It`s early Sunday morning. Carolyn Hofmeister of Hoffman Estates arrives at All Saints Lutheran Church in Palatine to work the 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. shift at the homeless shelter.
As she prepares to take over, one of the departing volunteers realizes that Hofmeister and one other woman will be the only volunteers on the wake-up shift.
Today, Hofmeister laughs as she recalls that morning. ”The lady went home, shook her husband awake and said, `You`re late, you`re late.` He got up, took a shower and she told him he was going over to PADS. He said, `I`m not scheduled for PADS,` and she said, `You are now.` He got there about 4 a.m.”
The scene may not be routine as volunteers work throughout the northwest suburbs at sites for the homeless in the program dubbed PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter), but it does indicate the level of commitment literally thousands of suburbanites bring to a program that provides a place to sleep and hot meals to the homeless among them.
The PADS shelters operate in churches from Oct. 1 to April 30 each year. Each site provides homeless persons, referred to as guests, with a place to sleep, a hot dinner and breakfast and, if they want, a bag lunch. Sites are open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. each day.
Mary Anderson of Barrington began working with PADS in Lake County in 1987 and worked at shelter sites in McHenry County in 1988. The following year she was asked to participate in forming a PADS coalition in northwest Cook County and she said no. ”I was going up to McHenry County once a month and working a four-hour shift and that was fine with me,” she said. ”But that was just not to be.”
Anderson became site manager at Lutheran Church of the Atonement in Barrington, one of the first northwest Cook sites. Since then, the northwest Cook PADS program has expanded to 22 sites spread from Barrington to Des Plaines. In McHenry County, where PADS has been operating since 1987, there are seven sites, one for each day of the week, according to executive director Donna Marquardt.
The number of volunteers required to run PADS is astounding. Mark Hofmeister, Carolyn`s husband, has worked with her as a site manager at All Saint`s and is now a member of the PADS volunteer board of directors. As the board`s official keeper of statistics, he estimates that between 4,000 and 5,000 northwest Cook County suburban residents have been trained as PADS volunteers.
”We have volunteers who work once a month. We have people who are involved two or three times a year,” he said. ”The pattern varies.”
In McHenry County, Marquardt estimated there are approximately 600 volunteers working in the seven sites. In addition, she said, the McHenry PADS program provides transitional housing in apartments for some families who might otherwise end up in the overnight shelters.
What does not vary, except to increase, according to Mark Hofmeister, is the need.
Use of the northwest Cook PADS shelters was nearly double this October from what it was in October 1991. ”Our numbers are running 65 to 75 per night,” he said. ”I think it`s partly because it`s better known and partly because the economy is worse.”
In McHenry, use of the overnight shelters has remained stable, Marquardt said, mainly because of the use of transitional apartments. She said, ”We see a lot of families who are either homeless or in the process of being evicted and we try to work with other agencies to get them taken care of so they don`t have to come to the shelters.”
Estimates of the total number of homeless in the suburban area vary. Hofmeister said one estimate is that in northwest Cook ”we`re looking at around 3,000.”
In addition, he said, the volunteers quickly learn that the homeless do not belong to a single, easily defined category. ”They aren`t who you expect. You can be standing next to them in the grocery story and not know they`re homeless,” he said. ”At our site, the volunteers wear name tags, because otherwise you might not be able to tell the volunteers from the guests.”
Anderson agrees that meeting the homeless persons provides a new perspective. She said she has met young men who are working two or three jobs and cannot afford housing. ”These are people who have lost their choices.”
Recently, she said, Atonement has hosted a woman in her 50s who comes with her 80-year-old blind mother and a seeing-eye dog. ”This is the United States of America and this should just not happen,” she said vehemently.
Volunteers describe a variety of motives for becoming involved with PADS, but most describe satisfactions that are hard to put into words.
Lois Frey of Palatine, site manager at Christ Lutheran Church in Palatine, said she originally got involved because ”I felt the need to get in touch with what was going on in society somehow.”
Frankie Walters, also of Palatine, became involved in starting the PADS site at First United Methodist Church in Palatine because, she said, ”I had just sold a business and had some free time and I read an article about homelessness and saw a picture of a young mother and her 7-year-old son sitting on a cot at a homeless shelter and that picture haunted me.”
Walters said she looks back at a childhood growing up in Texas and California while her parents made a living as sharecrop farmers and migrant workers. ”I have experienced a different kind of homelessness three times in my life,” she said. ”When I was 6 years old, our house in Texas burned to the ground while we were in school and we lived for a month in a neighbor`s granary.” Other experiences, Walters said, include the destruction of the replacement house by a tornado and living in migrant camps in California.
”I`ve been there-maybe a little bit different than our guests, but I`ve been there.”
Arnold Fish of Arlington Heights spends two mornings a week going to PADS sites to clean up before going to work in Skokie. For him, ”It`s not a matter of `do I want to go.` It`s a magnet. You just feel you have to do it.”
And so at 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning and 6:30 a.m. Thursday morning, Fish is on duty at Kingswood United Methodist Church in Buffalo Grove and St. James Catholic Church in Arlington Heights, respectively, beginning to pick up and mop as guests depart.
He said he does not feel there is anything extraordinary about his effort. ”When you see the people getting up to leave and you know it`s 20 below zero out there, you want to reach out. It takes so little time to help. In this one and a half hours, you can do a lot of good,” he said.
The problems of the guests can be overwhelming sometimes, and volunteers are told in the training that they must keep their distance.
Anderson said, ”I self-protect by knowing as little (about guests`
lives) as I can. It`s so frustrating to me that we only do what we do. We aren`t trained to solve their problems.”
Mark Hofmeister said, ”We can only give people a Band-Aid. We give them some strength, but they still have to fight the day.”
Volunteers are also sometimes frustrated by the guests who seem to resist improving their situation. Carolyn Hofmeister said, ”Sometimes you get very frustrated at people who seem like they aren`t trying. You want to say, `Get it together.` But others are just wonderful, wonderful people who are just having a rough time.”
Anderson said she is particularly concerned by the number of people ”who are raised with no hope of having a good life. By working directly with them, it helps us to understand why the problem exists.”
Anderson said she and other volunteers often have to deal with the question of whether guests, who are never asked to prove need, deserve help.
”Whether or not people deserve the help that I`m giving doesn`t matter,”
she said. ”I`m not sure I deserve all that I have either. Deserving does not have anything to do with why I do it.”
Fish also said he believes working at PADS has given him a new perspective on life. ”I think that as people get more involved with the homeless, it doesn`t just help the homeless, but it helps you. I really think I have it good, although there have been times I thought I had it tough. I`ve gotten a better appreciation for my own life.”
The future of PADS is something that volunteers wonder about as they watch needs increase. Anderson said that last year volunteers at the Atonement site, which has a capacity of 35, sometimes piled blankets on the floor for extra guests. ”We have decided this year when we reach 35 to offer a blanket and a chair to anyone else,” she said. ”We`re looking at the possibility of having to turn people away.”
Long-range solutions to the problems faced by the homeless are need, Fish said. ”The question is what we can do with our politicians to end this situation. The question is not what the long term projections are for PADS but how soon we can end PADS.”
Anderson said, ”I think one of the best things about PADS is that, by bringing all these volunteers who are not normally touched by a life of poverty and bringing them together with those who have misfortunes, it helps us to understand.”
Information about volunteering or about the location of Northwest Cook County PADS sites is available at 708-818-1916. The information number for McHenry County PADS is 815-477-1338.
