Uncertainty.

If last year at this time you told me I’d be living in Oakland and spending a significant amount of my time working with homeless men, I wouldn’t have believed it. I was comfortable in Colorado, it was familiar and there also wasn’t a 15-year-old high school drop-out smoking and chilling in my suburban cul-de-sac at all hours of the day and there definitely weren’t drug deals occurring within earshot of my window. With that said, I have truly enjoyed my first month in Oakland and JVC in particular. There is great uncertainty, but the flip-side of that is the excitement of new opportunities and experiences.

There has also been a level of uncertainty at SVdP, after my first week here the decision to change the men’s center director was made. Currently, last year’s JV in my position is running the center in the interim. We also decided to shut down the center for about a week to refinish the floors, which also allowed us a chance to clear out the old clutter and only put back items that were essential to the functioning of the facility. One of the volunteers informed us that the stuffed armchair was covered in a sheet because two years prior a man had vomited on it and it had been too difficult to clean up—we decided that it was no longer an essential item.

In addition, we rearranged much of the furniture in the center and so far the changes have been received with an overwhelmingly positive response. The guys thought the floor was “sharp” looking and appreciated that we had moved the TV to a part of the room with less glare from the Sun. I’ll go out on a limb and say that the room now has phenomenal feng shui! Though, I don’t actually know any principles of feng shui, but in any case, the energy has been greatly improved. I'm guessing there's a correlation between the new changes and the abnormally large number of guys requesting bottles of our free “Man Power” vitamins.

Another thing we’re trying out is purchasing a couple of newspapers each morning to leave out on the tables for the guys to read as they drink coffee or wait in line for the showers or laundry. So far it looks like the guys are enjoying the papers and we’ve even had a few informal discussions about various news items, mostly homicides, in the Oakland area. We might try to make it into a more formal thing in a couple of weeks, or we might just keep it casual, either way it will be nice especially as the election approaches.


“It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.”
-St. Francis of Assisi