On August 31, I found myself passing plates at a food pantry. Only it wasn’t for the sake of volunteering; it was part of a program to expose the problems facing America’s homeless.
I was invited to the Will Write for Food program in Hollywood, Florida. It involved about 20 college students on a mission to produce a newspaper called The Homeless Voice for a privately-run homeless shelter called the Coalition of Service and Charity, or COSAC. We had 36 hours to do this.
The night before the program began on August 31, the students, including myself, had dinner with the residents of the shelter. The residents were mostly open to conversation from us college students except for a certain resident who entered the dining room, muttered a profanity, then left.
After dinner, we were given a full tour of the shelter. The guide took us up stairs littered with cigarette butts into the residential part of the shelter. Upstairs we found a room kept relatively neat and personalized by three women who said that their “bed space” was the closest thing they had to a home and should be treated like one. We saw a man lying on a bed in the hall. After the man gave permission, our guide told us he was a recovering alcoholic but he “doesn’t want to talk about it.”
I learned that COSAC was different from most homeless shelters in that they take almost anyone who is not a fugitive in, unlike government shelters where there is an application process and a different environment.
We started our true reporting on Sunday morning. I decided to pursue a story about the staff at COSAC, some of whom used to be or still are residents at the shelter.
For the story, I interviewed the night manager, one of the many caretakers, kitchen staff and those working at the front desk. While I was talking to each staff member, I started to see how community plays out at the shelter. With a few exceptions, every resident is required to do some kind of work in order to stay there. I saw people working in the kitchen bringing food to residents who couldn't get it themselves, I saw a mentally-ill woman who was allowed to stay at the shelter despite not being able to work, I saw a man served food who offered his whole plate to the rest of the lunchroom.
After I was done interviewing residents, the writers, copy editors and designers went to work on writing their stories. There was an article on religion, a biography of the shelter’s owner, an analysis of the relationship between homeless and the police in Hollywood, Florida, and a chronicle about one girl’s experience being homeless. We were busy well throughout the afternoon and evening.
Later, after most of our stories were written, someone in our group came up with the idea to document what goes on in the homeless shelter at midnight. We set off with a card game to play with the residents. We found a few residents still not asleep and we talked to each of them. Myself and another student were playing the card game with two residents when an ambulance arrived at the shelter. Apparently, one of the residents had shown symptoms of a heart attack and had to be tested and taken to the hospital. A few of us recorded the whole scene as it happened and wrote an article soon after.
At about 5:00 in the morning after copy editing was mostly over, the rest of us writers left for our hotel. I left the state that morning.
The experience was definitely a positive one for me and I think it has helped me as a reporter for Otterbein360. I now realize that there are stories to be told all around us that can come from the most unlikely and overlooked people. I’d like to thank Will Write for Food for allowing me to participate.
