Photo Story: The Homeless in Albany and Benefits of Volunteering

Jesus Munez(his friends call him JJ) is from Phoenix, Arizona. He moved up to Albany six months ago, and he's a member of Albany's homeless community. JJ has rickets, and is confined to a wheelchair; he lost use of his legs when he was very young. He has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction his whole life, but has been clean for the six months that he has been in Albany. He has been kicked onto the street by family, suffered through abuse and addiction, and lost his mother to cancer only a short time ago. Despite all that, he remains a glowingly optimistic person who maintains plans for the future. His goals are to open his own business and own his own residence. JJ has worked long and hard at recovery through tragedy and relapse, fighting against his predisposition towards addiction, an admittedly rough childhood, and spiderwebs of bad relationships. His greatest temporal resource? The Charity of Others.
"People are so nice here, so open. People will help me get around, they give me money. I even got this pair of gloves the other day."
In the absence of charity, JJ says he and his loved ones have been forced to commit crime.
"Years ago, when I was homeless in Phoenix, it would get too cold at night. The homeless shelters only have a certain number of beds. I never stole, but when it became to cold to sleep outside I would sometimes have to break into empty houses to stay alive. I'm not proud of it, and I would've never done it if I didn't have to. If I saw someone I knew going into a store to steal, I would give them money I earned from panhandling so they wouldn't have to. I don't like things like that."

The homeless community is unique because it is one of the only marginalized groups that depends completely on the charity of others. They don't vote, they certainly don't contribute to campaigns, and they don't sit on local councils. Even as they struggle to survive, municipalities pass anti-homeless laws and break up camps where they sleep. When the shelters are full, homeless are left with nowhere to go.
This should be an indictment of the officials who fail to help the homeless, but also an incentive to volunteer. A citizen can't necessarily build a new shelter or make the government pay for housing, but they can volunteer at soup kitchens and outreach centers, where they often find themselves short handed.
Listen to the volunteers of Saint Mary's Soup Kitchen and hear their reasons for volunteering, and how important it really is.

St. Mary's Soup Kitchen will have been serving the homeless and less-fortunate on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays for 37 years in January. The Church, located on the corner of Eighth and Ellseworth, serves a healthy variety of foods from their soup kitchen, and also supplies food, clothes, and toiletries they receive through donation.

Patricia Jacobson(81) has been the director of the Soup Kitchen for over five years, coming in often times at 9 in the morning and staying til 7 at night preparing and serving food. She also commits significant time on all the other days of the week to procure the goods that the Soup Kitchen provides; "most of the time when people think of volunteering they think of serving, but there's a lot more to it than that."

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David Enge(76) has been volunteering at St. Mary's for nearly five years. "Volunteering is a good way to use my time. I also volunteer with the historic society. We've got a population of 50,000 or so here, and considering the whole volunteer base, there aren't that many in Albany. We have times with plentiful volunteers and times with a drought, and we're in a drought period right now where we could use some good people to put in as much time of their day as they can. We could really use them."

Thomas Lehr (38) spends 20 hours a week in the kitchen, and has been volunteering for three years. "I used to come every hour they were open until my son was born... it was weird because when I first started coming here I was homeless, and I used it as an excuse to get out of my camp and get out of the cold, but when I got into a recovery house all the reasons for coming changed; it became about giving back. I've taken a great many things in my life and I think I'll have to come here for the rest of my life to return it all."

Ashley Coats(33) volunteers nine hours a week at St. Mary's. "I have a different story, I was addicted to drugs for many years; I've been clean and sober for about a year, and it's just a way to give back to something I took from for so long... Places like this provide an opportunity for people to get warm food in their stomach." Ashley was homeless for eight years. She is mother to five children, and says she made her recovery for her daughter.