On Sept. 6, Washington, D.C.’s faith community held a block party and “beloved community banquet” in front of and inside Walker Memorial Baptist Church. According to the organizers, the event was meant to uplift and encourage residents of the city, especially unhoused people and immigrants, as well as to enact the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the beloved community and demonstrate communal resilience and unity. The event was sponsored by faith-based organizations and congregations representing most major faith traditions.
Kathy Dwyer, senior pastor of Rock Spring Congregation, United Church of Christ in Arlington, Virginia, told Shelterforce that the event emerged from about 100 faith leaders who came together “trying to imagine something we could do that would help communicate hope, resilience, joy, steadfastness in a time when especially D.C. is feeling so much under attack, and rather than pushing people out, what would it look like to invite people in. In all faith traditions I know, the desire is to welcome the stranger, to share with our neighbors, to build up love. We really believe that love is always stronger than hate, and wanted to model that in a real positive way.”
Donald Whitehead, the executive director of National Coalition for the Homeless, spoke at the event, and also told a Shelterforce reporter about the effects of the crackdown on homeless people in D.C. The following conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Jelina Liu: Can you tell us what the term beloved community means to you?
Donald Whitehead: “Beloved community” means a community where all members of the community have a stake in caring for each other, and that was the vision of Martin Luther King. There are many different beloved communities. The community I ended my homelessness in was considered a beloved community. It was just a community where there was mutual care and mutual respect for each other.
What do you want people to take away from today?
When we started putting this together, I reached out to the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis from the Poor People’s Campaign with a request to get the faith-based community involved in addressing the occupation that’s happening around us. And in a very short time, they came up with this plan to make sure that people felt that they were part of a community of care and to come together and feed people and have other kinds of expressions of joy, like music and dancing and face painting; just so people had a respite from all the chaos that was around us that was being intentionally forced upon them by our federal government.
Why do you think there are some people of faith who are not involved in the community at all?
I think people are afraid, people are tired, and that idea of a beloved community where people care about each other has dissipated a bit in our country. We’re very insulated. We don’t have conversations, we use social media. A lot of different factors have caused that separation, but it’s also intentionally been divided by politicians who use wedge issues like people’s sexual orientation or race or gender or religion. I think it’s intentional and it’s working. Those negative players in our community represent very, very vast sources of wealth, and so they have been able to use that to be able to turn people against each other. And you know, unfortunately, many of us have fallen for that.
We know there’s been the sweeps of the unhoused community. What is the current state of things? Where have people gone?
People have just kind of hidden themselves away. So some people have gone to Virginia or Maryland. Other people have just gone into hiding in places not meant for habitation, in the woods, or in cars, or wherever they can find safety and hide themselves away from those that would do them harm. Some have gone into shelter. The city was amazingly able to come up with more shelter beds. Now my thought is, why aren’t those shelter beds available every day?
How has the takeover affected your work?
Whether it’s people who are doing direct service or people like me who do advocacy, our jobs have gotten so much more intense, so much harder, and it takes a toll on people’s mental and physical health. Certainly not at the level it does for people experiencing homelessness, but it does have a debilitating effect. We’re going to lose people, so it has that effect. The social service providers that are out here are being forced to do things that they wouldn’t normally have to do, and sometimes they have to double that work. So they find somebody after, you know, months, sometimes years of engagement, they have them ready to get into housing, and suddenly that person disappears. So that work has to start all over again. All of the effort, all of the resources that were put into making that connection in the first place are lost. So it is a very expensive way of treating an issue.
We have a lot of people saying … why are people on the streets? Why don’t they just go to shelters?
There’s not enough shelter in any city in the entire United States. We got this idea that we should just build permanent housing, which we should, but people do still need protection from the elements. You know, we have vicious winters and harsh summers and all of those things are detrimental to people’s health. And it’s getting worse with climate change.
And there are some shelters that are not managed properly. This really bothered me today—one of the shelters, that’s a faith-based “gospel” shelter, would not allow people to come to this event today because they close at three o’clock on Saturdays, so grown men have to come inside at three o’clock and not go back outside for the rest of the day. Would you go to a place like that? I wouldn’t. People have to be given agency. That’s the only way they get through this. There’s nobody that’s on the street that isn’t able to find change, but we just have to treat them as human beings, and we have to make sure they have agency, and we don’t have so much control over them that they don’t have the opportunity to breathe.
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