Sister Maureen Kottenstette is trying to escape the office for the third time this evening when a knock sounds at the door. She needs to leave before dark, she explains, because she's just had cataract surgery and can't see to drive at night. As she gets up to answer the door, the phone rings. No sooner has she said, "Sacred Heart House, hello," than the second line rings. Whoever is at the door knocks again, impatiently. Sister Maureen puts both calls on hold and hurries to the front of the house, navigating through drifts of donations for the homeless that always come at Christmastime.
"That's when everyone cleans up their garbage and sends it to us," says Sister Maureen, without a hint of sarcasm. "We go through it, and sometimes there is good stuff."
In the room Sister Maureen has just vacated--a combination kitchen/dining room/storeroom/office--camouflage-patterned bedrolls, well-worn cowboy boots, plastic bags full of day-old bread and wrapped Christmas packages are stacked wherever there is space, and there isn't much. This week, Sacred Heart House, a shelter that houses single women and families, will move across the street into an abandoned convent at 28th and Lawrence streets that's been gutted and renovated over the past two years. Everything needed to run the new facility--from file cabinets to soup kettles--is packed inside this much smaller house.
"Well, hello, girl!" Sister Maureen says, ushering in a nine-year-old in sweats and her mother, a blank-faced, doughy woman who stayed at Sacred Heart briefly last year. The girl gives a shy hello to Sister Maureen. Her mother says nothing.
"Just look at you," Sister Maureen says, trying again.
"We came for our Christmas package," the woman says.
"I'm here all by myself, honey," Sister Maureen replies. "I don't know where your Christmas stuff is."
"We got a ride and everything."
"Well, honey, I just feel so terrible," Sister Maureen says, "but weren't you supposed to come several hours ago?"
"Maybe," the woman says, frustrated. "But I don't know when I can get back here."
"Well, help me look. Maybe we can find your name on one of these boxes."
But the woman doesn't help Sister Maureen look. Instead, she wanders around the kitchen, radiating anger. Meanwhile, her daughter stares raptly at the miniature canopy bed that sits precariously at the top of a pile of donated toys. "What about this box right here?" the woman finally asks.
"Honey, I can't give you someone else's presents," Sister Maureen answers, just before she remembers that both phone lines are on hold. She is dealing with that problem when the woman leaves, slamming the door behind her.
"No, we won't be open for Christmas, honey," Sister Maureen says into the phone. "Have you tried Samaritan House?"
As she hangs up, a small boy with a haircut so short you can see his scalp hurtles into her arms.
"Look at you, look at you!" says Sister Maureen. The boy's mother, a tiny black woman with curly hair, a squeaky voice and a crucifix around her neck, has come, on time, to pick up her Christmas basket, which, as arranged, contains presents for her son, two teenage daughters and herself. She left Sacred Heart House almost exactly a year ago and is doing well, she says.
"But are you eating, honey?" Sister Maureen asks. "I haven't been that skinny since I was four."
"I'm eating, Sister Maureen," the woman says. "And this is so nice of you."
"Wait," Sister Maureen says. "We have this bicycle. It's just about your size," she tells the boy. "What do you think? Do you have a bicycle?"
"No," the boy breathes, staring covetously at the bike--an old BMX-model Rustoleumed into a second career. His mother arranges to pick up the bike when they're not traveling by bus.
"She was cleaning for a living and lost her job," Sister Maureen says after the woman leaves. "After she came to us she found work, and her kids went to grandma's after school. She found transitional housing, and she's saving a third of her income. She's going to move up in the world. It's good," she decides.
By now Sister Maureen is late for the "peaceful demonstration" she's planning to attend outside the Denver City and County Building. "The point," she says, "is that here it is Christmas, and there is still no room at the inn. We are just going to hold up banners and not cause any disturbance; it's a Catholic--"
Another knock. This time Sister Maureen opens the door to find two well-dressed Hispanic men in their forties, armed with toys.
"We work at Stapleton," one man explains, "and every year we do a toy drive, and someone told us you needed toys for your shelter."
"You know who needs toys even worse than we do?" Sister Maureen counters. "Theresa Keneally at the Northeast Women's Center."
"Is she a Sister? No?"
"We're kind of prejudiced, Sister," the other man explains. "We both grew up in Annunciation, with Sisters teaching us. We like our donations to--"
"Just let me call," says Sister Maureen. "Did you see our new building across the street? Well, that building is like a geode, if you see what I mean. Ugly on the outside, but beautiful on the inside. Theresa," she says into the phone. "I've found your Christmas toys!"
She draws the men a map of how to get to Theresa's center.
"Don't you need anything?" they ask.
"Diapers," Sister Maureen answers promptly. "We need diapers real bad."
She returns from seeing the men to the door waving two hundred-dollar bills in her hand. "For diapers," she says proudly. "This kind of thing is why I'm not afraid. What we need has a way of turning up."
The phone rings again--"Another person wanting to adopt a family for Christmas," Sister Maureen explains after she hangs up. "But this woman said, `I want a family, but make sure I don't get one on welfare.' I didn't know what to tell her."
Because even though the talk at Sacred Heart centers firmly on self-sufficiency, that almost never seems to mean off welfare. It just isn't that neat. Around here, there are always too many children; there are jobs, but never high-paying ones; there are government training programs, but no one ever appears to graduate. Welfare is as much a part of the landscape as the ever-present need for diapers--and food stamps, assisted housing, Medicaid, even the gift certificates from Safeway, King Soopers and Target that stuff the Christmas baskets. As Sacred Heart's director, Sister Maureen is here not to fix all that so much as to help her clients find their way through the maze. Why it never seems to get any easier is something she has thought about and would like to discuss--but not now. It's getting dark too fast.
"A lot of people are scared of me because I have nine kids," says Deborah Smith. "I was on Section 8 housing, and Section 8 houses have been trashed, and when they see all those kids..."
Two years ago Christmas, the rental house where Deborah had been living for three years was sold and her family had to move. At the time, her children ranged in age from 1 to 19; Deborah herself was 35. "I always wanted a large family," she says. "I guess I got my wish."
But not once has her large family even come close to supporting itself. The winter Deborah lost her home, she was collecting welfare, working part-time at Taco House, and rapidly running out of cash.
"We went to stay with my sister," she recalls, "but she was on assisted housing, too, so we put her in jeopardy. Then, I guess, I was homeless. It's a horrible feeling. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy."
After several referrals from other agencies, she ended up at Sacred Heart House in January 1993. Because the renovation of the convent building had already begun, Deborah and her nine children moved into one room of the small, hundred-year-old house across the street, which was then serving as an interim shelter and now houses the Sacred Heart offices. The family shared the building's second floor--and its one bathroom--with two other single mothers and their three children.
"They didn't try to make me feel bad in any shape or form," Smith recalls. "We were made to feel welcome right away. The kids went right into Denver Public Schools and Curtis Park daycare, and you just didn't have to worry. I was free to go to school, and we all met at Sacred Heart at the end of the day."
When she wasn't studying legal administrative management at Denver Business College, Smith says she was on the phone, armed "with a notebook this thick," trying to find a landlord who would accept Section 8 money. It took nearly three months, during which she talked constantly with Sacred Heart counselor Carol Wedig, who gave her leads but refused to do the legwork. "She said, `You got to do for yourself,'" Deborah remembers, "and I was getting desperate. I finally found a three- bedroom apartment where they wouldn't do a credit check. My credit's no good, either," she adds sheepishly.
Deborah and her children moved to an apartment in Adams County that March, loaded down with furniture donated by Sacred Heart. They've since moved into a larger house, which contains new, rented furniture, as well as two late-model TVs. In November Deborah finished her degree at Denver Business College.
In the two years since the family left Sacred Heart, Deborah's stayed in touch through its Follow-Up program, whose director thinks of her as a "major success story." What this seems to mean is that Deborah has not slipped back into homelessness, despite several medical disasters, marriage to and divorce from a husband who beat her senseless, and the near-loss of her oldest son to gang warfare.
"I'm still on assistance," Deborah says, "but not as much as I used to be. I'm working 28 hours a week at Sacred Heart, and another 16 hours at Fashion Bar, and now I have this degree. But I cannot afford daycare so I can get out and look for work. They have a child-care assistance program in Adams County, but they're not accepting any new families. Fine. I'll do without their help. Some of these program people are so snotty and nasty, anyway."
Deborah is interrupted by the excited screams of her three youngest children, who are one room away staging an organized raid on a box of donated Christmas candy. "Go in your room and watch TV," she tells them, but her youngest, now eighteen months old, runs over and leans against her knee. With practiced ease she scoops him up, pats him on the back and, five minutes later, lays him down on the sofa fast asleep. "I am going to have to make fourteen, fifteen dollars an hour even to break even," Deborah says, "but those jobs do exist. I was offered one, in Cherry Creek even, but the night before I was supposed to start, my ex beat me up pretty bad. There it went, down the drain. But come rain or shine, I will find daycare for these guys and I will get a job."
Meanwhile, she says, she's spending quality time with her kids, trying to enforce certain messages: You must stay in school, you must not get started in the welfare cycle, you must do for yourself.
The last lesson doesn't come easy. "My oldest son is bitter about how I've been treated," she says, "and he should be. Some of these programs are worthless. Adams County, they haven't done nothing for me. How can anyone succeed?"
This question comes up often during Smith's favorite weekly appointment--the Monday night meeting of Sacred Heart's Circle of Women, all of whom passed through the shelter during the past three years.
"We call ourselves the COWs," Deborah laughs. "We get together and work through things, give each other emotional help or any other kind of help we can. We're all human, we get loud, we drink coffee, we cry, we get away from our lives.
"It's our evening. It helps. Sometimes," she concludes, "I'm not sure anything else does."
"Sacred Heart House is more like a home," says John Parvensky, director of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. "Compared to what people generally think of, Sacred Heart is dwarfed. It's a lot less like an institution than most shelters."
Technically, in fact, Sacred Heart isn't a shelter at all but a rooming house--thanks to a recent decision by the Denver Zoning Department.
This unusual reclassification came about as the Salvation Army prepared to open a new shelter last year. With the city threatening to shut down its decrepit Blake Street Shelter, the Salvation Army located a possible replacement a few blocks away in Denargo Market, an old warehouse area in the Platte Valley.
Those who worked with the homeless saw the new building, which would provide beds for up to 210 single men, as ideal. "All the needed services are situated very close to there, and yet it keeps the men off the streets," says Sister Maureen. "And with Blake Street closing, it was critical."
But neighbors anticipating economic spillover from nearby Coors Field were considerably less enthusiastic over the Salvation Army's plans.
"All of us want to help, but this is a business area," says Jorge Oteo, owner of Prizma Industries, located directly across the street from the Denargo Market shelter. "The city talks about redeveloping, and this is an enterprise zone, and I don't think it's fair that we have such a disproportionate share of these kinds of places in our neighborhood. I don't think the mayor himself would want this shelter next door to him."
With the aid of Denver City Councilwoman Debbie Ortega, the Globeville Neighbors Coalition and the Denargo Market Neighbor's Association asked Denver District Court Judge Larry Naves to issue a permanent injunction to prevent the new Salvation Army shelter from opening this fall. To back up their complaint, they cited the city's two-year-old Group Home Ordinance, which prevents more than three shelters from operating within a 4,000-square-foot radius. And three shelters--Sacred Heart House, Samaritan House and the Denver Rescue Mission--were already operating within 4,000 feet of the Denargo Market site.
At one gathering of homeless service providers, a novel solution emerged: Perhaps one of the three existing shelters could be rezoned. Sacred Heart, the smallest of the trio, seemed the best candidate.
After several days of study, Denver Zoning Administrator Dorothy Nepa determined that Sacred Heart indeed qualified as a boardinghouse rather than a shelter.
The difference, which some opponents see as nonexistent, is that unlike the other area shelters, Sacred Heart doesn't offer on-site services, such as trained social workers or alcohol rehabilitation. And as for the zoning provision that a rooming house be operated "for compensation to permanent guests," Nepa says anyone who stays longer than thirty days can be considered permanent and points out that "compensation doesn't necessarily need to be financial. These people might offer to do work around the house instead."
With Sacred Heart's new designation secure, Judge Naves turned down the request for the injunction, and the Salvation Army was able to obtain a temporary Certificate of Occupancy for the new shelter. It opened November 9, and despite unseasonably warm weather, began operating at capacity almost immediately. Even though neighbors say the disruption is far less than they anticipated, they still intend to ask for another injunction on May 9, the day the shelter's temporary permit expires.
"I do have a problem with the way the city manipulated the law," says Councilwoman Ortega, many of whose District 1 constituents opposed the new shelter. "The zoning administrator classified Sacred Heart as a rooming and boarding house, when, for all this time, as anyone can tell you, it's been a homeless shelter.
"But I don't have a problem with Sacred Heart House itself," she hastens to add.
It would be hard to find anyone who does. Sacred Heart House has lasted in Denver more than fourteen years--longer than the public awareness of the need for shelters for families, longer than the currently accepted homeless tag has been used to describe them.
"It was one of those things that just happened," recalls Catherine Bevanda, who started the shelter in 1980 after she heard that the Archdiocese of Denver had closed the Sacred Heart Convent at 28th and Lawrence, leaving the building empty.
Catherine came to Denver to study at Loretto Heights and says she saved money by living and working first at St. Vincent's orphanage and then at the Marycrest Convent, which was operating a skeletal homeless shelter at the time.
She thought she could expand on that idea in the old convent. The Jesuit in charge of the parish told her she could try her housing concept on a month-to-month basis. It quickly stretched into two years.
"I'm sure I slept in an odd place myself at Sacred Heart," she recalls, "though I don't remember exactly. There was a chapel, and that was our dormitory for men, and there were bunk beds for single women and a large rec room upstairs we used for smoking. I bet they don't allow that anymore."
Some people remember Catherine's shelter as something of a flophouse, with few rules and even less reliable plumbing. "But I treated the people with dignity," she says. "The philosophy was, `You're one of the family, pull your own weight. If you break something, fix it. Respect each other's space.' You have to have compassion for just about everybody. I still believe that."
"Our position is not one of rehabilitation," says Sister Anna Koop, who has lived and worked at the nearby Catholic Worker's House since 1978 and became good friends with Catherine. "We live in an economy where a minimum wage cannot purchase housing, food, transportation and clothing for a family. That's a travesty, and any kind of illusion that we've solved this problem is just that. So our position is one of saying, `We're here.'"
After two years of being there, though, Catherine Bevanda moved on, stopping briefly at a west Denver shelter before returning to California, where she volunteers at a senior center.
In 1982 Sacred Heart House was taken over by Sister Sue Kennedy of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth. Sister Sue, now director of religious education at St. Stephen's Church in Glenwood Springs, stayed at Sacred Heart for a decade--much of which, she says, was spent learning that the "We're here" philosophy needed a reality check.
"I had not worked with the transient population before," she says. "There was such diversity! They knew much more than I did about life and choice. They were suffering the consequences, after all. They taught me outrageous lessons. In the beginning, I allowed myself to be manipulated."
In those days, Sister Sue says, shelter residents would stay longer than they'd agreed--promised jobs would evaporate, rides would fall through--and drinking and drugs were rampant. "What they were telling us was, they wanted to be self-sufficient," she remembers. "But then sometimes they'd lie to us, or there was substance abuse, or they'd say they went to work but they didn't, or they'd break a curfew. We found we had to really mean what we said. If they abused our system, the games were over, kiddo. It was goodbye."
More hard-and-fast rules followed. Residents had to find a job--"a real job, not a stopgap thing"--in ten days, or leave. If they found a place to move, they would be given free furniture--but only once. And even if hard times hit again, they were not allowed back into the shelter until a year had passed. "Their actions had to follow their words," Sister Sue says, "but of course, we never knew the right answer, only that we could not be in the rescue business, just the business of providing options."
Over the next ten years Sister Sue attracted an increasing number of volunteers and also added paid staff members. Sacred Heart's annual budget--now overseen by a six-member board of directors--approached a quarter of a million dollars. Only 11 percent of this money came from government agencies, and Sister Sue remembers bending over backward to account to the private donors who made up the rest of the budget--to the point of having her volunteers contribute to a book of essays about the people of Sacred Heart. "They kept coming to the door, the same cast of characters that we had seen before," Sister Sue says. "The kitchen table and the coffeepot were key. Once we began our tough-love approach, they'd tell us what was really going on with them, their successes, their disasters, and we would listen and listen some more, and they kept coming back."
The Sacred Heart alums became a sort of extended family. "We knew that was true when we buried several of our people," Sister Sue recalls. "Some were older, but three younger ones died of cancer, another of we don't know what. There were children born dead, probably of poor nutrition, and we buried them, too. That was the beginning of what we called the Follow-Up program."
Of course, some Follow-Up clients have less depressing stories. "In fact," says Sister Sue, "I saw one last week. She came to us in 1988, with four children, and fought her way up, leaning on us whenever she had to. She got her GED, found a job as a home health aide, and just last month bought her first car. It took four years, but she's off the dole now."
Getting off the dole--even keeping the shelter's doors open--often depended on something Sister Sue calls "creepidence," a term she coined to describe "a mixture of creepy divine providence and a miracle."
Once, when funds were so low that staffers had spent two hours trimming items from a grocery list--had just, in fact, decided to live without coffee or sugar --an anonymous donor sent over ten pounds of each. Another time, a father of three, living at the shelter with his wife and children, asked for an alarm clock so he could wake at 2 a.m. in order to walk to his construction job in Littleton. "And someone did donate an alarm clock," Sister Sue remembers, "but better yet, that same night, here came a bicycle, and not a broken-down one, either. It had air in the tires! He rode that bike to work until he met someone who could give him a ride.
"Creepidence," she recalls. "We would sit around telling stories about it. I miss that."
end of part 1
