The Marquette Journal

“Praise the Lord, it’s good to see you!” someone exclaims as a woman walks through the front door of the Repairers of the Breach homeless shelter.

Her name is Dorothy Jackson, the former manager of the shelter, and she has come to gather members of the Breach choir for the Saturday afternoon rehearsal next door in the clinic.

Through her thick-framed glasses, Dorothy smiles lovingly at the dozens of people who sit in rows of chairs along the tiled floor, finishing their lunch on white Styrofoam plates. For some, this may be their only meal of the day.

The smell of chicken noodle soup from the Crock-Pots in the pantry lingers in the air. Except for a few plastic forks clicking against plates, the room is quiet, and Dorothy makes her announcement in a soft but clear voice.

“Hello everyone. Once you finish your meals, choir rehearsal will take place next door in the clinic. Anyone can come if they’re interested.”

With another smile, she turns, and her black dress sways as she walks out the door.

In the back room of the clinic at 1335 W. Vliet St., old examination tables are pushed to the walls, and a semicircle of blue chairs faces an electronic piano.

Some ceiling panels are cracked and stained, and the paint on the wall peels like old, dry skin.

In a short time, 12 members join Dorothy in the clinic and take their seats in the semicircle according to their vocal range.

Eagerness fills the room as several voices read through the day’s songs, practicing the lyrics and warming up their voices.

A tall middle-aged man wearing a gray suit jacket with tan dress pants sings in a quivering tenor reminiscent of Elvis Presley. His salt-and-pepper hair is curled back into a wave, and his lip snarls as he mouths out the words on the page in front of him.

At the piano stands Arlene Skwierawski, a renowned Milwaukee music instructor who worked with inner city youth during the 1967 civil disorder.

Arlene looks down at her sheet music, and her fingers begin to flutter across the keys.

The choir sits erect and falls silent, watching for conductor and local musician K.C. Williams to begin singing.

K.C. is animated, exaggerating each word with his mouth and signaling each change in tone with his hands. His dark eyes glow as he moves from person to person, listening to their voice match his.

Prompted by his motions, the small choir comes alive in song and previously quiet voices sing with confidence.

They begin with the traditional form of “Go Tell it on the Mountain.”

Go tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere,
Go tell it on the mountain,
that Jesus Christ is born.

Then K.C. motions to Arlene, and her fingers flutter faster, like tiny beating wings. The music unfolds into a bluesy beat that awakens the choir. Their feet tap as they sing, and the music seems to flow through their bodies and fill the rest of the room.

Go, and tell it on the mountain
Go now!
And tell it on the mountain
Go!
And tell it on the mountain
That Jesus—
That Jesus—
That Jesus Christ is born!

As they sing, the choir grows comfortable with the words, looking up from their pages toward one another. From across the ends of the semicircle, the sopranos and the tenors exchange glances as if sharing a secret only they know and understand. They nod, smile and sing louder, perhaps acknowledging that the secret is meant for all to hear.

Homeless Helping the Homeless

Tony Lee, the late co-founder of Repairers of the Breach, believed in the homeless.

“Not only do homeless people have the solutions to homelessness, they are the solutions,” he said in 1989 when he began the newspaper that would eventually expand to develop a headquarters that is now Milwaukee’s only daytime homeless shelter.

Lee was a Vietnam War veteran who returned from the war homeless and addicted to heroin. A life-changing encounter with another homeless person encouraged him to break his addiction and repair his life. From then until his death in 1996, Lee dedicated himself to creating a means for homeless people to communicate and reach out to each other.

Based on the grassroots idea that the homeless can lead and empower each other, Repairers of the Breach developed a model of service to the homeless that hadn’t been tried in Milwaukee before.

Additionally, the shelter sustains itself through private funding and donations and has never relied on the government for aid.

It is purely the people’s shelter, something Repairers of the Breach Executive Director MacCanon Brown is deeply proud of.

Open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday, the shelter serves between 130 to 150 homeless adults each day and considers them members of their community, rather than mere clients.

This approach prevails throughout the organization, helping to restore the human dignity of the entire community while enabling the homeless to better face their struggles and work their way back to mainstream society.

In the living room of the shelter, Repairers of the Breach offers free classes on résumé building, job interviews and personal development.

Following their motto of the “homeless helping the homeless,” many volunteers at the shelter were previously homeless or are currently working their way out of homeless situations.

According to the organization’s website, every month 15 to 25 homeless members make significant improvements toward securing employment and housing, entering treatment programs, reaching new levels of education or finding greater family reunification.

In fall 2009, Repairers of the Breach began a campaign to raise $640,000 as the final part of a $2 million effort to renovate and expand the shelter. Just after the New Year, the shelter began construction to add an elevator, stairs and a sunroom and make repairs to the unusable apartments on the second and third floors.

The expansion will allow the shelter to use this space to provide more room for services like women’s groups, clothing distribution, educational classes and drug rehabilitation.

Even through the construction in the cold winter months, the shelter continues its programs in the cramped first floor storefronts.

And each week, three to five members find housing, jobs or both: evidence of breaches being repaired.

Clean Clothes, Clean Dignity

Through the cracks in the floorboards, the choir sings its secrets to the basement of the shelter.

It is just past 1 p.m. on a frigid Saturday in October, and guests are still making the short, squeaky march down the basement stairs to get clothing and toiletries.

At the foot of the stairs, an old man named Percy reclines in a chair, handing out clear plastic bags to guests, lightly tapping his toe and singing an old blues tune under his breath.

Behind him, several volunteers from the shelter and Marquette sit at three long tables with neat rows of donated bras, underwear, T-shirts, trial-sized shampoo, soap, body wash, razor blades and shaving cream.

In the other basement room is a rack full of men’s and women’s shoes, some lightly worn, while others are left without shoelaces. There are long metal poles full of clothes dangling from hangers, and a twisted pile of unused hangers sticks out in the far corner of the room.

A fluorescent light above the racks of women’s shirts and pants winks on and off as the voices of the Breach choir faintly radiate through the floorboards in the ceiling.

When the “Boston Store” officially opens at noon, many guests make their way through the clothing racks hanging from the ceiling and exposed pipes.

MacCanon Brown arrives just after noon and makes her way through the basement, greeting the guests, workers and volunteers.

“I can’t find 31’s,” a man says, thumbing through a rack of jeans hanging from a metal pole. He pulls out a pair, takes it off the hanger and unfolds it over his legs.

Brown stops and leans on her cane, looking over at the man. She tells him to keep looking, and he will find the pair he needs.

She turns away to say hello to a woman resting on a folding chair beside a broken electric organ, and the man exclaims:

“Hey! 31’s! I found them!”

Brown turns back to him and beams.

“Well, praise the Lord,” she says, lifting up her free hand to the ceiling.

Brown then walks to a locked wooden door with the word “Shop,” scrawled on its body in faded black lettering. After searching for the correct key as she leans her cane against the wall, Brown opens the door to a small musty room with boxes and black bags filling the floor. In the back, there is a tall stack of sleeping bags donated to the shelter to give out to the homeless during the winter.

With help from a couple of volunteers, Brown produces three boxes full of unopened packages of socks, underwear and white undershirts.

Although there is only enough for just four socks, two shirts and two pairs of underwear per person, guests come with excitement wrapped around their fingers as they clutch the clear plastic bags to carry their clothes.

Brown says it is very important for the homeless to have nice clothes. It helps maintain a sense of their dignity.

She speaks of a time when a group of directors from a Chicago homeless shelter came to Repairers of the Breach for a tour. Upon seeing only clean people wearing nice clothing, they asked where the homeless were.

Homeless people, they said, weren’t supposed to be like this — equals, that is.

Still Hungry for More

MacCanon Brown is no stranger to struggle.

Almost 20 years ago, Brown found herself alone after leaving her home state of Iowa, in search of a more fulfilling life in Milwaukee.

When in Milwaukee, Brown tried to live as an artist and intellectual, holding a small job to pay her bills. However, she also tried to avoid community — something she needed to grow spiritually.

After a few months, Brown had less and less money to spend on food and was barely scraping by on the little money she made. In desperation, she started going to the community meals held at St. Benedict the Moor’s at 1015 N. 9th St.

All of a sudden, she was vulnerable and very nearly homeless.

During the evening meals, Brown found the community she thought she didn’t need —ß with the poor, the homeless and the church volunteers providing the meals.

There she met Father Chester, a leader at St. Benedict’s who, according to Brown, later said “something came over him” the moment he met her. From that point on, Father Chester took Brown to the homeless shelters across Milwaukee almost daily.

As Father Chester, who has since passed away, continued to reveal to her the state of the impoverished and homeless in Milwaukee, Brown said she began to “feel something in her bones,” too.

Brown recalls thanking God for sparing her from homelessness during her time of financial struggle and asking him to use her in any way to help the poor and homeless in Milwaukee.

She never could have foretold how God would lead her to where she is today.

With a passion for the homeless growing within her, Brown received a scholarship to the Benedict Institute of Milwaukee from Father Chester. There she took a class focused on urban ministry, fostering her growth as a spiritual leader.

Where God led her in 1990 was a small newspaper led by a mere 12 people that focused on telling the stories of Milwaukee’s homeless and formerly homeless. The paper heard of her past experience as a writer and reporter in Iowa and asked her to join.

The name of that small paper was “Repairers of the Breach.”

Mary Maley, former president of the Repairers of the Breach board, said the paper had only $50 in its account when it began in 1989.

“From then on, it was a walk of faith. Week by week, month by month, we built this organization,” Brown said.

Soon after joining, Brown became president and editor of the newspaper.

With her help, Tony Lee’s vision of creating a shelter governed by the homeless became a reality in 1994. The shelter took its name from the newspaper.

Although Lee passed away not long after the shelter became reality, Repairers of the Breach continues to pursue Lee’s mission to provide a place for the homeless to govern themselves and to be encouraged and enabled.

However, the shelter has met much opposition along the way.

Since the shelter first opened, it has moved three times before it finally found a home at 1335 W. Vliet St.

In each place, Brown said neighbors complained that the homeless brought crime and drugs to their neighborhoods.

Faced with no place to go, the shelter received its current building as an anonymous donation.

“Our people are stigmatized and misunderstood,” Brown said. “We also have challenges of crisis. In any one day, you will find people who are in any kind of crisis.”

However, Brown counters external opposition and internal crisis in much the same way: she invites people in.

Brown said she invites the opponents of the shelter to visit and see exactly what they are doing for the city’s impoverished and homeless.

For Brown, who converted to Catholicism before joining Repairers of the Breach, her faith remains central to her life, and she continues to seek God through all she does.

“I say my search is not over,” Brown said. “I’m still hungry for more.”

Brown said her dream for the future of Repairers of the Breach is that it could expand to other cities where help is needed.

For herself, Brown hopes to become a part of the daily miracles that take place at the shelter as they bring people into empowerment — even in the midst of crisis and adversity.

“My life is woven into the homeless and theirs is woven into mine,” Brown said. “I’m, down deep, happy.”

Courage in Scripture

Derrick stands just inside the clinic door, watching passersby through the glass on a frigid November afternoon. Tightly woven braids peer out from a brown skullcap as he turns his head back to the clinic.

Only 10 minutes earlier, Praise Temple, a group from the shelter that meets every Saturday for Bible study in the medical center, meets to study scripture and pray together.

For Derrick, there was a time he thought that God forgot all about him.

Last year, at age 45, he lived with his mother and brother in a neighborhood infested with crime and drug dealing. Adamant about leaving for a safer place to live, his mother left for a new home, but only took his brother.

That decision left Derrick homeless and struggling to find a job to support himself.

Soon after, he began living at the Milwaukee Rescue Mission and attending Praise Temple at Repairers of the Breach.

Raised Lutheran, Derrick found courage from scripture and his fellow Christians.

At the shelter, he met MacCanon Brown and immediately began to do small things for her, such as taking out the trash and cleaning the floors. In return, he says Brown did a beautiful job of assisting him — he was able to have clean clothes and toiletries like soap, after-shave and cologne.

The blessings started to flow, Derrick says.

“My faith kept growing stronger as God moved in my life.” His brown eyes are peaceful while his hands clench to imitate his strengthening faith.

All people face struggles, and the Devil, he says, will find a way to squeeze into your heart if you leave the door open.

He says what you have to do is guard the door and keep it shut to the Intruder.

At the shelter, his job is just that: a gatekeeper.

Five to six days per week, Derrick monitors the door of the medical clinic, keeping any intruders out of the building.

From the money he’s made at his job since last March, Derrick now has his own home.

And he’s engaged.

In the future, Derrick plans to marry his fiancée and to continue “loving and praising God” all he can.

“I’m living,” he says with a wide smile.

Filling the Cracks

After an afternoon session of GED preparation, a small group of students and tutors ascend the stairs from the basement in a chorus of wooden creaks.

It is 3:45 p.m. and the first floor storefront is devoid of the constant voices and movements of the workers and guests. All the empty chairs have been pushed to one wall, with some

metal chairs folded and stacked into rows leaning against the bathroom door.

The lights have been shut off, but the sun still peers through the front windows as if to make sure every last detail has been tended to before the shelter closes for the night.

Two of the guards wearing blue jackets —ß both named John — mop the black and white tiles of the empty floor.

The group walks out the front door and into the watchful eyes of the sun. The winter air rushes into their faces.

It will be a cold night tonight.

Outside the shelter, the cracks in the sidewalk continue their slow meditated reach as they try to wrap their spindly fingers around the buildings.

With a quick goodbye, some guests turn toward the city to catch a bus near the highway. Others walk two blocks South to the Guest House or toward the Milwaukee Rescue Mission, where they will likely spend the night.

Still others will spend the night on the streets, wrapped in blankets with their belongings in bags beside their heads. Their struggles continue, and for many, their struggles continue in silence and isolation like quiet, deepening cracks.

Yet, even as those cracks deepen, Repairers of the Breach continues to kneel in patient prayers for change.

Tags: faith, homelessness, milwaukee rescue mission, poverty, repairers of the breach, shelter

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