Category: About Us

The temporary homeless shelter has closed for the season.   Unfortunately, it is still cold, wet and sometimes snowing.   That leaves at least a half-dozen men living in the streets in Plymouth, and a number of others that have set up tents in various spots near Plymouth center.

The second night after the shelters had closed, there was some significant wind and rain, which soaked the sleeping bags, blankets and personal belongings of the homeless men.

The men attempted to dry them by  hanging them out in the small bus depot, however with the temperatures still in the high 30s, there wasn’t much hope.

Volunteers for PeopleCorp took the sleeping bags and blankets and dried them in their respective homes, then brought them back 3 hours later, in plastic bags, so they would stay dry for the rest of the day, until needed at night.

If you would like to volunteer for People Corp, there are always needs!  Fill out the form below.

On Sunday September 10th, at 3:00 PM a coalition of groups that provide services to the homeless will have a clothing drive at St. Peter’s Parish Hall, Memorial Drive, Plymouth.   It coincides with a community meal that is provided by St. Peters.

Recently there has been a need for heavier jackets, sweatshirts, blankets and backpacks, which volunteers from PeopleCorp and the Salvation Army have been providing.  We are still more than two months away from any temporary winter shelters opening in Plymouth, and many of the homeless sleep out in the open, or in tents in the woods, with inadequate protection from the elements.

Feel free to bring items to St. Peters yourself on Sunday, or arrange with Eric to get them to him in the days beforehand, and he will deliver them.

Robert sat on the bench between Luke and Stuart.   The stitches over his left swollen eye still had the flakes of dried blood, betraying how fresh the wound was.

Across the street, a liquor store was about to close.  They watched the store closely as a steady stream of vehicles filled with tourists passed in front of them,  leaving the waterfront for the day.  Between them, they didn’t have enough money for a pack of cigarettes, which was the most pressing immediate need.   They had eaten several hours earlier at a communal meal served by the local Catholic church, and there was still a little vodka left in a half-pint bottle that they were sharing, which Luke kept in his pocket.

“You probably just fell down and hit your head” Luke said to Robert.  “You fall down all the time”.    Robert calmly replied “True, but this time I was sleeping, and some kid started to kick me in the face.   He kicked me ten or twelves times.   The police say they know who he is”.

Violent incidents in the homeless community are infrequent, but not unheard of.  Sometimes, it is the escalation of a squabble among such men, to whom small things, like a pay-as-you-go phone, or some stockpiled water, are precious commodities.  It is rarer still to have an unprovoked attack on an elderly homeless man.

As the lights turned off in the liquor store across the street for the night, the hopes of getting a pack of cigarettes faded.  There was a collective sigh.  “Do you have any cigarettes at all, Stu?”.

Stu reached into the pocket of his sweatshirt, and pulled out five partial remains of previously smoked cigarettes.  They had between 10% and 20% of the cigarette left above the filter, having been smoked by some passerby, and discarded.   They were trash to the previous owner, but a nicotine life-line to the three gentlemen.

“They are still a little wet from the rain”, Stu said.

Today had been sunny early in the morning, and looked promising for the whole day.   However a brief, but heavy shower moved through in the middle of the afternoon.   With no protective gear, and no shelter, one simply gets wet.   Clothes, shoes, cigarettes, and all.  What made it a bit worse for Robert is that he had his only sleeping bag out in the open in a grassy area at the time.   That meant he would be squishing around in the moisture all night.  Hopefully he could get it to dry out during the day tomorrow.

“The doctors say I might have had a concussion” Robert said.  But I’ve had that before, and I don’t think so.  They want me back tomorrow to check me out.”

“We got your back buddy”, Luke said to Robert.  “We’ll make sure that never happens again.”   Luke, a navy veteran, is always the guy to want to protect his fellow vets.

“I’m going crash for the night” Robert said, after acknowledging Luke’s pledge.  He got up from the bench and started meandering back towards the Catholic church.   At the parish hall, there was a concrete patio at the entrance, with a small overhang.   A low wall extended out from the entrance on both sides… just enough to provide shelter from any wind, and the overhang gave a modicum of protection from the rain, should it return while he slept.

Approaching the entrance, he lowered himself onto his wet sleeping bag, to the right of the door, directly beneath a “No loitering” sign.

To the left of the door, Trudy had already made her encampment about an hour earlier, making use of the same protective aspect of the wall and overhang.   She watched quietly while Robert laid down on his side of the concrete patio and fell asleep.

There are so many needs in society, it is evident that the government is a necessary entity in alleviating many of those needs.  A large aspect of the state and federal government is dedicated to assisting with housing, family services, food and nutrition, and financial assistance to help those in desperate situations.

The thought can be tempting to regard those services from the state, which we all contribute to in our taxes, as the remedy that exonerates us from personally becoming involved with someone in need.  This is addressed in part, in a text from Deuteronomy:

“If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart and you say, ‘The seventh year, the year of release is near,’ and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and you be guilty of sin. You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him.” (Deut. 15:7-10)

Every seventh year in Israel, there was a command to release everyone from their debts, as well as free anyone who had indentured themselves into servitude.  All civil debts were to be cancelled.

The text above deals overtly with the idea of being stingy with a loan, on the premise that in the following year, there would be no way to collect on it.  But in a broader sense, it addresses the idea that we might feel less motivation to helping someone if we felt that in the future, their deficit was going to be mitigated by an action from the community as a whole.   In the “year of release”, all of the debts of the person would be cancelled by civil decree.   So it would be easy for a you or I to say  “Hey, I know that person is in a desperate situation now, but a big program (the Year of Release) will straighten that out”.    This, the text calls an “unworthy thought”.

We still have a divine obligation to do whatever we can reasonably do.   Sometimes the personal caring and attention we give can be far more effective than an impersonal government program.   Sometimes it is that demonstration of love and caring that provides what is truly necessary.

There is nothing wrong with a state “safety net”, and we fortunate to have a society that does seek to help people in such ways– but we should never let the fact that government programs exist as an excuse for hardheartedness or lack of compassion.

In a society of laws, our thinking so often reverts to a simplistic notion of justice- people ultimately get what they deserve.   The hardworking rise to the top of the food chain.  The indolent sink to the bottom.   We like to picture ourselves as “self-made”… enjoying a status in life that we worked hard to achieve.

Although this vision of social and economic Darwinism may hold true sometimes, frequently the niceties in life we experience come from a degree of chance, rather than a formulaic outcome of our own design.

For example, the fact that you are reading this right now means that you live in an epoch with a written language, in a society that has harnessed electricity, and you have access to networked computers (The internet), giving you the ability to pull up essentially all of the cumulative knowledge of mankind, at your fingertips, within seconds.    That right there puts you in a more fortuitous position of 99.99% of all of humanity over the ages… and you didn’t do a single thing to effect where or when you were born.

If you have clean water, have access to a supermarket, and can buy your own food with no fear of going hungry today, you are even ahead of most people living in the world today.   Those are things to be thankful for.

It is important to recognize and be thankful for all the things we have that are simply a good fortune.   In doing so, we are more apt to recognize that the misfortune that might befall someone else is not a matter of “justice” or “karma” … sometimes it is simply chance event that befell them, rather than us.  And if we are honest about it, we realize that it could very well be ourselves in the same position.

This I believe is the foundation for cultivating a spirit of mercy for others.  Most people have heard the oft quote expression attributed to John Bradford (1510–1555) “There but for the grace of God, goes I” as an idiom with the same sentiment.  It is largely God’s grace and mercy which sustains the blessings in our lives.  We therefore have no grounds dismiss the misfortunes of others as earned or deserved.

Rather, the mindfulness of how fortunate we are should serve as the impetus for us to extend mercy and compassion to the afflicted.  What we do to render aid to the afflicted individual?  What is the most effective solution?

There is no one silver bullet for solving the problem of suffering in the world.  But we start by exerting ourselves to show compassion and mercy to those closest to us.   PeopleCorp is a loose confederation of volunteers who cooperate on local aid to those in need.   No one involved is a “hero” or “saint” in any spectacular sense.  Simply people who are grateful for what they have (which may be very little!)  and have compassion for others.

Aristotle said: “Let grace be that quality by which he who has it is said to render favor  to one who is in need, not in return for anything, nor that anything be given to him who renders it, but that something be given to that one in need.”

We live in and interesting time in human history- particularly in the Western world where “rugged individualism” and the profit motive are considered virtues which grease the wheels of enterprise, and by extension, make the whole world go round.   All of our marketing and advertising is an appeal to eg0- we should want to show off the nicest car, look sexy in a bathing suit, and enjoy the all of the luxuries we can get onto a credit card.

Unfortunately, the wisest of us have learned that just feeding an individuals ego creates only the most vain, shallow, and selfish monsters conceivable.   There has to come a time of reckoning for everyone when they have the epiphany that the insatiable ego is the chief problem in society, and the greatest source of unhappiness.   True happiness is only achieved by denying one’s ego-  by embracing the opposite-  a truly altruistic life.

Perhaps this was express by no one better than Albert Einstein:

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical elusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein

The solution, Einstein says, is to expand our care and compassion to an ever widening circle.  We are capable of empathy in a way that no other living creature can.  We have boxed in our feelings of care and concern to primarily ourselves, and a few choice people around us, and we are poorer and more unhappy for it.   When we removes that restriction, and break through the “us vs. them” mentalities that are some prevalent, we can be free to experience the universe as it was created for us.

For those of us who frequent evangelical or Bible churches, we have a fondness to discuss the “Good News” of salvation. Rarely will a Sunday go by when we are not reminded of the once-for-all, salvific work of Christ upon the cross. It is the moment that mankind was redeemed, the payment of our sins was settled. The worthy died for the unworthy, purchasing our eternal salvation. As Isaiah says:

“Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18).

This was one of the first Bible verses I remember hearing when I converted to Christianity.

Although Christ’s work upon the cross, by itself, without anything we could add to it, did indeed effect our salvation, I would suggest that this text should never be divorced from its context. Although we frequently quote it as a proof-text Christ’s actions achieving our forensic righteousness before God, there is a verse just before it that needs to sink deep into the hearts and minds of believers of all persuasions:

“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil, Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:16,17)

So much of Christianity has embraced only the “I got mine” aspect of the text. “I got my salvation– my free ticket”. And we ignore the emphatic mandate that righteousness- the living, breathing kind we are supposed to exemplify- acts on the behalf of justice. And the definition of justice in God’s estimation is exerting ourselves on behalf of the powerless and the disenfranchised.

It is not a matter of just ceasing from evil– it is actively hindering evil (reprove the ruthless), and aiding the less fortunate who are in need and unable to help themselves.

We live by a basic principle, which we believe is a universal.  Simply put: the highest ideal for the individual is the selfless care and concern of another human being.  Mercy and compassion for others is the apex of human nobility.

The goal then, is to help restore the dignity of those in need, ultimately to bring them to the position where they too can have the privilege of being a giver, not just a receiver.

The focus is primarily on those who can’t help themselves.  Putting in a Christian context, the Bible frequently mentions the “widow and orphan” as symbols of the disenfranchised, the poverty stricken, or destitute.     Those without any other means of support are the first priority.

Others may be those coming out of the criminal justice system, those seeking freedom from opiates or substance addiction, people on a fixed income with no savings, etc.

Our primary asset is simply the willingness of local volunteers to help by offering some time (which we limit, so as to not overburden anyone).  Others may want to donate supermarket gift cards for those with immediate food needs, or capital to help with emergency utilities.