," Thomas said. "Because just a couple of years before that she had a home and a car and was employed at a bank. After the recession the bank when out of business. She couldn't find another job, went through her savings and had to sell her car and leave her apartment. She had to stay with us for several months until she got back control of her life and pulled herself together."
For Angela, it was a happy ending. "She found another job and saved money and now has her own home again," Thomas said. "She still comes to the gathering of women who have moved on from Deborah's Place who say to the others, 'It's going to be OK. You can do it too.'"
The close community of 325 women age 18 and up that Deborah's Place serves annually includes lesbian, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. "We're doing a lot of internal work on transgender inclusion," Thomas said. "Staff training, internal dialogue and language to make sure we are sending a message to the community that we are completely inclusive."
Communications Manager Erin Watson told Windy City Times that the June 12 event, while looking back on the achievements of Deborah's Place, will also serve as a rebranding launch pad for the organization.
"We are a dynamic and growing organization with a very rich past and a very exciting future," Watson said. "The new brand is designed to be more reflective of how open we are. We meet people where they are and honor who they are. If you come in and have something that's important to you about your identity or your sexuality, our staff will always be welcoming to you."
While Thomas stated that the budget cuts proposed by Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner may make for challenging times as Deborah's Place moves beyond its thirtieth year, she is confident the systems put in place by the founding mothers—some of whom remain with the organization today as volunteers—will continue to sustain its programs while Deborah's Place begins to take on the policies and issues that directly impact the women it serves.
"We are creating an advocacy agenda that focuses on policy in a structural, deliberate and thoughtful way on a city, state and federal level," she said. "Partnerships and collaborations will be integral to the future of Deborah's Place as long as they best serve the women. The answer to homelessness is affordable housing and support and that doesn't happen without a community of people or an organization that is compassionate and mission driven. As long as we are benefitting the women, we're good."
For more information about Deborah's Place visit: www.deborahsplace.org .
For tickets to the anniversary event, visit myab.co/events/Gv.
