Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in 1889. The famous Chicago settlement house served European immigrants living in surrounding neighborhoods — all of them in poverty. 

Dorothy Day started publishing the Catholic Worker in 1933. Along with Peter Maurin, her work led to Dorothy Day Houses. The Catholic Worker Movement is still associated with this network of shelters operating from coast to coast and in more than a half-dozen other countries. 

Hull House was secular. The Catholic Worker Movement is rooted in faith. 

Significant cuts to the social safety net will likely occur soon, so communities must plan for the worst. And they are likely to get it — budget cuts will almost certainly increase food insecurity and homelessness while diminishing all services available to moderate and low-income Americans. 

People experiencing homelessness and hunger turn to a patchwork of services to meet their daily needs. Few of them care whether the help comes from the Salvation Army or county services. Their need is immediate.

Hull House and Dorothy Day shelters remind us of how communities responded to pressing human needs before major federal agencies were created to provide assistance and support. These models, and many other grassroots responses, will likely be necessary more than ever during the coming years. 

The first round of significant budget cuts during the Reagan Administration made homelessness a national issue. As the impacts of the budget cuts spread across the nation, there was substantial media coverage of individuals and families losing their housing. 

Across the country during the 1980s, secular and faith-based initiatives to open shelters and serve meals to homeless and hungry Americans were in the headlines. Then a numbness set in. Compassion fatigue, according to the press.

As a result, reports of an 18% increase in homelessness in January 2024 went largely unnoticed. The number of people using food shelves and struggling to pay their rent is on the rise — and this is easily documented by current data on rent-burdened families and the continued growth of food shelves and other responses to food insecurity. 

As the British magazine The Economist declared the United States’ economy one of the strongest in the post-COVID era, Americans looked for ways to express their exasperation and stress. They did not feel the economy celebrated by economists was meeting their needs.

If the United States of America saw increases in homelessness while the economy was going gangbusters, there are profound structural problems that need fixing. But any sane person must realize that political solutions, at this time, are unlikely.

For decades, activists advocated for public policy responses to growing inequities. But public policy is a rational response to a genuine social need. We live in a post-public-policy era where rational and humane responses are unlikely and openly attacked. 

Intended to address the needs of people experiencing homelessness, the Continuum of Care (COC) is a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) mandated planning process with local participants in every state in the nation. But a tax system designed by and for the wealthiest Americans guarantees there will never be adequate funding to address the needs identified in these regional planning processes. And now, there is likely to be considerably less funding than in recent years.

We need community-based planning processes like the continuum of care to deal with the impending disasters of increasing homelessness and food insecurity. While the COC process mandated by HUD focused on available federal funds, these new community-based COCs need wider participation — the sort of participation that HUD planners initially hoped for. 

But these new planning processes need to be rooted in the immediate needs of desperate Americans seeking shelter and meals in this new era devoid of sensible public policy responses. 

We need a new continuum of care process more focused on local responses and solutions. This is not an ideal solution, but it is the only way to mobilize citizens to address the problems we see in our communities. 

Many individuals will continue to pretend they live in a world where facts, figures and reason have significance. Best of luck to them. 

Many people will abandon the world of prioritizing advocacy with great reluctance. We share their pain.

Many of us will find difficulty moving from safe, affluent social spaces to creating and volunteering at a growing network of low-budget shelters, safe houses, food shelves and other creative community responses to the impending chaos. 

And the increased need for assistance to homeless families will likely happen in an openly hostile environment from federal-level leaders and agencies. They will argue in favor of cutting programs that were never adequately funded in the first place.

And this is where underfunded programs bump into social reality:

• Many people can no longer afford increasing rents. 
• Many people work multiple jobs and can’t make ends meet. 
• Many people have given up on the dream of becoming homeowners or, in the worst cases, of having a safe, secure apartment. 
• Many people go to bed every night worrying about how they will put food on the table during the coming week. 

Dorothy Day and Jane Addams would remind us that creative responses to poverty are necessary and achievable. After the Reagan cuts, many citizens organized to open shelters and local food programs. Many of these service providers eventually implemented locally conceived solutions. Sadly, it was not always an efficient or quick process. 

Hopefully, we’ve learned something since then. Impending budget cuts will likely require local groups and organizations to respond more quickly than ever and with fewer resources. Less than ideal, these limitations must temper our idealism with realism: the reality of increased numbers of people with no roof over their heads and no consistent way to provide food for their children.

New locally created solutions from small community groups — secular and religious — may not be the best solution, but they will likely be the only solution. 

We are entering a new, hyper-charged era of federal abandonment. But we’ve seen members of our community abandoned before. This time, we may need more hands-on responses and fewer people in advocacy roles.

Keith Luebke retired from teaching nonprofit leadership courses and has several decades of experience directing nonprofit organizations. He lives in Mankato.

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