It is the only shelter that I have heard of in Vermont or Massachusetts that:
-requires that all guests take a shower every night
-provides clean towels and sheets to guests every night
-has an unvarying procedure, followed by the staff, for coordinating services to a hundred homeless women every day
If the shelter hasn't yet succeeded at taking all of the degradation and verbal abuse toward guests out of homeless life at that shelter, that's because society hates and fears all homeless people and there's never enough funding for everyone who works at a shelter to be educated or trained to be really helpful, and because there is almost no financial investment at all at any shelter toward treating homeless people really as only being people who were born or forced into severely disadvantaged situations, rather than as people who were meant to have nothing all their lives. All the job training programs at shelters are for service jobs; cleaning, cooking, maintenance. You never hear the words "Bachelor's degree" or even "Associate's degree."
I once tried to participate in the cooking program, conducted at the men's side of the shelter. I was harassed so much that I was hauled into a supervisor's office and forced to withdraw from the program before I'd finished the first day of training; I was told that it "wasn't the right time" for me to participate in the program. It will never be the right time for me to participate in any program until the conglomerate stops telling the world to abuse me.
Copyright L. Kochman, July 8, 2017 @ 2:39 p.m.