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October 25, 2002
"John Parvensky of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless"
An interview with John Parvensky, President of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, and a 2002 Leadership for a Changing World awardee. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, October 25. You may ask a question in advance by clicking on the "Submit a Question" button. Due to time constraints, not all questions will be answered. You may need to refresh your screen during the interview to read the most recent responses. read background Leadership for a Changing World
Welcome to Leadership Talks. Today's guest is John Parvensky, President of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, and a 2002 Leadership for a Changing World award recipient.
Jon, can you give us a brief history and tell us how you came to social justice work?
John Parvensky
I grew up in the 1960’s. I was tremendously influenced by the Civil Rights and the Anti-War movements. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had a large impact on me. It forced me to look outside my narrow world of suburban Philadelphia, and search for meaning in the larger community.
I decided while attending Temple University that I could be most useful to the “movement” by developing legal skills that could advance the cause of social justice. While attending Penn Law School, I began working with neighborhood organizations in low-income communities, doing legal research on bank redlining and other issues. Since then, I have continued to use my legal skills to advocate for the needs of homeless and low-income persons.
Boston, MA
How did you become involved as a housing advocate?
John Parvensky
When I was going to Penn Law School I started volunteering my time working with neighborhood groups in North Philadelphia and Germantown and organizing within those communities. And the number one issue they identified was housing, the tremendous numbers of boarded up homes. And they saw that the banks had essentially abandoned their communities. So we started looking at what the bank's record was in terms of giving loans in those communities and discovered, in fact, that a number of banks were in fact redlining in those neighborhoods. So the first step was to force the banks to start lending within our communities, but we found that that wasn't enough without a significant effort to increase the capacity of our communities to build new housing. We still would not meet the objectives of the neighborhood in improving housing conditions. I took it upon myself to learn more and more of the nuts and bolts of housing development.
Washington, DC
John, what was the long term vision of this work?
John Parvensky
We discovered quickly that doing work on a house-by-house basis wasn't going to be enough to significantly change the housing that poor folks were experiencing within their communities, so we started connecting on citywide efforts to improve housing and ultimately connected with national efforts to change the way housing was provided in communities across the country. I participated in the Housing Now March in 1986 and met up with some national advocates, like Mitch Snyder from the Community for Creative Nonviolence and started linking the efforts of improving housing to the efforts of dealing with folks who had no housing at all.
Queens, New York
Tell us a little about the range of housing programs that you have created. And did you have one that you thought was more effective than others?
John Parvensky
We tried to be very opportunistic in our approach to developing housing, so we'll look for buildings that are vacant and figure out what the best use of that property would be to meet the needs of the community. Our primary focus, though, has been on permanent housing solutions. We find that providing integrated housing that provides an opportunity for homeless individuals or families to live in community with middle-income individuals provides the best opportunity for success.
Chicago, IL
What measures do you use to gauge success in your work?
John Parvensky
We see our mission as creating lasting solutions to homelessness. Thus, the greatest measure of success is how many people we have been able to move from the streets and shelters into permanent housing. During the past 10 years, we have created nearly 1,000 housing units for homeless and low-income families and individuals. We have assisted another 1,000 to find and afford permanent housing. These are great successes.
Unfortunately, however, we have not been able to stop the flow of new people into homelessness, as rents have increased faster than wages or public benefits; as more families have fled from domestic violence; as individuals with mental illness have been left on their own without community support. To truly be successful, we need to better address these issues.
burlington
Do the homeless people you house get involved in any way beyond receiving housing? Do you engage them in activism? Do they become politically active?
John Parvensky
We work with homeless people who we house in a variety of ways. We include in all of our construction contracts a requirement that the contractor hire homeless persons to do the work to the greatest extent possible. We also work with residents on helping them to achieve what they would like to achieve in terms of job opportunities and continuing education. And we also try to involve them in the management of their own housing on tenant review boards. And we plug them into our advocacy efforts as well.
Tucson, AZ
In Arizona we have found that the for-profit day labor industry often hires homeless people. The labor brokers pay them minimum wages, charge workers fees for transportation, safety gear, and check-cashing, and interfere with offers of permanent employment. What do you suggest as effective strategies for engaging homeless services agencies and networks in combatting day labor abuses? and for supporting homeless laborers progression to stable, non-exploitative employment?
John Parvensky
Most people are surprised to learn that a third of the people who are homeless and living on the streets and shelters are working in Denver. Unfortunately, many of those jobs are day labor jobs that do not provide benefits or a stable income. Our primary effort has been to work on the state and the national level to ensure a livable wage for all Americans that's tied to the cost of housing so that someone who's working 40 hours a week would be able to afford housing of their own in their community. We do need to be more vigilant, though, in terms of ensuring that homeless people are not exploited by these day labor operations.
kansas city
I understand that your work in Denver dealing with homelessness has been quite successful. Are you working on efforts to replicate your model in different parts of the country?
John Parvensky
I'm currently serving as the president of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council and on the board of the National Coalition for the Homeless. Through these organizations I've been able to work with over 100 activists who are doing great work in their own communities to meet the health and housing needs of homeless people. We've been sharing our experiences as well as learning from others from other cities and trying to incorporate those models that work into legislation at the national level that can provide the resources and expertise to replicate these programs in other communities as well.
Downingtown, PA
What do you find to be the biggest stumbling block in helping the homeless? How do you overcome such difficulties?
John Parvensky
First of all, there's no one response or one service that is needed by every homeless person. Our approach is to work with the individual or family to be responsive to what they need to achieve their own goals. We try to be nonjudgmental and welcoming in our approaches with people we serve. Sometimes mental illness or substance addictions get in the way of allowing the individual to freely choose their own path. So in the past few years, we've been aggressively expanding the treatment services for this population so that we can respond to their holistic needs, but these tend to be the most difficult issues to deal with for both the individual and our systems.
Huntington, West Virginia
The pervasive attitude in this country seems to be that people who are poor or homeless just need to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." How have you been able to overcome this common myth in your work?
John Parvensky
Unfortunately, many homeless people do not even have bootstraps which they can pull themselves up with. What we find is that many of the issues that contribute to one's homelessness are significantly beyond the ability of one person to overcome. This includes housing that costs much more than what people working at minimum wage can afford. In Denver, for example, one would have to work 118 hours a week at minimum wage to be able to afford an average one-bedroom apartment. Someone who is disabled and receiving SSI would need to spend all of their SSI check plus panhandle additional dollars to pay for that apartment. I would say about half of the population understands this and are supportive or our work. The key is to begin making inroads with the other half so that they can understand this.
Wilmington, MA
How do you ensure community input so that your work is in fact meeting your community's needs?
John Parvensky
We include both homeless or formerly homeless individuals on our board of directors and we have a consumer advisory committee made up exclusively of homeless individuals to give us input on programs and housing that we develop. When we start a new housing development we talk to the residents of the most recently completed project to find out what we did right, what we did wrong, and we make adjustments accordingly. We also hire formerly homeless individuals to work both in our residential programs and our advocacy programs.
John, can you share what book, mentor or other resource was influential in developing your leadership abilities?
John Parvensky
I think it's safe to say that my leadership abilities have grown on the job. I've taken inspiration from a broad variety of sources, including the people that we serve. Many times we look at homeless people and feel sorry for the struggles of folks living on the street, and yet they are some of the best survivors among all of us and I take inspiration from that. I have had the chance to work with tremendous people across the country who are doing good work on housing and homeless issues, and I think I'm a quick study so I've been able to beg, borrow, and steal ideas and put them into action within my own community.
tn
Due to the increased numbers of people incarcerated, do you think federal funding and other sources of funding for transitional housing for ex-offenders (who in some situations are considered homeless) will increase?
John Parvensky
One of the things that I've noticed in the last 10 years has been the increase in the number of people on the streets who have been formerly incarcerated. Part of this has been due to the increased use of the criminal justice system to deal with drug addictions and part has been due to the failure of those systems to provide planning and support for individuals as they're released from incarceration. Someone with a record has a significantly increased difficulty in being able to find affordable decent housing because most landlords will not rent to them. So unless we want to have a recycling population of homeless and incarcerated individuals we need to provide housing and employment opportunities for people being released from the criminal justice system.
San Francisco, CA
Congratulations on the LCW award! Keep up the good work.
I'm wondering how have public attitudes towards the homeless changed over the years that you've been working on the issue?
John Parvensky
When I began working on homeless issues in 1986, there was a lot of media attention to the issue. It was easy to get attention for the work we were doing. It was new and sexy. Over the years, the media and the general public have grown tired of the issue. Some call it “compassion fatigue,” although it’s hard to figure out what everyone’s so tired of. Others feel that after 15 years of work, we haven’t solved the problem, so why should we care?
While there have always been differences in how the public responds to a homeless individual or family, these differences have intensified. Conservatives feel more comfortable these days in “blaming the victim.” Even more liberal city dwellers are supporting measures that restrict the rights of homeless persons to be in public. It makes creating lasting solutions more difficult.
Portland
Is there a marked difference in the way that the two administrations have dealt with homelessness and affordable housing? If so, how has any change in federal policies affected your work?
John Parvensky
Unfortunately, housing and homelessness have not been high priorities by either of the last two administrations. We are spending less money on housing in 2002 than we spent in 1982. Most of the housing resources today are, in fact, going into just preserving the housing that was built 20 and 30 years ago. And while there is a commitment within this adminisration to preserve Section 8 housing, there is not a commitment to expand the resources to get back to where we were 20 years ago, let alone to meet the need that has developed since.
Richmond, VA
How do you work to bring different communities together - the homeless, policy makers, business leaders, community members, and service organizations?
John Parvensky
We started by identifying those most affected by the issue, since they had an incentive in working to find a solution to the problem. We outreached to the churches and human service providers in the community who were on the front lines of providing food and shelter to homeless persons. We then identified homeless persons who wanted to work on the larger issues affecting them and their friends. We then identified government and business leaders and sought to convince them that reducing homelessness would improve the quality of life in Downtown Denver, creating a win-win solution.
San Antonio, TX
You have been doing this work for a long time. What has been your greatest disppointment over the years, and your greatest source of joy?
John Parvensky
My greatest disappointment is the fact that we still need to be doing this work. When I started working on homeless issues in 1986, we felt that our job was to work ourselves out of a job within 5 years. Then we thought it might take 10 years. But now it seems like we're farther from that dream than ever before. The things that cause and exacerbate homelessness seem to be deeply embedded in our systems, both political and economic, and changing that will require a lot longer time than we ever believed.
On the other hand, I take joy every day when I drive by one of the housing units that we've created or see a family moving into a new housing unit or receiving quality child care or health care because of the programs that we've been able to put in place. This is what keeps us going day after day.
Minneapolis, MN
You lead a very large organization - what has been some of the leadership challenges internally? Is it lonely at the top?
John Parvensky
One of the key challenges I face with our growing organization has been maintaining a grass roots social justice culture within a larger social service organization. The advocacy that was critical to our early success is often forgotten as the fear of alienating funders and supporters becomes more important. So what we've had to do is keep focused on our mission of creating lasting solutions and to ensure that all aspects of the organizations understand and embrace this. I constantly stress the importance for all staff to be advocates in their work, advocating for those we serve on an individual basis as well as on a systemic basis. If we all keep as a central barometer of our work how the interests and needs of homeless persons will best be served, then we'll truly be successful.
Charlotte
John, Could you address the concept of centralied or "one-stop-shopping" for homeless and near-homeless persons and families? Do you consider your work to reflect this concept and is it a model to be replicated elsewhere?
John Parvensky
I found that no one model works best in all communities. The solution needs to be based on the needs of the homelesss within that community and the other resources that are available in the community. Sometimes concentrating homeless services in one location creates a disservice to both the people we serve and the community at large. It isolates them and keeps them out of sight and mind from other parts of the community. On the other hand, having a place where people can access what they need without having to run all over town is important. What we've tried to create is a system whereby wherever the homeless family or individual enters, they can access the resources that they need throughout the community from that one location.
Arlington, VA
Some say that today's youths don't care about social justice causes. Have you found that to be true? How can we educate and involve young people to this important cause?
John Parvensky
Certainly the youth today have a lot on their minds as the world becomes more and rmoe complex. The events of 9-11, even the more recent sniper shootings the in metropolitan DC area require kids to think much more deeply about the world than I had to when I was growing up. I get calls weekly from schools and from youth across the city of Denver asking how they can get involved, what they can do to make a difference. And I'm pleased by that and hopeful that when they get to be my age they are applying themselves in terms of working for social justice and solving some of the problems that we've been unable to solve.
Leadership for a Changing World
We have time for one more question. John, how do you sustain yourself and your staff while working on difficult social issues?
John Parvensky
Working with people in crisis can be very difficult. You may be dealing with families who have who have no place to stay tonight while your last housing unit has just been filled. Or you may be working with someone who just slipped from two years of sobriety, and now has to start the climb all over again.
It is important first to take care of your self and, second, to have the support of caring colleagues. They can help you get through the tough times. What is most important, though, is to keep a long-term perspective. I see our work as “guerilla warfare,” winning a battle here, losing one there. But with each battle, we win over supporters, increase public awareness, and create real solutions for many of those we serve. Over time, we will prevail.
Leadership for a Changing World
That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for participating in Leadership Talks. For more information on The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, you may contact John Parvensky at:
The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
2111 Champa St.
Denver, CO 80205
phone: 303-293-2217
email: jp@coloradocoalition.org
Please check back for future Leadership Talks.
John Parvensky
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