The Hundred Story Home

by Kathy Izard

  Liz had been working her way through the crowd. “You okay?”

  “Yes, thanks to Bill.”

  “Oh, I just love him,” Liz said. “He’s one of my favorites.” She, of course, knew his story and filled me in.

  Bill Halsey had one of the most unusual living arrangements of any street person in Charlotte. He had tried living in the men’s shelter but it was too chaotic for him, so Bill created the only house he could. Along the railroad tracks, he had found a concrete platform that once was used to unload bales of cotton from freight cars. Bill didn’t pitch a tent on top of it; he dug a hole under the concrete. It took him two months to excavate his underground home: an eight-by-eight-foot dirt cave with just enough room to stand up in. Bill had been living in that hole for about five years.

  As unusual as that living arrangement sounded, I kind of understood it. Bill’s need to go underground for safety was not much different from a six-year-old making a haven out of a closet’s top shelf.

  “My dream day,” Liz said, “will be to see Chilly Willy and Bill Halsey move into Moore Place.”

  I finished my shift and went back to my office.

  It was astounding to think someone as sweet as Bill Halsey was living in a hole in the ground. It was amazing to think men like Coleman and Samuel had been on the streets for decades. They were the faces of this argument for housing.

  I had a lot of facts and data to put into the Knight application, but I also had these real-life stories that told why it truly mattered. Would someone at the Knight Foundation care about an argument of the heart as much as an argument designed for the head? I took a chance in the closing section. Maybe it was more appropriate to stick with formal technical language and statistics. But maybe, just maybe, those reviewing the applications got tired of reading all that and wanted to hear what truly mattered:

  One fifty-year-old resident named Samuel, who was in our pilot program, was visiting the UMC after his first day of classes at the local community college. He was impeccably groomed and dressed in a pressed collared shirt and proudly held his college backpack. He stood out amid the tattered crowd of four hundred gathered in line for the UMC Soup Kitchen lunchtime meal. He had previously been a part of that crowd for more than twenty years. As he showed others his syllabus and books, a UMC employee marveled, “I can’t believe it. I always thought he was a lost cause.”

  He and twelve others are proving daily in Charlotte that there are no lost causes. Moore Place will offer the possibility of transformation to eighty-five others. Their collective chance for change will offer inspiration and hope not only to those seeking housing but more importantly, to the housed among us who once believed the homeless were hopeless.

  I sent up a little prayer as I pressed send.

  Although we were focused on fundraising, the resistance from the neighborhood association around our junkyard had not gone away. Throughout that summer we attended city and neighborhood meetings, trying to change sentiment, but it wasn’t working.

  In late July 2009, I checked my e-mail and couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was a message from a church in the neighborhood that wanted to help:

  [We] recently heard that the property across the street from us has been purchased by the Urban Ministry Center. We are thrilled about that and hope we can partner with whatever is going on there in the future.

  I knew the church because it was directly across the street from our junkyard purchase. It didn’t look like a traditional church—just a simple cement building that I had driven past a hundred times. It felt almost too good to be true—a friend in the neighborhood? A group of people who claimed to be thrilled we were building there?

  It was a hot southern summer day when I showed up at the church, but I was sweating for other reasons. I needed this to go well. After all the neighborhood meetings where people had been unpleasant, even hostile, I worried I was being set up for confrontation.

  As promised, however, it was just the pastor and two friendly church members who greeted me. We sat down awkwardly in kid-sized chairs in a classroom. The happy sounds of a children’s summer Bible camp spilled in from the room next door. After exchanging introductions, I brought out our brochures with the drawings of Moore Place in hopes of convincing them they had nothing to fear or protest. I was desperate to assure this congregation that their new neighbors would be like Coleman—good people who needed a chance.

  “You don’t need to convince us,” the pastor said. “We already want to help. We did an all-church read of a book and it was very powerful.”

  I was amazed—an entire congregation wanting to work together on homelessness? It was a small church with seemingly limited resources, so I was even more impressed that they wanted to give back so generously.

  “Wow—that’s great,” I said. “What was the book?”

  “Same Kind of Different As Me,” he replied.

  Of course it was.

  Both Dale and my sister Louise laughed when I told them.

  “Kathy, you cannot make this up!” Louise said over the phone. “You are on some kind of cosmic journey! You better start writing all this down!”

  I sent Lisa Saunders a simple e-mail that night: God showed off again today.

  Once I was looking and listening, it seemed God was everywhere.

  I had not talked to Scott Mercer much since we had paired him with Coleman, but we needed more help raising money. With a vested interest in one of our Homeless to Homes residents, I hoped Scott might be willing to be on the team asking for corporate and private donations. We met at a pancake house and talked so much about Coleman and their friendship, we barely got around to the Moore Place Capital Campaign.

  “Coleman had dinner at our house a couple of months ago, and I served him some of my special BBQ sauce,” Scott told me.

  “‘Scott, this is so good you should sell it,’ Coleman told me. And so we are!” Scott announced.

  He proudly showed me a photo of the new joint venture with Coleman. A red, white, and blue bottle of BBQ sauce with the label reading, “EC’s Home BBQ Sauce—The taste that brings you home.”

  They had already started bottling and were looking for retailers to carry their product. Scott told me the kicker. “Coleman wants to give the proceeds to the Urban Ministry Center for all they’ve done for him.”

  Scott confided he believed he was destined to meet Coleman. They’d formed a family bond much like Denver Moore and Ron Hall’s.

  We were talking so much that I almost forgot why I had asked Scott to meet. As he was hurrying out, I put a Moore Place brochure in Scott’s hands and asked if he would help raise money. The brochure had been created by two of my advertising friends, Julie Marr and Arkon Stewart. The pages featured three people—a doctor, Jane Harrell, telling the story of how housing was vital to health; a district attorney, telling the story of how housing prevented misuse of community tax dollars; and Coleman, telling his story of the transformative power of housing.

  Scott quickly flipped through the pages and agreed to connect later on the details. That afternoon, I opened this e-mail from Scott:

  Kathy,

  You are never going to believe this. When we were looking at the brochure this morning, I missed a page and testimonial from my physician, Dr. Jane Harrell. We have a special connection because due to her intuition and diligence, she diagnosed me with early stage prostate cancer. At my fairly youthful age (by medical standards), most patients my age would not have been screened. In effect, Dr. Harrell saved me from a much worse outcome. The truth be known, I will always credit Dr. Harrell with saving my life. We have talked about this openly, and we have talked about my “paper route,” and she feels strongly that she was guided to have me screened for a greater purpose in my life.

  You should have seen my face when I looked through the brochure again this morning upon returning to my office from our breakfast and seeing Dr. Harrell’s testimonial just one page behind Coleman’s. It really gave me chills. I can’t
wait to share with Jane on my next checkup. She will be blown away when she finds out that I was paired with Coleman in your program!

  Scotty

  It was beyond coincidence. I hadn’t even known Dr. Jane Harrell when we put her in the brochure. She was helping start a clinic at the UMC, and Dale had suggested she present the medical perspective in our brochure. Neither of us knew she had any connection to Scott Mercer or Coleman.

  I could no longer be surprised working on this project. Now, anytime there was a God-instance, I just looked straight up and whispered thank you.

  It was September 14, 2009. I had been watching the calendar all month and the clock all day. Susan Patterson with the Knight Foundation had told me the vote would be today. Our campaign was stuck at just under $6 million, and we needed a boost. The million dollars they were voting on would not only push us past the critical halfway mark but also signal to other foundations and donors that we were legitimate. All of the work on that master’s thesis of an application came down to today.

  I stared at the phone on my desk, willing it to ring. Willing it to bring good news.

  When it did ring, I was afraid to answer because a no would be too devastating.

  “Kathy, they voted,” Susan began. I could imagine her bright red hair and stylish black glasses.

  “The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is pleased to award Moore Place a grant of $1 million.”

  Relief overwhelmed me. It seemed that heart-and-head argument I had written had worked. All the meetings, all the cups of coffee, and the grant requests were finally starting to pay off. We now had $6,997,000 of the $10 million we needed. Susan suggested we hold a press conference to announce how far we had come and ask the public to help us raise the final $3 million.

  We were already excited about announcing our success to date when the senior pastor at Scott Mercer’s church—Myers Park Presbyterian—telephoned Dale. The church wanted to contribute in a big way and reveal it during the live press conference, Monday, October 19, 2009. Dale added him to the program.

  That morning I helped set up one hundred chairs in the old train depot. We had no idea if anyone would come, but friends and donors started arriving a little before 10:00 a.m., easily filling the room. The depot was buzzing with excitement when Jane Harrell, Scott’s lifesaving doctor pictured in our fundraising brochure, hurried over to me. Her wispy blond hair was pulled back, and under her coat she wore her blue physician’s scrubs, having just come from a free clinic for the UMC. I assumed she was coming for the press conference.

  “Don’t think I’m crazy,” she began. “I just can’t sleep. God keeps telling me to do this so now I’m doing it.”

  With that, Jane shoved a plain white envelope in my hand, turned around, and disappeared out the door. Confused by what all that meant, I watched Jane as she headed to her car. Although I was incredibly curious about her message to me, the press conference was about to begin, so I slipped the envelope into my pocket for later.

  By the time we got started, the train depot was overflowing—standing room only. The program began with Coleman and Scott each sharing a little about how they met and what a difference they had made in each other’s life. Next up were representatives from Wells Fargo and the Charlotte Housing Authority. Then Dale introduced Steve Eason, the pastor from Scott’s church.

  With an impassioned speech, Steve spoke as if giving a Sunday morning sermon, not a press conference. His plea was powerful, but Reverend Eason’s final line was the most compelling, addressing all that Charlotte had lost in the past few years due to the failing economy and the loss of the two big banks as our civic centerpieces. “We can live in a community that has lost jobs or even lost businesses,” he said, “but we can’t live in a community that has lost compassion.”

  His big finish was a surprise announcement. Myers Park Presbyterian Church was giving $250,000 to the Moore Place campaign—part of it as a challenge grant encouraging other churches to give. The church would give us $150,000 up front, and $100,000 more if fifty other churches gave something as well. Reverend Eason was calling upon the faith community to collectively declare that the homeless were worthy of support.

  It was out-of-the-box thinking that a church would give such a large gift—and recruit fifty other houses of faith to join this campaign. My heart pounded as I did the math in my head: we were now almost at $7.25 million—under $3 million to go. Everyone in the room seemed to know this was huge news.

  It was the best kind of feel-good story, one that would make the news on all four local stations and the front page of the newspaper the next day.

  Leaving the press conference, I was ecstatic. This impossible dream was within reach.

  Reaching into my coat pocket for my car keys, I found Jane’s envelope. Remembering her words, I wondered what God had kept telling her to do and ripped open her envelope. There was no note, no explanation.

  Just a check to Moore Place for $10,000.

  twenty-one

  BLESS AND MULTIPLY THIS SMALL AMOUNT

  Sometimes beautiful things come into our lives out of nowhere. We can’t always understand them, but we have to trust in them. I know you want to question everything, but sometimes it pays to just have a little faith.

  —Lauren Kate1

  Jane Harrell’s check was one of many gifts that seemed to drop from heaven that autumn.

  The good press coverage gave us a huge boost. Gifts came in all sizes, from a children’s lemonade stand that raised $105 to yet another check for $10,000 from a woman I’d never met. She offered no explanation of who she was or why she sent it.

  By far the most mysterious gift, however, came from someone I began calling our Mailbox Angel.

  Her first gift arrived when I was checking for mail at the UMC desk, which is a Grand Central Station kind of operation. Hundreds of Charlotte’s homeless people use 945 North College Street, our address, as their place of residence to receive checks or communicate with family. Thousands of letters are sorted each week by volunteers and put into cardboard boxes labeled A–B, C–D, E–H, and so on.

  Staff mail arrives at the center with this landslide of communication. Oftentimes a volunteer, not recognizing Izard as an employee, would put my mail in the Neighbors’ box. Because of this common occurrence, I made a habit of not only checking my staff slot in the back but also sorting through the big box of Neighbors’ mail. Sure enough, one day I found a pastel envelope with my name on it that did look like a Neighbor letter from home resting in the I–L box.

  I took it back to my office and turned it over. There was a return address in Charlotte but no identified sender. Just my name and the UMC address on a small pink envelope. Tearing it open, I found a greeting card inside, like one a grandmother would buy: soft colors and pictures of violets. My mother would never buy this kind. She routinely went for the Peanuts and humor cards. When I opened the card, the mystery deepened when a $10 bill fell out. Under the preprinted message was this handwritten note:

  May God Bless and Multiply this small amount.

  That was it. No signature. No clue.

  The next month another pastel envelope arrived. Again there was no name with the return address. Just a card, a $5 bill, and the message:

  May God Bless and Multiply this small amount.

  The next month, another. Someone liked Hallmark as much as my mom. Each card held a different amount but the same blessing of the gift.

  I started to profile my benevolent giver. A woman, I was certain. I imagined soft gray hair framing the face of an elderly, Oprah-like saint who saved up her spare dollar bills each month to send to us. I wanted to meet her and tell her that her gift gave me outsized hope each time an envelope arrived. The idea that someone I had never met would give to our cause in this way made me feel I wasn’t crazy to dream this at all. Maybe a higher power was spreading the message far more convincingly than Dale and I ever could.

  It seemed our Mailbox Angel’s prayer was taking hold—the small
amounts were being multiplied, and they were adding up significantly, moving us toward $8 million.

  Dale took to the phones to advance the Myers Park Presbyterian church-challenge grant announced at our press conference. Having been a minister in Charlotte for decades, he had an extensive network to call upon. Dale reached out to pastors from every house of faith to let their congregations know we needed them. He was persuasive. Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian, and Jewish congregations joined the Presbyterians at every level. Some collected specific offerings for Moore Place, and we received the day’s collection. Odd amounts, like $1,516 from St. Ann’s Catholic or $2,351 from Avondale Presbyterian. Others gave thousands of dollars from their own capital campaigns, including $30,000 from mine, Christ Church, and $75,000 from Myers Park United Methodist in honor of a church member who had once been homeless.

  With churches, foundations, and families donating, we had so much momentum that I asked a friend, Jan Shealy, to help me track it all. By November 23, 2009, only a month after our press conference, we had received checks and pledges totaling $8,116,000. Only $1,884,000 to go.

  “Mom, get off the phone!” Maddie told me.

  We were driving to the mountains for the holiday weekend, and I checked my cell at every stoplight. A reporter from the Observer was going to call me for a Thanksgiving article he was writing on Moore Place. The lead angle was that we had raised nearly a million dollars in the month since our press conference.

  While I was glad for the publicity, I was nervous about the impact. A million dollars in one month was a huge story, but I didn’t want people to think we didn’t need their gifts. We still had a long way to go—almost $2 million. It was going to take another breakthrough gift like the Knight Foundation’s to make this happen.

  My cell phone rang in the car, and Emma grabbed it away. “Mom, it’s Thanksgiving!”

  “I know, but this could be important! What’s the number?” She read it aloud, and I didn’t recognize it.