The arms that wrap around Norman’s hungry and homeless
Head north on Jenkins Avenue from Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium — past the ongoing $160 million construction project to make more luxurious the Palace on the Prairie; past the bronze statues of Sooner football greats whose successes have helped bring the university fame and fortune; past the $50 million Sarkeys Energy Center where some of the state’s leading minds study how to extract more wealth from this state’s soil.
Three minutes and less than a mile away, the campus’ bucolic bubble bursts. Here, near the railroad tracks, is where Norman’s often hidden hungry and homeless find temporary peace and comfort: Food and Shelter for Friends.
Roughly 18 percent of Norman’s total population of 120,000 lived below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau as of 2015.
Food and Shelter’s mission, according to executive director April Heiple, is to feed people who are hungry, wrap arms around people who are lost and alone and help them find their way. The nonprofit organization offers short-term, long-term and temporary housing options as well as breakfast and lunch seven days a week.
The need for Food and Shelter is even greater as outside temperatures drop and people try to stay warm, according to Heiple. Due to the larger number of people needing shelter, the dining room is opened up to be a make-shift shelter.
Heiple said the organization gears up for the transition every November, and although the make-shift shelter is temporary, it’s necessary because there are some very vulnerable people on the streets.
“Even temperatures as low as 45 to 40 degrees overnight can be very dangerous for them, especially if they are in it for an extended period of time,” Heiple said.
The next few days and into the weekend the temperature is projected to hit lows between 32 and 38 degrees Farenheit, according to the National Weather Channel.
“Food and Shelter is the only place in town they can go where they won’t be run off,” Heiple said.
O n any given day, 10 to 15 new people show up to Food and Shelter who say have nowhere to go, Heiple said. It could be a single individual or a family. She said the first goal is to find an emergency solution. Food and Shelter doesn’t own an emergency shelter, so the organization refers to Salvation Army in Norman. However, Heiple said that’s a very small shelter; they only have 11 beds, while there are hundreds of people homeless in Norman.
Heiple said that if they can’t find a solution there or through someone’s personal contacts, family or friends, then Food and Shelter provides motel stays.
“This is a very expensive shelter option, but right now that’s our only option because we don’t allow (families with) children to sleep outside or in their cars,” Heiple said.
Of the majority of people who come to Food and Shelter, Heiple said they just need to get back into their own housing. She said all they need is a bit of assistance, which is accomplished through the organization’s transitional housing, meant to be used from three to six months.
“Well over 80 percent are going to fall into that category where homelessness is episodic. It’s not chronic,” she said. “They go back and live fine on their own and never come back again.”
Heiple said the organization owns and operates seven transitional housing units, as well as six units that operate as long-term supportive housing specifically for families. Food and Shelter is working on expanding its housing options at a new location to be opened in summer 2017, Heiple said.
With both short- and long-term housing, individuals and families work with case managers, someone who helps them determine what is needed to overcome obstacles they might face.
“A significant majority of those people will be able to do that in the amount of time that we have with them, and go on and do fine,” Heiple said.
But there are people dealing with maybe an untreated addiction, mental illness or no job skills or situations that wouldn’t allow for them to live on their own, according to Heiple. For that specific group, Food and Shelter has 10 single-bed apartments that it rents.
In addition, Food and Shelter works to intervene in homelessness before it happens.
“It’s very expensive to rehouse somebody once they become homeless, so we have a homelessness prevention program where we try to work with as many people as possible that would encounter someone on the brink of homelessness,” she said.
Heiple said the average age group the organization helps falls between 35–44.
“Every year that seems to be getting younger,” Heiple said. “When I first started here it was higher than that. It’s always alarming to me to see young people becoming homeless, because once it gets into your system that hopelessness sets in.”
People come into Food and Shelter for one reason or another because most of them are broken, said Sunny Hill, the food services director for almost one year.
“They all have a story, but they won’t be mended,” Hill said. “We don’t mend people well anymore — we patch really well, but we don’t mend our society in general.”
Food and Shelter draws in the most people who are in need of food and companionship, too. The dining room — normally filled with four long tables, seating 12 each — has about 60 people during breakfast and around 200 or more people during lunch, Heiple said.
Last month there was an average of 258 people per day, which is an unduplicated number, meaning the total meal count was over 400 or 500 per day, according to Heiple. She said there are times people come in for breakfast and leave and go to work, times people only come for lunch and times people stay for both.
Hill is the only paid and trained chef, who is also a master gardener, according to Heiple.
“She is a wizard at cooking and serving delicious, healthy meals with virtually anything we have in our pantry,” Heiple said. “It’s totally like what you see in ‘Chopped.’ You don’t know what your ingredients are going to be on any given day, but she can make something delicious out of all of it. She’s a magician in my opinion.”
Hill plans the menu, organizes the kitchen and then delegates tasks to volunteers, such as cooking, serving and cleaning.
“I get to come in every day, and I don’t know what I’m going to make for lunch when I walk in the door at 6:30 in the morning ; I have no idea,” Hill said. “And I love that.”
She doesn’t know what came from the community the day before, but she has an idea of basic supplies the kitchen has and what she might be able to make of it, Hill said.
She said the Norman community is very supportive, and the donations never stop. Hill knows other shelters and soup kitchens that are not as well supported as Food and Shelter. Hill said Norman has always been generous, even back in the '80s.
“People truly take volunteering and giving back to their community seriously here,” Hill said.
Hill’s favorite thing to do at work is cook a nice meal on Sundays. Ideally, she likes to cook a baked chicken with potatoes, but she said the people just want simple decent food.
“The most popular is always Mexican (food) or hamburgers and hot dogs. Believe it or not — awful stuff, but that’s what they love,” Hill said.
Normally, there are eight to 10 volunteers in the kitchen every day, Heiple said, who show up around 10 a.m. and chop onions, stir pasta, peel potatoes, open cans of soup or (help with) whatever the meal is going to be that day. The organization also uses reusable plates and cups.
Food and Shelter’s biggest volunteer pool helps in the kitchen because one person couldn’t manage all of it, Heiple said. She said there are about eight to 10 volunteers who come on any given day and that it is lucky to have them.
Tish Marek, an Enid, Oklahoma, native and Food and Shelter’s past president, started volunteering at Food and Shelter after her daughter asked for an extra hand almost seven years ago. After that day, Marek never stopped going, and she even brought her husband along.
“We just enjoyed it so much because we recognize how humbling it was for a lot of the people that go through there,” Marek said. “But just their gratitude for (us volunteers) taking our time to do that for them was nice to see.”
Marek volunteers with a group from St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church on the third Friday of every month. The group always brings stir-fry.
“When we get out of our car, everybody there — all the guests there — are like, ‘Oh my God, stir-fry!” Marek said. “They get so excited, and they’re always like, “Tell the old ladies that cook it, thank you and how much we appreciate it. This is our favorite meal during the whole month.’”
Marek said it’s one of the most rewarding and fulfilling opportunities she’s been able to enjoy.
Whether by distance or family circumstance, the state of being homeless or hungry is closer to some than many people fathom.
Heiple grew up in Chickasha, Oklahoma, with two parents who were as good as they could possibly be, she said, until one day a severe mental illness overtook her father.
She said he disappeared and lived homeless and in and out of mental hospitals for a long time.
“I grew up in that. That was just part of my life; I just knew that existed, and it was always in the back of my head,” she said.
Heiple went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in psychology and her master’s in public administration. While getting her master’s, she worked as the director of development at Positive Tomorrows, a school devoted to educating homeless children in Oklahoma City. As she drove to work each day, she passed through all of the men and women who lived on the streets.
“I would ignore them,” she said. “Every day I would just do everything I could to just not have to look at them.”
But one day on the way to her office, something struck Heiple differently.
“I was sitting in my car … and I look over, and there’s this man sitting on this bench … I just looked at him, and almost kind of in this deeply spiritual way I could see my dad sitting there, and my heart broke that he was somebody’s dad,” she said.
Heiple said she immediately thought that these people were somebody’s mom, brother, sister, aunt, uncle or child.
Although Heiple’s father finally found the help he needed to live the last 10 years of his life housed and functional, she said, “It just broke my heart that there were all of these people that we had decided were not worth investing in.”
Shortly after, someone called her telling her that Food and Shelter was hiring a director and wanted her to come talk to the board.
“I said, ‘OK. Give me the job. I don’t even care how much it pays. I’m going,” she said. “I knew from that first phone call that this is where I was supposed to go.”
For Marek, she understands the difficulty of just getting by and living a life paycheck to paycheck. She said she and her husband, Ed, did it all by themselves, but not without help.
Marek’s parents didn’t have any money, but what little they had they used to help her and her family. Though, Marek relied mostly on commodities when her husband was teaching in Norman in the ‘80s.
“I knew that if anything major happened, we would have been in a lot of trouble. We would have been destitute,” she said. “I never could understand why a teacher in Oklahoma was faced with having to get commodities.”
Then she thought about all the other people who have to rely on Food and Shelter.
“It just makes me feel good that we can help them somehow have hope that things are going to get better for them,” Marek said. “But the key is they have to want to, and they have to do it. They have to get back up and start all over.”
“You don’t have to (care about them). You can go on all your life thinking, ‘Well you know, that’s someone else’s problem,’ Marek said. “I just feel good that I know that I’m helping people that either don’t know where to go or what to do, and it’s just a matter of giving them the information and giving them hope.”
