Taking Back Our Voice

​Pat Capponi is a straight shooter, a survivor, an author, an advocate, a visionary, a member of the Order of Canada, and is well known for amplifying the voices of those most marginalized in her community. Of late, she's been called on to advise on policy and  bring reform to institutions as entrenched as police services. This week Pat has been invited to speak to an event for emerging leaders. This is what she has to say:
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We worry about people dying on the streets, and take comfort when we hear about shelter expansion, someone is doing something.
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​But there are many ways of dying, even as the body trudges on, the struggling heart still beats, there is the daily death of hopes, expectations, any residual sense of value, as the forced march from service to service, soup kitchen to drop-in, always having to line-up in the cold and the heat, always having to ask, always having to hold out your hand in supplication, having to take what you’re given, having to look grateful, never letting your despair, your anger show. ​Anger gets people barred, anger makes workers back away, so you lower your eyes, and mutter thanks.

​​But we comfort ourselves by not looking at individuals, allowing our eyes to skitter way from the different, from the obviously homeless, collective labelling allows us to de-humanize those we find public annoyances, affecting our quality of life, having to step around people huddled on heating grates or sleeping in parks.

We don’t see them as people, we don’t want to know them, it might prick our consciences, impel us to get involved. And besides, so much money is spent on services, they must just refuse to get help, or refuse to help themselves. So its a life-style choice, free-loading off those who go to work every day, struggle to raise and educate their families, pay their mortgages, and contribute to the city. Are there no poor-houses? as Dickens wrote long ago.

​As night comes, as a cheerful worker hands you a mat and points you to a narrow space on the floor between other huddled forms, it's clear we’ve normalized this nightmare, and by doing so, we’ve erased the individual's identity, lost any compelling sense of urgency, or need to do more.

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We house agencies, we house workers in offices and institutions, we spend millions on care for mental health issues, for addictions, then we discharge people to the same streets they came from, or to places no one would willingly enter: rooming houses or shelters where dealers pound on the door, where bed bugs torment, where theft of the little you have is a given, where assault and rape and bullying are everyday occurrences.
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For me, after three months and eleven days on a psychiatric ward, and God knows how much that cost, I was discharged to a huge for-profit structure packed with seventy other patients and no staff, a move that almost killed me, the despair was so strong as I looked around me.

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Hard to re-build when there is no place start. No place to plant your feet, no door to lock, no moment to take an unencumbered breath. Most of all, no way to re-work your self-image from powerless, from responsible for your own plight, from unable, from shunned in your own city, your own neighbourhood.
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We like to pride ourselves on zero waste in our public institutions and businesses, and yet we discard people without a second thought.

We waste their potential, we waste their future contributions, we waste their lives. It takes so little to bring people up to the level of safety where they can plant their feet, and start to grow again.

So little and yet so much. We have to admit to our systems failures, we have to admit our complicity, we have to recognize that the poor, and homeless, and ill, and aging, don’t clone themselves, they are replenished daily through barring, through ‘not meeting criteria’, through a preference to spend time with those easier to work with, through prejudice and stigma, through an appalling lack of accountability 

We’ve allowed governments to keep OW rates punitively low, ensuring no one can find a “clean, well-lighted place”. My work today involves people who’ve spent years on welfare, people who fled abuse, people who came as refugees with dreams that shattered, people who self-medicate to help them endure the streets. 

It confounds me how little it takes to revive them, once they have a roof and walls, a lock, a key. A recognition of their individuality, a salute to the strengths involved in surviving all the bad, a statement that even if their own mistakes or choices led them to the streets, it doesn’t deserve a life sentence.

Create conditions where they can empower themselves, help their peers, find work in the systems that failed them, engage with policy makers and politicians to find real solutions. And push for housing allowances that reflect reality. Push for opportunities to work in peer run social enterprises or as peer workers in mental health and addictions, community work, shelter staff where they can be role models to staff and clients. 
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And most importantly, take back our Voice from those who've become too comfortable speaking for us.

Reprinted with permission of Pat Capponi.