Transcript
Have you ever looked at someone’s life and thought, “I wonder how they got there?” Maybe it’s a woman at an intersection, a man panhandling outside of a sports venue. Maybe it’s that same school student who’s dropped off every day hungry and disheveled.
Maybe that feels pretty far from your own life. Probably it does.
What if your knee-jerk reaction is actually wrong? What if the people we so quickly judge aren’t really that different from us? This is not that different. The stories behind the statistics of people experiencing homelessness.
Because when we stop and really truly understand, we find that we’re a lot more alike than we are different. The people that are experiencing homelessness around us—our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends, the people God calls us to love. Today, I want to share with you why we’re doing this. Why would the City Mission want to have a venture of a podcast?
Jamie Buckton: I’m Jamie Buckton, and I’m the community engagement manager at the City Mission. I’ve devoted my entire career to understanding homelessness, working with Cleveland’s most vulnerable people, and really my heart is to destigmatize the stories of the people of the life that I get to share. It’s my honor to be an advocate for men, women, and children experiencing homelessness in the Cleveland area. Today, we’re jumping into a whole new adventure, a whole new chapter for the City Mission: a podcast, and this is the very first one. While I’m really excited to be your host, I have to admit I have exactly no idea what it is that I’m doing. But I’m excited to start this journey with you today. We have my friend and colleague Lauren Quas joining us. She’s going to help us get to exactly why it is that we’re doing this and help us come to a realization of why you would want to join us in this, why you want to listen, and hopefully what you can learn as we venture through this together. Lauren.
Lauren: Hi. Happy to be with you, Jamie.
Jamie: Thanks for being here.
Lauren: Yeah, it’s fun.
Jamie: I have no idea what I’m doing, but I know you do.
Lauren: So, I’m glad that you’re on the ship.
Jamie: Yes, I’m glad to be here and I’m excited to learn more about the City Mission with you today. I’ve only worked here, I don’t know, nine months.
Lauren: It’s been that long. I know, it’s kind of crazy.
Jamie: Yeah. So, it feels weird you asking me this, so I’m just going to put it out there. I’ve worked at the Mission for my entire career. And I know I said that already, but 21 years to be exact. I was just a baby. Actually, I was a baby mature-wise for sure and had no understanding of really homelessness. But, you know, I graduated with a degree in youth ministry and thought, “Oh, that was really great. I’m really glad I studied this, but I really don’t want to be a youth pastor, at least not in a church right now.” Which was not great news to my parents who paid for college for me.
So I spent some time in a little Central American country called Bise. And I know what you’re thinking at home—that’s a crazy beautiful vacation destination. Yes, it is, but not where I lived, side note. But I was serving there as a missionary when I got an email. Now, you need to know that there was some social unrest happening in the country at that time and it was becoming unsafe for me to be there for a short little jaunt. But I am an only child and those same parents who did not love that I was not using the youth ministry degree were like, “It’s time to come home.”
So, the same day that they kind of made me tell everyone in charge of my life there in Bise that I was coming home, I went to a little internet cafe and started emailing my friends and messaging them and letting them know I was coming home. When I received an email from someone saying, “Hey, I’m leaving my job at the City Mission at Laura’s Home where we serve women and children.” And I don’t know why, God just keeps putting your name on my heart. When are you coming home? And I quickly emailed back and I was like,
Jamie: “Today.”
It wasn’t today. It was a couple days later, but that was the day we decided. So yeah, I flew home that Saturday. I interviewed the following Wednesday and I’ve been at the Mission ever since. And so, you know, my role has changed over the years, but I have to admit I love my job. I love that I’m doing this. I love what I get to do. But that first little role felt so easy and comfortable. I was a preschool teacher. Early on, I came back as a single lady and young and immature and I just was soaking it all in. But within the first two years I got engaged, then married, and within a year of marriage I got pregnant. And I had the opportunity to bring my own kids to work with me. So I was working literally in a classroom, holding my own baby while holding a storybook Bible, getting to tell little children who probably don’t really understand how vulnerable and in crisis they are,
but getting to love on them, introduce them to Jesus, and then loving their moms and getting to be a mom alongside them.
Like, I just, you know, in hindsight, I’m just amazed what a gift that was. And it would just take an earthquake to move me from the Mission because of that. Because it’s still such a gift that I got to be—it’s still such a gift that I got to be a mom working in a ministry, passionate about that ministry, and rubbing shoulders with other moms. It just was the best. And so, you know, I started there and then I’ve had lots of roles in between now and then. But now it’s my greatest privilege to be an advocate for those same moms and the moms today that we’re still serving. And so, you know, when our leadership said let’s start thinking about a podcast, my heart did start to beat fast to say this is what I love to do.
Lauren: To tell the stories.
Jamie: Yeah. While I do not love being in front of a camera or even in front of a microphone all that much—actually, I do love being in front of a microphone.
Lauren: I think you like being—
Jamie: I do love being in front of a microphone. Maybe not a camera or being recorded, but yes, live I love. So, this is definitely outside of my comfort zone, but advocating, destigmatizing—this is what gets me crazy excited. So, yeah.
Lauren: And what do you hope to do through this podcast?
Jamie: I think exactly that. I think, you know, you can look at different statistics. You can look at different programs that exist anywhere in the country, not just specific to Cleveland. But I want to be able to pull back those layers and help you understand the people behind those statistics, the people, the stories. I think there’s such a misunderstanding of what homelessness actually is and why people are experiencing it. And to me, it’s just so much more than that knee-jerk reaction that we have. And I’m not going to lie, that knee-jerk reaction is us in fight or flight, right? Like, “Oh, what am I supposed to do?” That’s foreign to me. That’s okay. I want everyone to know that’s okay. But I’m hoping what we can grow together in these podcast times together is what we do after that knee-jerk,
because it’s always about the repair, right?
Like, what do you do after you make a mistake or you say something you shouldn’t say or you think something you shouldn’t do,
right?
What do you do afterwards to fix it?
Lauren: Yeah. And to be quite frank, that’s how I live my whole life.
Jamie: Oh, yeah.
Lauren: Every night is, “Oh, I should have said that better. I could have done this better.” And so, yeah, if I can be that tool for someone, I think that this is a success.
Jamie: Yeah.
History and Programs of the City Mission
Lauren: Can you give a brief history of the City Mission?
Jamie: Yeah.
Lauren: How many years have we been around? What kind of programs are we doing? What’s our purpose and goal?
Jamie: Yeah. So, we’ve been around a long time, which I think is really unique and specific to us. 115 years ago, there were some wonderful Christian people who said, “Hey, there are people coming to the big city of Cleveland trying to make a name for themselves, trying to make lives, and they’re struggling.” And it was their heart at that time to be the downtown arm of the church. And so they pulled their money together. They did crazy things, mortgaging homes to be able to put that money together so they could grow a ministry that did just that—met people who were vulnerable and had needs. And they did that. For 115 years since then, we’re continuing to look at what are the needs of our city and the surrounding area and how can we continue to meet that.
I think lots of people think maybe we only are a soup kitchen like we kind of started off as and a showerhouse. It’s so much more than that. And that continues to eb and flow and grow as we see the different people that come to us.
Lauren: What do our programs look like today? We have two campuses, right? Can you give an overview of what we’re doing on the ground today?
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. We serve about 96 or 97 men today at our men’s campus. If our listeners are in the Cleveland area, that’s in the Midtown area of Cleveland. Probably most people are more familiar with that campus. And then on the other side, while it is Cleveland, it feels like a bit of a suburb. It’s definitely on the outskirts; it feels like a smaller community than the metropolis of Cleveland. But we have Laura’s Home Women’s Crisis Center where we serve women and then women with children. I think today about 58 or 59 women and somewhere in the 70s of kiddos. And that’s pretty normal for us. Both campuses are operating nearly—well, the men nearly at capacity. The ladies are always at capacity. We’re just coming out of these crazy winter months.
Knock on wood that we’re done with the winter months. I’m pretty sure we’re not. We’ve had overflow and we’ll do anything to accommodate more people. Crossroads is what you’d expect kind of a shelter—although we don’t call ourselves that—to look like, kind of shared living spaces. Laura’s Home has individual rooms to be able to accommodate different-size families. So you can have a single woman all the way up to a mom with up to eight kiddos living at Laura’s Home. It’s a unique space in that we’re able to accommodate and give dignity to whatever size families come to us. Our approach is kind of three-pronged. I use our three pillar words to talk about what we do: Help, Heart, and Home.
Help is what we hope everyone thinks that we already do. It’s meeting safety and the basic needs of the people that come to us—three warm meals a day, a dignified space to live, all of the hygiene items. People give us amazing donations. If we have it, we give it. We like to provide as much as we can and that helps us on that end to build rapport. It’s meeting those needs, but so much more in the dignity and respect with which we lovingly serve the people that come to us. The more outrageous the donation, the deeper it builds that trust with those individuals. Help—we meet the basic needs, and that’s I hope at best what people expect us to do, but I think a lot of people think it ends there.
Heart is the understanding of healing and bringing that person to restoration. Number one—we share the gospel, and that is part of those basic needs for us as believers, but it’s taking someone deeper. Each and every person that we work with is assigned to a case manager. Assigned makes it sound so not the way that it is; they get to journey with that person. That person is going to walk with them their entire stay with us. A person can stay with us anywhere from three to five to twelve to eighteen months. It really is dependent on their unique barriers to living self-sufficiently. They’ll get to know them—what brought you here? Not what happened to you or what mistakes have you made, but
what brought you here and how can we come alongside you? For many people, that’s a huge nuanced question. It’s understanding their primary needs and then all of those other things that have been affected and the trauma of whatever brought them to living without a home. That’s the heart. That’s the reason I show up every day, because it’s that opportunity to serve and minister.
Home is empowering stability and our really fancy keyword is resiliency. When someone leaves us, we want them to understand they’ve experienced stability in living with us, but now they’re empowered over the issues that brought them to us. They know how to be resilient, because I think, you know, so many people would like to say, “Okay, well, we fixed them. Now they can go and their life is going to be perfect, right? Maybe they even met Jesus and now everything’s going to be perfect.” That’s just not usually the case for people. We’re all going to face adversity. So now you have the resources, you understand how to overcome, you’re empowered over those issues, and now you know how to be resilient. You know who you can depend on. You’ve created healthy relationships. You know what exists to help support you and your family. I think that is key to what we do.
We have over 60 community partners and that is crucial to the work that we do, because those partners can follow these individuals for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, when they leave us, it’s not like we cut them off. They can certainly call and come back, but as a whole, they’ve moved on and that’s important that they move on. We absolutely want them to, but they have these other support systems in place that can walk alongside them as they continue. That’s really key. So, Help, Heart, Home is really how we do ministry at the City Mission.
Lauren: Yeah. I’m sure you’ll hear us share more about Help, Heart, Home throughout the episodes.
Jamie: I’m sure.
Lauren: And more about our programming and how our programming has transformed people’s lives.
Jamie: Absolutely.
Lauren: Because like you said, it’s not a shower house and kitchen. It’s more than that.
Jamie: So much more than that.
Looking Forward: Upcoming Episodes
Lauren: You want to share maybe just some sneak peeks of episodes coming up that you know that we have?
Jamie: Yeah. In our next episode, we’ll be talking to my friend Katie. Katie is our intake specialist at Laura’s Home. Her whole role is understanding the people who are waiting to come to Laura’s Home, navigating a really difficult situation of a waiting list of people, and then helping them acclimate to Laura’s Home life. In the episode following that, I think we’re talking to two of our leaders who are in charge of training and teaching and employment readiness, and they have some really cool jobs. I’m really excited to introduce our listeners to Raquel and Sarah. I think that’ll be really great. But we’ve got lots—pastors, board members, other staff members, previous residents that will be joining us. I’m just really excited to continue to share not just what the Mission does, but the people who help live out the mission and how God works through them and the success stories of the people that we lovingly had the privilege of walking alongside.
Lauren: Thanks for sharing, Jamie.
Jamie: Thanks for helping me to share. Lauren is the producer of this podcast, but also works at the City Mission with me. I’m so grateful we were friends before that. I like to think I brought her to the Mission. I’m so excited that we’re able to kind of merge our worlds and do this podcast. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Not That Different: The Stories Behind the Statistics. If this episode resonated with you, we encourage you to get involved in ministry to those experiencing homelessness. If you’re in the Cleveland area, please check out our website at www.thecitymission.org. There are all kinds of ways to get involved, volunteer, pray with us, donate towards our cause. We’d love to see you make an impact on those we’re serving at the City Mission. We hope that you will like and subscribe to this episode and we look forward to doing more of these together in the very near future. Thanks for listening.