He is the heart and soul—and a founding member—of a small group called Sharing and Responsibility (S&R) which raises money to help house the homeless though an elegantly designed system of bulk food buying and dedicated volunteerism.
The non-profit sells food baskets worth $40 for $20-$25 each, which, because of the bulk buying and the support of local producers, still raises $2 per basket to support housing for disadvantaged and high-risk groups.
Now, after 20 years of contributing to Edmonton and surrounding communities, the nonprofit group is about to shut its doors.
“It’s discouraging,” Lopez says. “It’s not that we want to shut it down; it’s that there is a lack of support in the community.” The group has simply been unable to recruit new volunteers to shore up an aging and exhausted board.
What makes the immanent disappearance of the group so unfortunate is that the value of the food baskets goes beyond fundraising. Food basket buyers are also asked to donate two hours of their time a month either directly to S&R or to other organizations within the community.
In the case of the Prostitution Awareness and Action Federation of Edmonton, which until recently received $500 a month from S&R to help house those leaving the streets, friendships sprang up between former prostitutes and the S&R volunteers as they worked together assembling the baskets, says board member and 15-year volunteer Laurel Lutes.
“People got involved with them and their babies,” she says. “We started rounding up baby clothes, providing car rides, and offering friendship as they got their lives back. It was much bigger than a food project.”
Under The Radar
So why haven’t you heard of S&R? Although the group has been around since 1986, they haven’t spent much time on marketing or recruiting. In the early days they concentrated on a couple of affordable housing units they owned, and in the last five years they’ve been so busy keeping the basket program alive, that besides their website, word of mouth has been their sole recruitment tool for attracting new volunteers.
Despite their struggle to stay afloat, Lopez remains proud of the work S&R has done. He remembers in particular one young man who lived in one of their houses years ago, and how easily he got his life back on track once the group gained his trust. The young man, whose name Lopez doesn’t want to reveal, had run away from home because he didn’t pay a speeding ticket. He became paranoid and destroyed his ID, afraid that police would track him down and send him to jail.
“For some of them,” Lopez says, “we had to be like mom and dad because emotionally they were shocked or they had mental health issues.”
In addition to providing the young man with a place to stay and friendship, S&R found him a lawyer, got the ticket forgiven, and replaced his ID so that he could find work again.
Of course, not all Lopez’s stories have happy endings. S&R couldn’t find any volunteers to stay in the houses with the recently homeless; as a result, Lopez feels many didn’t receive the support they needed.
And keeping up the houses was a strain. One house was vandalized and drastically damaged, and residents defaulted on even very minimals rents.
“All the money from the food baskets was going [to the houses],” says Lopez. “In terms of finances, we weren’t going anywhere.”
Volunteers became discouraged, and many left. In 2002, the group sold the two remaining homes and decided to donate the money they raised from the food baskets to other housing groups. Lopez left the board over the decision, but continued to volunteer.
Goodwill Wasn’t Enough
Last fall, the group put out a call for volunteers, and although they saw some renewed interest, it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat. Board member Lutes says the desire to help just wasn’t enough. “In order to grow,” she says, “we would have to be marketing, promoting, and doing all kinds of other strategic visioning, and we can’t because we are working to keep it going.... We started to see that this isn’t going to happen just because we want it to happen.”
S&R’s situation is not unusual, says Jim Gurnett, a board member of the Edmonton Chamber of Voluntary Organizations and a longstanding figure in Edmonton’s nonprofit and civil society sectors. “I think sometimes people who care a lot about an issue don’t realize how complicated it is to try to make any change,” he says. “Social change is not as straightforward as you might think it is. People get worn down.”
The vast majority of social justice groups in Edmonton are small, underfunded, and undersupported, he says. There are at least 6,000 nonprofits chipping away at problems in the city, and there’s always a certain level of attrition.
Although he does say that there is more pressure on small nonprofits like S&R than there was in the past because of the high cost of living and long workweeks, he points out that smaller groups are not always exemplars of efficiency. “If everybody that had an idea of how to help started a new group rather than find a group they could ally with or join,” he says, “what happens is every little organization is putting a certain amount of effort into just staying alive.”
Duplication on paperwork and organization eats into the mission of these groups, Gurnett says, and they are all facing steep competition for charity dollars.
Still, Lopez is not discouraged. If S&R folds at the board meeting in May, he plans to continue his other work with the Edmonton Food Bank and international social justice projects. “If you know how to help people,” he says, “you should do it.”
