Soup kitchen faces eviction, changes
New models for serving homeless spark rift in San Jose
SAN JOSE — Loaves & Fishes, the San Jose soup kitchen that has done a lot with a little to feed the city’s homeless for 33 years, was preparing to perform its annual holiday miracle last month when the nonprofit agency learned that it, too, was about to become homeless. Its landlord was giving the organization less than 30 days to stop serving 1,000 hot meals a week, a deadline that would effectively sideline Loaves & Fishes for Thanksgiving, and possibly Christmas.
“Shutting down a soup kitchen whose biggest day of the year is Thanksgiving, a week before Thanksgiving,” said the organization’s executive director, Christina Egan, “was not a smart move.”
But when Egan chose to publicly name the
downtown drop- in center’s landlord at the Montgomery Street Inn, whom she believed was being hardhearted with Loaves & Fishes, it triggered an uncomfortable war of words and emotions in the local nonprofit world. That’s because the move- out order was coming from a longtime ally: one of the biggest homeless providers in the Bay Area.
In an open letter to Loaves & Fishes supporters, Egan identifi ed the culprit as the newly merged InnVision/ Shelter Network, and its CEO, Karae Lisle.
Recounting the phone call during which Lisle allegedly delivered the eviction notice, Egan wrote in the Loaves & Fishes holiday newsletter, “I was shocked.” She went on to lay the cold, hungry holidays now facing 250 people at the unwelcoming doorstep of InnVision’s new leader. “Our hope,” she concluded, “is to change Karae Lisle’s mind.”
But in Lisle’s mind, nothing needed changing — or further discussion. “Everything they asked for, wegave them,” Lisle said. “I made a phone call ( to Egan), she said noproblem, and immediately we started getting blasted in the media.” Publication of the newsletter caused Lisle so much grief that she joked her husband was forced to wear a wig and dark glasses when he went out.
As compassion — for many years, thought to be the only acceptable balm to the scourge of homelessness — was overtaken by social engineering, change has not always come easily to the community of caring. A scruffy network of shelters and soup kitchens — such as Loaves & Fishes — is slowly giving way to “transitional housing” and other models that emphasize long- term stability over a hot meal.
Frayed relationships
The fabric of that network is knitted together by relationships, many of them between women who devoted themselves to caring as a career. The merger over the summer of InnVision The Way Home, led for 24 years before her retirement by Christine Burroughs, with Shelter Network, located in San Mateo County and led by the hard- charging Lisle— who comes from the high- tech world — exposed the fraying of some relationships.
“InnVision/ Shelter Network really prides ourselves on running our organization like a business,” said Maria Duzon, the organization’s marketing director. “We have a service model that works like a science if you have enough staff and focused services. We are committed to using metrics-based, research- based practices to do the best by our donors and clients.”
That newer model aligns with the Housing 1000 program, which seeks to take people off the streets and put them in a home. InnVision provides housing for 85 single men at the downtown Montgomery Street Inn, where Loaves & Fishes will continue serving four dinners a week until a still unspecified date in December. “Dropin services are not necessarily the most innovative model in moving people through the system,” Lisle said of that patchwork approach. “So you’re going to see the soup kitchen take a different role in the whole continuum of care.”
One local homeless advocate, who asked not to be identifi ed, fearing further drama, noted Lisle’s brusque, businesslike style. “We know that for a segment of our population, the solution is housing,” this person said. “That doesn’t mean that people don’t have to eat in the meantime. They definitely do.”
The city of San Jose had recently cut the block grant funding for the dropin center, of which Loaves & Fishes’ meals were just one part. When Lisle’s team examined services at Montgomery Street, they found the bathrooms were being fouled by people who came to the building for meals.
“The chronically homeless population is the hardest to serve, so we had a very aggressive plan to start turning down the volume of people,” Lisle said. She and Egan differ over how that message was delivered. Lisle said that Egan was “very, very, unusually accepting” of the move- out date when they spoke on the phone Oct. 19.
“The first time we found out they were upset with that was in the media,” she added.
The contretemps also revealed an odd subtext in the recent shift of focus in homeless care, which might be described as “Our homeless are better than your homeless.”
“The guests that we’re serving, most of them are homeless homeless,” Egan explained, “living in the creeks, in Guadalupe Park, Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek.”
Under the new plan for InnVision, all residents at the downtown shelter must now pay a modest stipend for their bed, Egan said. “They’re no longer going to have people who are homeless come into their Montgomery Street Inn location during the day.”
Distance a problem?
Egan also wondered if the shift in leadership at InnVision/ Shelter to a different county exacerbates the problem. “She’s up in San Mateo,” Egan said of Lisle, “she’d probably never heard of Loaves & Fishes, thought we were a tiny player and nobody really cared about us. She was shocked to find out that people do care about us, and it was not going to be a good move of theirs.”
Lisle called the San Mateo theory a “cheap shot,” noting that she had spent three days last week in San Jose. “This has been a very difficult entrance into the community,” she said, “having someone call me out.”
Meanwhile, Loaves & Fishes’ own homelessness has been resolved by a call from Mike Fox Jr., CEO of Goodwill of Silicon Valley. He offered the Goodwill kitchen at 1080 N. Seventh St. to Loaves & Fishes at least through the end of the year — and possibly beyond. Egan said she expects to decamp for Goodwill — which has also offered to help visitors find jobs — after one final Thanksgiving dinner at the Montgomery Street Inn, which InnVision agreed to allow after a brief negotiation.
“I actually think it will be a net gain,” Egan said, “because we’re moving to a place where we’re wanted.”