The Open Shelter
Kent Beittel
370 W. State St.
Columbus, Ohio 43215
(614) 461-0407

This large warehouse houses what has to be one of the most unusual shelters/soup kitchens I've found, and most of the creative spirit seems to spring directly from the brain of Kent Beittel, its energetic director.

Beittel, an opinionated but extremely effective man, has lots of ideas, and he puts them into practice. Examples of his rapid-fire thinking came in a lengthy interview: "Almost everyone who has dealt with life on the street or with the social service structure assumes that there are only two kinds of poor in this country: Ineffective crooks, and lazy bums," he said. "Most of the social-service field is based on that assumption, and it is wrong."

"From a recipient's perspective, most of the system is a demonstration that one of the ultimate rewards of being classed as 'deserving poor' is having your face laughed into. When people come to a shelter, they are keenly aware of their perceived lack of value." So, he said, the first face a shelter must present is to be fair and consistent - blatantly so. "This is more important than being 'nice,'" he said. "It's not important to be lovable, but it is important to be trustworthy."

Beittel believes that a good shelter needs to provide certain things: A safe,accessible place to sleep, and basic needs such as a place to get mail and messages, a shower, something to eat and a safe place to store your possessions; doing all this in a consistent, predictable way.

The shelter really needs to deal with two issues that are somewhat contradictory: It must find ways to help people stay as long as they need to stay, but it also must get people leave quickly - that is, "leave" in terms of getting off the street and back to a self-reliant lifestyle.

How does he propose to break the cycle of poverty?

"The big dilemma for people in economic crisis is that it has a long-term effect on their planning process. A person who's homeless is, by the nature of his crisis, dealing with where to sleep tonight, where to eat his next meal, where to hide his property. That sort of shrinks planning to the next few hours. So we need to be about helping people readjust their planning sequence while at the same time taking care of tonight."

"Part of the way we do this is to combine the two dilemmas. If someone wants predictability in where they sleep and wants to sleep here, then they need to contract with us their method of leaving. Are they leaving for employment? Are they leaving when they save enough to fix their transmission so they can go on to Dallas as was their original plan? By helping us work toward their leaving, we'll help stabilize their situation.

"If they're unwilling (to contract on a plan for leaving), we'll still allow them to stay, but they're at the mercy of folks who will. So, in short, homeless people can "make reservations" at The Open Shelter by agreeing to participate in a plan that will stabilize their lives. If they're not willing to do that, they're still welcome to stay, but they have to participate in whatever is left over, first come, first served."

The policy works. Although The Open Shelter is Ohio's - and perhaps the nation's - only shelter with no fixed maximum length of stay, the average resident stays only one month, and the recidivism rate is only 7 percent.

The Open Shelter is filled with potential models like that one. Another is a "bank" right in the shelter - a sturdy, bank-donated deposit box in which residents can make deposits in interest-bearing accounts administered by the shelter's staff.

Among other effective models, The Open Shelter enlists 30 Columbus-area restaurants to provide meal service one day each month, delivering cooked food and taking the dishes away; this allows the shelter to feed 180 men per day with no kitchen. It also procures beds and basic furniture items, which are given to men when they locate suitable housing, eliminating one of the major debts that usually hangs over people trying to recover from homelessness.

"This is not a home for people who are homeless," Beittel said. "It is an attempt to provide a springboard from which people leave. It belongs to us, not them. We expect to be believed and we expect to be trusted. The great danger is when folks start to feel a sense of ownership. I'm amazed at the rewards we (the social-service system) give folks for staying. We don't give them any. Our rewards are about leaving."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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