[music playing] ANNOUNCER: The following program is a production of Ozarks Public Television.

Good evening, and welcome to "Sense of Community."

I'm Gregory Holman.

Faith and religion make up some of the most central aspects of personal life, but they're also forces in public life.

Joining us tonight is Pastor Christie Love with The Connecting Grounds and Ozarks Church, working hard to address poverty and homelessness in the Springfield area.

Please stay tuned.

[music playing] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to "Sense of Community."

"Sense of Community" is a public affairs presentation of Ozarks Public Television.

Welcome to this edition of "Sense of Community" here on Ozarks Public Television.

I'm reporter Gregory Holman.

Our theme for tonight's broadcast is faith in public.

We're going to explore what it means for a person to live out their own religious idealism in terms of community affairs.

Our guest tonight is Pastor Christie Love with The Connecting Grounds Church here in Springfield.

Pastor Love, welcome to "Sense of Community."

Thanks so much for having me.

I want to start our conversation by just outlining some basic data.

Poverty and homelessness, as you well know, are steep challenges for the Springfield area.

The United States Census tells us that poverty touches about 21% of the Springfield population.

That's almost double the poverty rate across America in general.

Meanwhile, The Connecting Grounds has committed itself to documenting the poverty problem here locally.

And in part, you do this by publishing an ongoing street census.

The last time you did one, you counted more than 2,700 Springfield-area individuals affected by poverty and homelessness.

And you've told me in the past you take care to use the federal government's definitions for homelessness from housing and urban development.

As you see it, if you just want to start us out, as you see it, what's the present state of homelessness and poverty in Springfield across the Ozarks?

Yeah.

So, Greg, it's a complicated question.

And it's a complicated answer.

But I think the two things that I would point out for us to get a baseline temperature is one, this isn't a new statistic for us.

Springfield has been running double the state's poverty rate for more than a decade.

And so this has been a long-standing problem that was not created overnight.

It's not going to get better overnight.

But it's definitely a problem where we have seen kind of-- and we've seen internationally since COVID the impact of poverty globally has kind of taken a setback in terms of some of those numbers and statistics and progress that was made prior to COVID.

A lot of that traction has been lost.

And so what we see anecdotally at The Connecting Grounds and where we felt like we needed to start keeping the street census was when we are dependent upon only single metrics to shape our policy and our perception of what the problems are in our community-- for example, the Point-in-Time Count, which is a federally mandated count, it's a count that takes place over a 24-hour period once a year.

So you're trying to count as many people that are living without shelter stably as you can in one 24-hour period.

It's just not realistic that you're going to capture everybody.

And we all know that.

There's a lot of issues with the Point-in-Time Count.

So right when COVID was hitting, one of the things I started to notice was on the streets of our church, on the sidewalk of our church, how many new faces we were seeing, people that I hadn't seen prior that were coming out and needed help and needed food and needed medical care.

And so we decided that we needed to start documenting how many people we were seeing and how often we were seeing them.

And so we created this metric.

And we divided it into categories of how many are strictly living on the streets, how many are staying in their cars, how many are doubled up with family and friends, how many stay at a hotel, how many were in shelter programs here in our community or sober living houses.

And then the totality of those numbers give us a good picture of what we're seeing.

That's where a 2,700 comes in?

2,739.

About 945 are considered street unsheltered.

CHRISTIE LOVE: Exactly, as of our last episode.

And those are typically higher than Point-in-Time Count?

CHRISTIE LOVE: Much higher.

And my understanding from Point-in-Time Count and the folks who administer that is that it's not intended to be definitive.

It's sort of like here's the winter-time worst-case scenario moment, right?

Right, but part of what is a challenge, even with the Point-in-Time Count, is that if cold weather shelters are open that night, and so people have an opportunity to go to shelter, they're technically counted as sheltered for that night of the Point-in-Time Count, even though if it would have been 2 degrees warmer, they would have been out on the street that night.

So, again, we need this realistic, real-time meter that's helping us to track changes as they happen in our community and keep a better pulse on what's happening.

And so that's why we maintain the Street Census.

Now, I definitely want to return-- you mentioned the pandemic a minute ago.

And I want to return to that topic in our conversation.

But let's zoom in a little bit on you personally.

When Christie Love is five years old and in kindergarten and the teacher asks, what do you want to be when you grow up, how did you get from there to here?

Yeah.

I failed forward a lot.

And so I was one of those people that changed my major numerous times in college.

I changed the what do I want to be when I grow up answer constantly.

I'm sure my parents were kind of like, just make a decision, Christie.

But I went through a lot of things.

I wanted to be a lawyer.

I wanted to be a doctor.

I wanted to be a social worker.

I wanted to do a lot of things to help people, but it looked like a lot of different ways.

So I've had a lot of experiences in my life.

And this really became the outlet that allows me to do a lot of those things, allows me to engage in a lot of those areas of interest.

And it's incredibly diversified.

No two days are ever the same for me at The Connecting Grounds.

And so I appreciate that.

And I think that's helped me prepare for the work that we do every day.

And let's talk a little bit about The Connecting Grounds as a congregation.

My understanding from reading a lot of past news coverage is the church was planted about five years ago.

You had done some small business.

You had worked in some different ministries, some Christian women conference activity and that sort of thing.

But then you planted The Connecting Grounds.

And its original location was there on East Commercial Street.

Can you talk about that journey, just planting that church and a little bit how that church has developed since it was planted over these past five years?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I was actually on staff at another church in Springfield three years prior to The Connecting Ground's launching.

And I was in a conversation where I felt like there was a huge need in our community for a faith community to be planted in a higher-poverty context, to be planted that was paying attention to the needs of our neighbors, that was social justice focused, that was progressive in nature.

And I vocalized that need and that desire and was kind of dismissed in that space.

But that urge and that need just kept appearing for me.

And so I felt like it was something I needed to explore, was something I needed to follow.

And so I stepped away from the faith community that I was serving and spent three years just really studying the city of Springfield and building relationships and trying to understand some things.

I was working internationally at the time.

We took the step of closing that organization that I had founded so that we could focus on our community and bring a lot of these pieces that I'd been doing in other communities and other countries around the globe here to our city.

And so when we finally were ready to go in 2018, we had really done our homework in terms of what were some of the needs.

And what were ways that faith communities could do things differently, could do church differently was a lot of what we talked about.

And we felt like East Commercial Street really represented kind of the intersection of all of those opportunities.

It is a neighborhood that had a much higher poverty rate than even the city as a whole.

While Springfield was running 21%, 22%, this particular neighborhood was running into the low 30s.

And so it was a part of town that I've lovingly nicknamed the donut hole because a lot of the progress that happens in our community happens outside of that or on the perimeter of that or pushed away from this area of town, where there's gentrification on different sides.

But there's just a lot of high-need housing that has been dilapidated and landlords that have taken advantage of people for a long time.

And so we were in that specific area of town because we knew that that's where the high traffic was going to be and where the need was going to be.

No more did that become evident than during COVID in 2020.

Well, and so let's talk about that.

I definitely want to circle back to the onset of COVID-19.

And now here in Missouri, we began to be affected March 2020.

I looked up The Connecting Grounds in news accounts from that time.

You and the church were right there at the beginning.

It seemed like at the beginning of the pandemic's impact here.

You're dealing with trying to keep people calm, communicate hey, we maybe need to socially distance, and doing things like setting up hand-washing stations before it was clear that this was not a hand-washing disease, it was an airborne disease, right?

Can you talk a little bit about your initial response there?

My understanding is you basically were instrumental in setting up an emergency network of shelters through churches and volunteer organizations.

There was some fire code violation recorded by the city.

But it sounds like, at the end of the day, people got served who were out during the pandemic at the onset.

Can you talk about those experiences?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I can remember vividly watching headlines and watching news stories, kind of tracking the progress of COVID-19 as it made its way into the United States.

When we saw the first cases in Missouri and then the first case is in Greene County, I vividly remember we had finished a Street Choir practice when the headline was announced that we had our first Greene County case.

Street Choir is a choir for homeless folks here in Springfield that's a nonprofit.

Yeah, that used to rehearse at our location on East Commercial.

And so I remember finishing that, reading that news story, and pulling our leaders into a separate room and saying, how are we going to address this as we go forward?

And we did do things that looking back now were-- we got out hand soap and hand sanitizer and those kind of things.

But as things progressed, one of the things that we also recognized was The Connecting Grounds became where people were coming to gather naturally.

And so it became an opportunity for us to speak truth, to try to dispel myths and misinformation.

And so we would host regular family meetings, where people could come, have dinner.

We could talk about how to keep ourselves safe.

As things started to progress really quickly in our community and the shelter-in-place orders were put into place, we held a leadership team meeting because one of the things we had to decide was would we shut down?

Most of our social service providers, most of our churches went virtual at that time.

And I didn't feel like-- when I looked at the call of scripture for me that leads and shapes my ministry and my leadership, I couldn't find a caveat that said, don't help people if it's dangerous to you or don't help people if there's a public health crisis.

For me, it felt like all the more reason that we needed to be honoring the call of Matthew 25.

And so we were one of the few organizations that remained open to the public, especially for our individuals in high poverty without stable shelter.

And so we just simply transitioned from bringing people inside for meals and conversations to doing all of that on sidewalk service.

And you can see in the news coverage from the time, you all are out on the sidewalk in front of the Outreach Center there on Commercial Street.

Switching to the current moment, emergency-- because I want to talk about this situation of events, weather, things that affect homelessness here.

Switching to this current moment, emergency cold weather shelter season ended here a few weeks ago in Springfield.

And this, for people who don't know, this is a system where under a declaration called Economic Calamity that Springfield City Council set up way back in 2009, a system of nonprofits and churches are open some of the nights when it's the coldest during the winter season.

That season ended recently.

I am really curious if you have a recap on how this winter went as far as safety for homeless individuals here in the Springfield area.

For example, do you know if we lost any to deaths from cold exposure?

And just in general, how has the system fared this round?

Yeah, absolutely.

So we did not have any direct deaths as a result of cold weather exposure in Springfield to my knowledge.

So that's maybe a point of celebration.

And that is.

And I think it's a piece of people working together.

I would say it's a huge testament to street outreach and the ability to get out to people.

This season really reminded us, though, that we still don't have enough cold weather shelter capacity.

We only had cold weather shelter beds that were available for a very small percentage of the number of people on the streets.

And so the majority of people still were not able to access cold weather shelter.

We have large shelters in the city that used to once have a capacity of 100 individuals who when COVID came through, they reduced that capacity to 50.

And they've never increased it again.

And so we don't really have a lot of replacement for some of that capacity.

We've had new churches that have come online.

But, again, we have smaller shelter sites, so people that have the capacity to do 20 or 15 individuals.

While we appreciate all of that, and that's wonderful, and that's good, and it's been beautiful to watch that degree of partnership in our community, we still need more spaces.

We need more shelter capacity.

And we need that year round.

We need those arbitrary dates to be expanded.

Just a week ago here, we saw temperatures dive to 31 degrees in early April after that arbitrary-- March 31 is when that season ends.

March 31 is when the shelter season ends.

So we sent an email and we asked, will anybody please open?

And nobody was able to do that.

And it was on a Saturday night.

So the Revive 66 campers on West Chestnut didn't open because they don't open on the weekends right now.

And so we were on a Saturday night at 31 degrees where nobody had any shelter options.

And so those are the things that still need to be addressed and need to change in our community.

Now, you've talked just now about year-round resources.

Can you talk about as we move into spring and summer how needs for homelessness individuals change?

What goes on?

I would think that there would be some really predictable effects of summer heat on biology, people's mental feelings and that kind of thing.

But what do you see?

Right, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, homelessness is a seasonal issue.

And every season brings its own challenges.

By no means does any one season mark us as safe, where it's OK for humans to exist outside without stable shelter, right?

In the spring, we have flash floods.

We have tornadoes.

We have issues that we have to wrestle with large hail and people that are exposed.

And we don't have gathering shelters or we don't have enough spaces for them to come and get inside during those kind of severe weathers.

During the summer, we see dehydration.

We see people that are suffering from heat exhaustion.

We see people that are dealing with these high temperatures, where they can't get out of the heat.

They can't get out of the sun.

We are seeing a lot of people and have seen for the last few summers, when our bodies get hot, we change the way we metabolize our mental health medications.

It changes the way that we metabolize substance abuse issues that we may have.

And so we see a lot of different struggles in the summer.

By no means is it safe for anybody.

And so we need those stable shelter locations all year round in this community.

And did I-- do I have a recollection that there maybe is a new hydration component that your church is rolling out or working with others to roll out this year?

And talk about that.

Yeah, so one of the big things that we wanted to try to do, until we can get these stable shelters, is how do we alleviate some of the individual symptoms and problems?

And one of those is just difficulty accessing safe, clean drinking water in our community for people that are unsheltered.

And so we have been working for the last few months with a group of our individuals that have lived experience on the streets, brainstorming solutions.

And so through those conversations, we've come up with this idea and this design to do water refill stations strategically placed around the city of Springfield.

Our goal is to place 10 of them by mid-May.

And so we've been reaching out to faith communities and organizations to ask if they would host a water refill station on their property.

Literally it's just asking permission to place the structure on the corner of their property.

And then our outreach teams will actually come by refill it every single day with ice and water so that people can come by and fill their refillable-- People can fill their water bottles.

Yep.

This is-- it's really basic.

People refill their water bottles.

CHRISTIE LOVE: Exactly, mhm.

One of the notable aspects about The Connecting Grounds as a ministry as far, as what I've observed, seems to be repeated efforts where you host public events.

And my experience is they've been in the public library, but presumably other venues that are not just the church sanctuary, that focus on lived experience and getting narratives out there from homeless individuals to the rest of us.

I'm wondering if you can talk about those and maybe with a view toward what are some things that middle-class folks, that rich folks really just are missing when it comes to trying to understand homeless people?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think there's a lot of myths, there's a lot of misconceptions, and there's a lot of misinformation when it comes to what it's like to exist in our community without stable shelter.

And so I can tell those stories all day long.

I can do data and surveys and give you metrics on things.

And those are important.

I tell people all the time that I think the two missing components in our public conversation are data and stories.

And they need to come together because I can show you the numbers and the totality of the problem, but you need to hear from the people who are experiencing it themselves.

You need to hear what it's like to be frustrated that you are criminalized for sitting down to just catch your breath and try to find a few moments of shade, that that can earn you a trespassing ticket.

You need to hear from people who are tired and weary because they walk an average of 8 to 10 miles a day during the spring the summer and the fall when our meals change locations all the time in this community.

You need to hear from people who are desperate for change in their life, and they get turned away at detox centers or they get turned away with a mental health crisis because there's not enough capacity.

And so when we have this narrative in our community that this population of people, that they don't want help, that they're service resistant and those kind of things, hearing from people who are saying it's quite the contrary, I'm begging for help, I'm desperate for resources, and there's simply not resources enough to meet the needs of our city, those are really critical dots that we've got to connect in this community in our conversations.

And that leads me to a question we definitely wanted to get your take on.

In your view, if the Ozarks were to mobilize resources in a more definitive way to address homelessness, what would that start to look like?

Yeah.

Well, and to go back to the framework of why we're sitting here, for me, there are enough faith communities in this city that if we were to mobilize all of our faith communities to do something-- no one faith community is going to solve this crisis.

No one nonprofit is going to solve this crisis.

No one government agency is going to solve this crisis.

We all have to find a way to do our part and to come together.

There are enough resources in the city of Springfield that we should not have people sleeping outside every single night.

We should not have people that are being arrested for simply trying to exist in this city, to try to find a place to sleep.

And so for me, I think if everyone would recognize what is mine to do-- how can I help?

Can I host a water refill station?

Can I open up a summer daytime shelter so people can cool down?

Can I open up an overnight shelter in the spring or the summer to expand that capacity for our city?

Every one of those little bits add up to a huge difference that we can make.

I wanted to quickly touch on the criminalization aspect that you've mentioned a couple of times.

Last year, the Missouri Legislature passed a law.

It's typically known as House Bill 1606.

It's modeled on laws passed in several states influenced by a conservative nonprofit group out of Texas, the Cicero Institute.

And it's verified.

We verified that.

Missouri Independent news site verified that.

The Missouri law bans people from sleeping on lands owned by the state.

And my understanding is a lot of people advocating for homeless individuals have worried about this particular law, that it amounts to basically criminalizing homelessness as a status in our society.

Is that your view?

What has your response been to that development in the law and in the news?

Yeah, absolutely.

House Bill 1606 is an incredibly complicated piece of legislation.

It's got a lot of components to it.

Not all of them even connect to the dots within themselves.

And so there's been a lot of confusion in terms of what are some of these things going to look like?

I think part of what we are seeing, especially in our community, is that it is not just being criminalized at an increased rate for being on state property.

We are seeing law enforcement at our county level especially that has really taken this as an increased ability to criminalize on any property.

And so we are seeing an increase in arrests.

We're seeing an increase in tickets that are being cited.

We've got more and more people right now that are walking around with two, three, four of these trespassing tickets that have large fines and fees.

And so if we keep digging the hole deeper for people and they can't get out of this hole or even find level ground, it's really hard to start to climb upward and make progress in our situation.

If you or I get a trespassing ticket, this is a few hundred dollars.

This is a nuisance.

But for an unsheltered person, pretty difficult.

CHRISTIE LOVE: Absolutely.

I want to close out our conversation.

I have a quote from you.

This was reported by this journalist Steve Pokin.

He was a writer at "The Springfield News-Leader" several years ago.

He's now at The Springfield Daily Citizen.

And this is a quote from you that Steve reported.

"It is my hope," you told him-- this is three years ago, in the heat of the pandemic.

"It is my hope that this crisis changes the footprint of the American church so that church is not just a weekly gathering but a response to the call of Christ every day."

Can you talk about those words with three years of 2020 hindsight, now that we've gone through the pandemic, now that you've and other faith leaders have tried to respond to it and these issues of deep poverty?

What's on your mind when you hear that now in 2023?

It's heartbreaking because those words still ring true for me.

That was my hope, and that was my heart, that we would forever be changed as faith communities by responding to the pandemic and the needs of our neighbors in radical new ways, that we would be more creative, that we would shift away from these senses of normalcy that we had, and we'd find new expressions to live out faith more in the public square and more outreach orientated activities in our community.

I don't know that that's what happened.

I know that that's not what happened.

There were pockets of it.

And there were pieces of it.

There were small numbers of congregations that, I think, rose to that challenge.

But by and large, I think what we saw during the pandemic was a lot of people of faith who yelled about my individual rights, my desire to keep things normal and not worry about how that might impact others, who continued to try to go about business as usual in this city while we had increasing poverty, while we had humans that were suffering the effects of COVID-19, while we had our health-care providers that were exhausted.

And so I think instead of rising to this moment, in a lot of ways the pandemic highlighted and reinforced what I think is really broken in American Christianity today and the way that our churches, oftentimes we cater to power, we cater to privilege, and we overlook opportunities to make a difference and really live out the call of the gospel every day in our backyard.

Pastor Love, thank you for joining us tonight.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

For Ozarks Public Television, I'm Gregory Holman.

And this is "Sense of Community."

For more information on tonight's topic, you can check out the website of The Connecting Grounds Church.

That's theconnectinggrounds.com.

ANNOUNCER: Here is where you can find more information about the topics covered in this program.

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