Dear Editor,
First,let me say that I've been a fan of Real Change from the beginning. It's a great paper and a great organization. However, I am concerned by the story on a woman's discrimination suit against the YWCA [“Homeless woman protests being barred from shelter,” Dec. 5]. It gives the impression that her improper treatment by shelter staff is proven fact rather than as-yet-unproven allegation.
Homelessness is a stressful condition. Working in shelters, I have come to see how being homeless exacerbates existing personality disorders and may even create new ones. Most of our guests are beautiful human beings, but it is naive to think that all homeless people are honest, well-intentioned, peaceful or sane. All the same, access to shelter is a basic human right and we shelter staff do our best to provide it, dealing firmly but compassionately with those guests whose experiences have taught them that manipulation, deceit, theft, and intimidation are useful tools for survival.
So we work with some very hard-core folks night after night, and we keep doing it for less than wonderful pay, precisely because we understand that while abused and underprivileged people may not always be very pleasant individuals, they still deserve a safe place to sleep, in circumstances of dignity and compassion. For that reason our standard of proof for behavior that incurs a short-term or long-term bar is usually very high. Please give us the benefit of the doubt when you hear accusations of our unfairness.
I believe I am speaking for the vast majority of shelter providers when I say, yes, there are occasional bad apples among us, but we don't keep them on staff once we've identified them. There are incidents of unfairness, but we don't tolerate them. We are stern with each other and ourselves when we've lost sight of compassion and justice under stress.
You do the community no service by presenting one-sided stories that essentially say “homeless person good, shelter staff bad.” We have enough trouble recruiting good staff for a difficult and fairly thankless job without creating the impression – however inadvertently — that shelter workers are fair targets for vilification by advocates for the homeless.
Alison Slow Loris | Bremerton