Looking to the future
Its mission and passion intact, the Open Shelter will carry on without him, Kent Beittel says
For most of his 72 years, Kent Beittel has been in the middle of a fight. He relished the battles, taking on public officials and business titans and anyone else who stood in the way of his vision of love and acceptance for the city’s homeless.
“Being a sidelined coach is a little different,” he said.
Beittel sits at home now with a blanket over his long, thin legs and hospiceprescribed medications on the table.
He is dying. The fact frustrates but does not frighten him, believing as he does that he will again see Mary, his beloved wife and partner in the running of the Open Shelter.
Most important to him is to reassure the community and supporters that “the best of the shelter and its work” will go on. Though indelibly connected to its founder and his rebel persona, the 37-year-old organization has come into its own.
“The Open Shelter rises and falls on how well we communicate what it does,” Beittel said. “Our approach will last as long as people understand it.”
That approach is pastoral, built more on patience and mutual respect than rules and case-management requirements. The Beittels always believed that without the Open Shelter and its comeas-you-are mantra, there would be no place left for those who can’t or won’t adhere to the conditions and procedures of other shelters and social-service agencies.
“Most of us don’t fit into society — at all,” said William “Critter” Roberts, an Open Shelter regular who spent 12 years living in a tent. “If we walk into a business, somebody will judge us, quickly. And they could be wrong. Kent doesn’t judge. His heart is to help everyone he can.”
A big part of the reason Roberts is in an apartment now, at age 70, is that Beittel and the Open Shelter staff never gave up on him.
“Kent is a good man,” Roberts said as he stopped by the Downtown shelter this week to pick up meals. “He set an example that I was able to follow.”
Carrying on without him
The late Dispatch columnist Mike Harden, who talked to Beittel often and wrote about him several times, referred to the lanky advocate as the Don Quixote of the city’s homeless. The description was apt; Beittel remained stubbornly undaunted, no matter that his job seemed awash in impossibility.
He once lost most everything the shelter had, only to refuse defeat and start over.
“What I remember is that we survived,” he said.
In 2004, after a long and ugly struggle, the city-owned building in Franklinton that housed the Open Shelter was razed to make way for development on the Scioto Peninsula. Beittel had rebuffed a push to relocate to the North Side.
“He was adamant,” said Harry Yeprem Jr., the shelter’s development coordinator. A former client who spent months at the Franklinton shelter, Yeprem joined the small staff 23 years ago.
“Kent said that moving out of the Downtown area was abandoning those we serve,” Yeprem said. “And I still believe that today.”
Beittel also had bitter policy disagreements with the city- and civic-supported Community Shelter Board, which cut off all funding.
No longer able to operate as a 24-hour program, the Open Shelter moved temporarily to Trinity Episcopal Church and then to its current home Downtown at St. John’s Evangelical Protestant Church on E. Mound Street. It has continued there since 2006 as an advocacy center and day-services shelter (without beds), serving nearly 3,000 men, women and children last year.
“Our approach has to be explained and it has to be defended. Standing firm has only brought forward more people,” Beittel said, delighted that the Open Shelter continues to gain supporters. “It is the thing that has kept us alive.”
He was last in his cluttered office on March 3, just before the coronavirus shutdown. He wants no more hospital stays and has stopped treatments for his lung cancer.
Beittel’s desk is as he left it, covered in all manner of paperwork, newspaper clippings, shelter mementos and funny or inspirational sayings. There is fan mail and hate mail. Three years after her death, Mary Beittel’s black sweater is still draped on the back of a chair.
“It stays,” said Solomon Dean, the shelter’s long-time director of day services. “Mary’s the guardian angel.”
As Mary wished and with Kent’s enthusiastic concurrence, Sheli Mathias — former volunteer, executive assistant and chief operating officer — has taken over director duties. She’s proud that the shelter hasn’t missed a beat, or a meal, during the pandemic.
“She’s one of the good ones,” Mary had told Kent after meeting Mathias several years ago and sizing up her potential. “Please don’t run her off.”
Beittel has all the confidence in the world that Yeprem, Dean and Mathias will carry on just fine without him.
“I look at them,” he said, pausing to contain his emotion, “and I rejoice.”
Minister to the marginalized
The son of a Methodist minister, Beittel lived in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington as a youth. He attended high school there until his father left Riverside Methodist Church for another appointment before Beittel’s senior year.
Though Beittel shared his father’s faith, it was evident early on that the son’s service would be different.
He recalls a discussion after his father made a pastoral visit to a family that was stressed and stretched and miserable, unable to furnish the million-dollar home they’d bought.
“Tell the jackasses to move!” Beittel said.
What he was on the way to realizing “is that I’m not the right person to minister to the wealthy. Marginalization, the struggle to survive — that I understand.”
More than half a century later, he has learned plenty about those who live on the ragged edge. Their differences and complexity are underappreciated, as is the commonality of their situations.
“I’ve been working with marginalized people for 40 years,” Beittel said. “And in that time, I’ve only found one thing all homeless people have in common, and that is that they don’t have a natural support system that they trust. Our mission has always been to create an artificial natural support system.”
German Village resident Shawn Redman, a Bexley-based real estate agent who serves on the Open Shelter board, first encountered Beittel during services at Broad Street United Methodist Church.
“He was just a man in the pew then,” Redman said. “I didn’t realize, the day that I met Kent Beittel, the way that he would change my life.”
Redman has served on many nonprofit boards and generally witnessed administrators representing their organizations or directing the goings-on. The Beittels were different.
“He and Mary both just wanted to be there, and to be a part of people’s lives,” Redman said. “I believe that the shelter will live on. I believe God wants it to.”
Beittel regrets not having witnessed more social change, particularly on the health care and housing fronts. “Subsidized housing is not affordable housing. That’s just housing that you and I pay for,” he said. “People need to get over the arrogance of picking and choosing their neighbors based on income. If you’re going to tell them where they can’t be, you also have to tell them where they can be.”
Beittel still lives in the South Side home that he and Mary bought decades ago for less than $40,000. She decorated it with antiques. “A Victorian with a lot of class,” he said of his wife. “I’m an unrepentant hippie.”
He talks to her regularly, carrying on both ends of the dialogue. “Mary doesn’t pull any punches, as you know,” Beittel said.
He believes she would approve of the answer he gives to the question that followed them for all of their marriage.
“I am asked, ’How do you end homelessness?’’’ Beittel said.
His response is that you don’t, necessarily. But with love and compassion, “You make it less inevitable.” rprice@dispatch.com @Ritaprice