Founded in 1984, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) is the nation’s oldest homeless advocacy group.It serves as a national network of advocates, service providers, homeless and formerly homeless persons committed to the single mission of ending homelessness. It is also the fiscal sponsor of Street Sense.
Donald H Whitehead, NCH’s executive director, is the first formerly homeless and first African American to head the organization. He attended the University of Cincinnati and the City College of Chicago, as well as served in the United States Navy. Whitehead spent five years living on the streets of Cincinnati or at homes of relatives before ending up in treatment at Drop Inn Center at Over-the-Rhine. After getting his life back together, the center hired him as an outreach coordinator and he eventually became its executive director. Later, he served as the executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless and was a founding member and vice-president of the North American Street Newspaper Association. With a strong record for advocacy, Whitehead designed the “Homeless Think Tank,” which helped the city of Cincinnati design its strategy for providing services to homeless population and now serves as a national model.
Whitehead discussed NCH and the national crisis of homelessness from his office in Washington, DC with reporter M.J. Langley.
Street Sense: Would you talk about your involvement in the area of advocacy for the homeless?
Donald Whitehead: I met Buddy Gray, a long-time advocate and one of the founders of NCH. Buddy, with Mitch Snyder, helped to found both the national coalition and the state coalition on housing and homelessness in Ohio. Buddy took me under his wing. My beginnings in advocacy were very modest. I got to speak at city council meetings and community meetings. In order to be an effective speaker, I started to research the issues and became more passionate about the plight of homeless people. Since then, I have dedicated my life to advocacy on behalf of homeless people. I have gotten to speak on Capitol Hill and met the President of the United States and visited his home.
The experience of being homeless can be one of trauma, humiliation, and general life disorientation. You have been there; what are your reflections on being homeless?
The most vivid memory I have of that experience is just pain. Moral bankruptcy and physical pain – the hunger, the cold, the jobs you have to work. All those things are vivid memories for me. The experience is unimaginable to most people. It’s a feeling of invisibility. When I equate my experience with any one adjective, invisibility is the term that most comes to mind. I truly felt invisible. People rarely ever took the time to make eye contact. When people said something to me it was usually mean-spirited. The other thing that really resonated with me was that I felt incredible humble. Things had always come very easily to me. I had been pretty successful in anything I tried. I used to cry myself to sleep in the shelter. Here I had graduated from high school “Most Likely to Succeed,” and I had succeeded in getting a bed in a homeless shelter.
Do you pull from experiences of the past to build for the future?
Absolutely. My strategies – all the directions that I take or directions I have learned from are careful studies of the civil rights movement. I truly believe in the teachings of the movement. The Bringing America Home Campaign is the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. Homeless people by their very nature are very different from any other population that has achieved success. In the women’s and civil rights movement you had a population that whatever happened to them, they remained that population. Women are always going to be women. African Americans are always going to be African Americas. Homeless people, as soon as they become housed, are no longer homeless people. So you don’t have a static population of people that can fight this issue. But the organizing, the use of students – those are the things taken from this movement and tried to incorporate into the homeless movement. We’ve got a long way to go. We have a need for a lot more resources to create the kind of energy and the kind of strategic planning the civil rights movement had.
What led to the founding of NCH and what is its mission?
NCH is the oldest advocacy group that works specifically on the issue of homelessness and helping homeless people. Its founding came about by necessity as people were dying on the street. Suddenly, there was an explosion in the United States of people living outside. Advocates, service providers, people from the faith community and homeless people themselves got together in the late seventies. There was a meeting in Chicago to form the National Coalition for the Homeless. It started out as a project of the New York Coalition for the Homeless back in the early eighties. In 1982, it actually became the National Coalition. In 1984, NCH was incorporated and moved to Washington, DC, following year. And the mission to end homelessness. However, there is a second part of the mission that is, to take care of the everyday needs of homeless people. While we are working to end homelessness we are also working on things like civil rights and other issues that affect people experiencing homelessness every day.
Have you joined with a network of other organizations on the national and local level? What are some of your primary initiatives?
Our biggest initiative right now is the Bringing America Home Campaign. It’s the most comprehensive initiative to end address homelessness in history. It was introduced in July and we already have 41 co-sponsors. It covers housing, economic justice, health and civil rights. It is the largest bill ever attempted to address this issue. We are really encouraged by the support that we have gotten so far. There are a lot of long-time, well-respected national groups supporting this piece of legislation.
What are your thoughts about the policies and priorities of this nation’s policymakers in addressing homeless needs?
There is a smoke and mirrors campaign going on. The “Chronic Homeless Initiative” [the president’s plan to end chronic homeless across the country by 2013] suggests that if you target all your resources on 10% of the population somehow solve the problems of that population. In fact, what it has created is a waiting list for public housing and we are shifting to a waiting list for homeless services. We have now a waiting list for public housing and we are shifting to a waiting list for homeless services. I think there is a lot of rhetoric about ending homelessness by this administration and policymakers, but the actual resources needed to do that are not even on the radar screen.
Advocates say the administration has talked about expanding homeless services when in effect it has cut the Section 8 [affordable housing voucher] programs.
Exactly. What we have here is an administration that says it wants to address chronic homelessness and end it in ten years, when at the same time it dramatically reduces the number of public housing units available through the Hope VI Project, and in this budget it dramatically reduces Section 8 resources for the first time in history. Not only are there no new vouchers, there are not enough vouchers to support the people that are already in Section 8 housing because there are not enough resources.
With the increasing number of families with children becoming Homeless, is the focus on the chronic homeless a misdiagnosis of this administration?
Yes, this policy certainly ignores the realities of the current population. The larges growing sector is women and children. In fact, women and children are being turned away at a higher rate than individuals. And what the administration proposes is targeting funding for public housing to what amounts to 10% of the population, including families and people without disabilities, is on a waiting list for homeless services. 1.35 million homeless in this country are children.
The other issue is jobs. You hear that this administration has lost millions of jobs. We have not raised the minimum wage in this country in many, many years. Currently, there is not one town or one city in the entire country where you can work a minimum wage job and afford a one- or two-bedroom housing unit – no-where in the entire United States. The living wage in this country is about $15.00 an hour. That is three times the minimum wage. We have not increased the ability for people to access housing during this administration. Actually, we decreased the ability. Many families left the rolls of TANF and now the jobs that they went to are lost because of the policies of this administration.
What is your message to others about getting involved with NCH or other campaigns to end homelessness?
the issue of homelessness is reaching deeper into the population. More and more working families are becoming part of the population. More and more people in the suburban communities are becoming a part of the population. It is not “them” anymore, it’s everybody. A few things people can do include becoming involved in the political process. Votes do count in this country. Contact your representative. And get involved by volunteering at a shelter or with a service provider.
