A DETROIT CHURCH IS PAYING HOMELESS PEOPLE TO CLEAN UP THE CITY by Vic Bishop for Waking Times
The homelessness situation in America is severe, sad and getting worse. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that there are over 554,000 homeless people in America, and in major cities, especially on the West Coast, the problem is very severe.
Tent cities and major homeless camps are now a normal feature in many American cities, and when ordinary Americans try to help out, they are often stopped by law enforcement agencies who’ve been arresting citizens and members of churches and charity organizations who feed the homeless in public spaces.
So what can be done? It’s unlikely that housing prices will fall enough to allow more people to afford housing. It’s unlikely that the opioid epidemic will end itself over night. It’s unlikely that the criminal justice system will all of a sudden stop turning normal people who choose to possess and consume a plant into felons who aren’t allowed to get work or decent housing. It’s unlikely that the endless wars will finally end and our soldiers stop coming back from PTSD causing deployments.
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We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
We have to help other people, and the charitable organization, ‘A Better Way Detroit‘ is doing just this by paying local homeless people ten dollars an hour to clean up the city and empowering them to participate in the betterment of the community. The project is funded in part by donations raised in charity from members of the church and surrounding community, and the idea is giving new hope to members of this Detroit community.
The money the men are getting paid isn’t coming from someone’s bank account or a governmental program. It’s coming from donations sent to the Better WAY Detroit initiative, which is hosted out of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Designed to help put a little cash in the pockets of the homeless, it uses the honest-work-for-honest-pay code, and cleans up the city in the process. [Source]
The program is the brain child of Father Marko Djonovic of the Midtown parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, whose finding the endeavour to be incredibly inspiring and enriching.
A few times a week, Djonovic drives his large white suburban truck to shelters and sites where he knows homeless people sleep. Each time, different people are given the opportunity to help clean up a part of the city and get $10 an hour for their work. While the initiative started as a way to clean up Detroit’s public parks, it has evolved into a system of beautifying some of the city’s blighted neighborhoods.
On March 14, it was an empty house’s backyard that’s been the site of illegal dumping, overgrown with dead wood and weeds. [Source]
