Every day near 14th Street, students walking to class pass by a small percentage of Charlottesville’s homeless population. The group, usually consisting of all males, likes to lounge under the railroad tracks. They often ask passersby for some spare change, give them a high five, ask them how they’re doing — or a combination of the three. Sometimes, students stop and talk to them. Other times, if students are in a rush, listening to an iPod or simply not in the mood to chat, they keep walking.
The homeless have a stigma attached to their situation which at times can make people give them the cold shoulder. It is this stigma that Josh Bare of the HOPE Community Center is trying to eliminate.
“When a homeless person — a phrase we use sparingly here — is walking down the street, other people get out of the way,” Bare said. “They stay away from them. When you’re homeless, you’re alone and at an incredible low point in life. You have no courage or faith in yourself. We aim to restore that.”
The HOPE Community Center is a place where the homeless can find sanctuary — “a haven,” Bare said. Located in a struggling neighborhood at 11th Street, the community center was launched in 2006 and began offering after-school programs and summer camps for local children. The center has expanded to include HOPE 4 Refugees, which offers ESL help to foreign families new to Charlottesville, as well as HOPE Village, which aids the homeless. Bare heads up both programs.
“The most important function of the Village is restoring confidence and self-belief in these people,” Bare said, “so that they can get back up on their feet.”
Through the community center’s many offerings, this goal is becoming a possibility. HOPE opens its doors every weekday at 8 a.m., offering both breakfast and classes. The Villagers can take creative writing and art courses or get help with their résumés. Also available are a small kitchen, gym, lounge and computer room, where people can surf the Internet or look for job opportunities online. Then, at 1 p.m., the center becomes a soup kitchen.
Crucial to the center’s success as a refuge for the homeless is the dedication and hard work show by its volunteer staff, which includes students. Third-year College student Garrett Trent, the founder of Hoos Helping the Homeless, said his student-run organization works very closely with the HOPE Community Center.
“We have a very flexible volunteer schedule,” Trent said. “There are people who come once a week and people who come every day. Everyone has a different specialty which they help pass on to the people staying at the center.” He added that most of the volunteers — as well as the Village’s clientele — hear about the center through word of mouth.
The HOPE Center’s clientele, meanwhile, is as diverse and varied as the organization’s types of volunteers. The HOPE Center has vans that pick up homeless men and women, as well as cards that volunteers hand out with a map on the back detailing directions to the center. As a result, a wide variety of individuals filter through the HOPE Community Center’s doors.
“There are people from the North and deep South, drug addicts ... people who have grown up poor,” Trent said. “There are a couple high schoolers and then people in their 60s.”
One of the individuals at the center is a man named Bruce, who has spent the past 20 years in and out of prison. He has had his bouts with alcoholism and has struggled to keep a job.
Perhaps Bruce could learn a lesson from Normand Cartier.
Hoos in Recovery hosted Cartier, a once-homeless man featured in the documentary, “Lost in Woonsocket,” March 23. The movie follows Cartier and his companion Mark — who a film crew discovered living homeless in the woods of Woonsocket, R.I. — and their journey out of destitution. A beleaguered alcoholic out of touch with his family for years prior to “Woonsocket,” Cartier came to the University to share his story of revival and success.
“I struggle sometimes, especially when I travel,” he said. “When I was recently in Los Angeles, I was in a room surrounded by people drinking martinis. I told myself I couldn’t have one.”
Cartier saw too many friends ruin their sober records with just one drink. “A friend of mine had been clean for eight years,” Cartier recalled, pacing the Newcomb Hall Ballroom stage in front of the crowd. “Hours later, I got a call from him. He was in a Kentucky jail, charged with vehicular manslaughter. Thanks to that one beer, all of that good work went down the drain.”
Regardless of the tragic nature of these stories, Cartier emphasized that telling the stories can benefit others. “I can’t change the past,” he said. “I can’t change the fact that I have this addiction. But God granted me the courage to change myself and to help change others.”
For Bruce, the man at the HOPE Community Center, Cartier’s message of change is beginning to seem more attainable. Despite a story that includes jail time, poverty and the loss of his son to drugs, Bruce remains optimistic. A couple of weeks ago, Bruce was one of two dozen people that the HOPE Community Center took to a local job fair. He said he submitted 17 job applications and is hoping that the local transfer station or Pepsi will hire him as a truck delivery man.
During the past two weeks, Bruce said Bare and the many volunteers at the community center have given him more help than he has ever received in his life.
“If anybody needs help, this is the place,” Bruce said.
Because of positive responses like Bruce’s, the HOPE Community Center is excited about continuing its work.
“The HOPE Center is all about relationships,” Bare explained. “It takes these volunteers to help rebuild these people.”
In addition to promoting volunteerism and helping the homeless, Bare and students like Trent are working on initiatives for the future. Last December, HOPE donated bags full of clothing to nearly 1,600 of Charlottesville’s neediest residents and is planning more clothing drives soon. A street soccer league also is in the works, and Bare said the Meet Your Neighbor program, a compilation of 10 different projects in neighborhoods across the community, is getting off the ground.
If the HOPE Community Center continues in this direction, more of Charlottesville’s homeless could find safe havens of their own. Good will, though, should not just be left to the direction of the center, Cartier said.
“Instead of giving them your money, ask them to dinner,” Cartier said. “Or buy them a cup of coffee. That way, you know your money will be going to a good use, and not to fuel an addiction like I had.”
Small acts of kindness from individual people will go farther than most realize.
“[The homeless] can’t do it alone, and neither can you,” Cartier said. “We can all be better people and we can all help each other.”
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