Organizing Shelter During COVID-19: An Interview with Zach Johnson
In this series, Abby Rampone interviews CTA members about their responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Listen to CTA Executive Director Zach Johnson discuss his longtime work with homeless folks in Minneapolis shelters and his effort to support an organizing project that would demand better conditions even after the pandemic ends.
Transcript
Abby: Could you start out by telling us a little bit of background about yourself and the work you’ve been doing on an ongoing basis?
Zach: Sure, yeah. So I’ve been working in shelters for about ten years now, a little over ten years, and the only break in that action was when I first started with CTA for the first like year and a half, I only did CTA, and then I got a job back at the shelters, so I came to CTA from shelters and now I’m back there. So that is really where I feel vocationally called to be, in shelters. For all sorts of different reasons. Mostly I think when I was discerning priesthood, it felt like shelters were the way- with the discernment that I was feeling that I thought was the priesthood was actually to be in shelter with people experiencing extreme poverty.
So the job that I have now before the crisis was doing outreach in the shelters, particularly for veterans in the shelters, to try to connect them with any resources that they had. There’s five shelters in Minneapolis and I would do inreach in those five shelters and between all five there’s probably fifteen hundred beds, 1,500 beds of shelter, and there’s maybe like 5,000 people looking for those beds on any given night, probably more than that, the people who are doing couch surfing, that sort of thing. So I would do inreach to all those shelters, try to find folks, connect them with whatever resources we could find and then them walk them through the process until they got stably housed, whatever that meant for them. That was mostly the work beforehand.
Abby: So could you talk a little bit about how the coronavirus crisis has changed things and about the projects that you’re working on in light of that crisis?
Zach: Yeah. So the crisis itself- as soon as the crisis hit, everybody started wondering about big congregate site shelters or congregate site places like jails, hospitals, shelters. And there was really no consensus among decision-makers about what they were gonna do with people in shelters, so the two main shelters that I work at have about 500 beds and 300 beds respectively, so they make up the majority of the shelter population. And those were the two big priorities, to empty those out as fast as possible before the virus started spreading. And so there was talk about things that would never have been on the table were suddenly open for discussion. Occupying foreclosed homes, taking over school dormitories now that schools all got emptied out, or what ended up happening was the city placed people in hotels across the county.
So that’s where people are. Right now there’s two, about to be three hotels where all of the folks in those two big shelters or most of the folks in those two big shelters have been transferred. So there’s probably like 500 people total who are now in, spread across two hotels. So most of my work has been supporting the rest of my team as they transfer people from one site to another and then suddenly staffing the shelter of like 300 people. My team has been doing a lot of the staffing, my role has been trying to find out how the hotels don’t replicate the worst parts of shelter, namely the isolation and the punitiveness, the patronizing way that shelters often treat people, trying to not replicate that as we create a shelter within a span of a week. You know, usually that takes like ten years to open a new shelter from idea of, the first idea to getting people in. We did it in a week. So there’s a real opportunity here to do it better.
So one of the things we’re trying to do is have tenants or residents of the shelters organize themselves, manage themselves effectively, make demands for themselves effectively before a functional staffing model can be set up, namely like before the county hires a whole bunch of people to come in and like impose rules and things like that. Right now the whole shelter is staffed by like one to two people at a time, so right now the residents are managing themselves, they just- we’re not like explicit about it. So the work I’m trying to do is to surface that responsibility and accountability, the autonomy that the residents actually have by finding computers, phones, ways of connecting residents as they’re quarantined in the hotel rooms from each other, connecting them so that they can all realize like, that this is actually where they want to be in the long run, this hotel is better than the shelters, they don’t want to go back. So the demand in the long run is probably gonna be like, don’t ever close this hotel down, turn it into housing for us rather than a $250 a night hotel.
Abby: I think that does- that answers my next question in a way but maybe you’d want to talk about that a little bit more, which was about why this work is like especially important right now. I think that from the interview that I did with Angela I heard about challenges and opportunities and I’m seeing that in your description, too, of this project, so maybe if you could talk a little bit about that?
Zach: Yeah, I think that’s a good framing, challenges and opportunities. I think the way that capitalism functions as it moves at a status quo, steady steady steady, until its own internal contradictions cause a crisis and a breakdown, I think that’s kind of what’s happening here. The coronavirus is the spark that ignited something that was already ready to blow, like the structure. The homeless structure and system that we have here was brittle, not working. It would have collapsed under any points of stress, so it obviously collapsed here with this big stressful moment. And when things collapse, there’s an opportunity like I kind of described to make things better.
Like suddenly people are not in shelters that were literally modeled after jails, like the furniture in the shelters is from- they bought used jail furniture. Suddenly they’re in hotel rooms and there’s king-sized beds and there’s mattresses and housekeeping, which is now staffed by shelters. But there’s an opportunity to do all of that, like make life radically better for people in the span of weeks. And I think that’s possible in a crisis in a way that it would never have been a month ago. It feels like now is the time to really think boldly and creatively about how we can respond immediately to the material needs of the people as they are right now but then also to think six months, twelve months from now, what are the opportunities, whenever this immediate season of the crisis like starts to ebb and people they’ll desire to return to normal, whatever that was, there’s gonna be particular points of struggle. I think thinking about what those are right now is the work, the opportunity of this crisis.
Abby: Yeah, wow, that’s a really good framing, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that this final question is pretty critical, which is, how does your identity as a Catholic inform your response to both the coronavirus crisis and the ongoing crisis of homeless and the inadequacy of the shelter system and obviously the intersections of those two right now?
Zach: Well, this is the ongoing question, as long as I’m with CTA, this is like front and center, and I think it’s maybe as simple as… it’s not just the preferential option for the poor. The way that I think about Catholicism, it’s like a preferential option for margin, you know, like, re-centering anything that gets marginalized. So in this context, it’s obviously economic and social poverty is marginalized, but also in the homeless population, you know, like white supremacy’s really relevant, heteronormativity’s really elevated there, trans people are overrepresented, youth are overrepresented, old people are overrepresented, you can just sort of see that the people who are least represented in the shelter population are labor-able white men. I mean, they’re there, but the age of people who are able to do most kinds of jobs, they’re the ones who are least represented. So I think Catholicism has me look for the margins and try to re-center them. So in the homeless crisis, it’s trying to re-center the people who are overrepresented in the solutions.
But, you know, there’s also like, I think Catholicism does something beyond just having a liberation framing to political struggles. I think it also has given a learned habit of trusting ritual, trusting consistency, because this work is long and hard and success and progress is really hard to identify a lot of times, so I think the ingrained belief that ritual is the way that you practice something authentically, like ritualizing the work, I think allows me to sustain it. And then probably the sacraments from Catholicism are really still useful, that’s connected to the ritual part, but the idea that just some things are holy and they should be celebrated and acknowledged as being holy, I think that’s also really useful in the work of homelessness. They can’t all be reduced to a political question. Some things really are just holy because they’re shared and universal across time and space. Sacraments I think are things that connect us to each other across time and space. All people throughout all history.
