Chinatown merchants and restaurant owners once loved to hate the River of Life Missionʻs homeless outreach program.
They said the missionʻs food service in its building on North Pauahi Street attracted hundreds of street dwellers to Chinatown who left behind piles of trash and feces on the sidewalks and scared away customers from stores and eateries.
And worse, critics claimed the promise of free food encouraged more homeless individuals to station themselves permanently downtown to be closer to meals.
The Christian ministry became a scapegoat for some detractors to blame for everything bad that happened in Chinatown.
But no more. The mission has ceased its three-meals-a-day service at its building. On April 1, 2022, at the urging of the city and downtown businesses and its own leaders, River of Life launched a new way of doing business.
“We wanted to continue what we were doing — serving people on the streets — but we also wanted to be good neighbors. We realized we needed to decentralize, to minister to smaller groups in different locations so we didnʻt disrupt the community,” said Paul Gates, River of Life’s executive director.
Instead of serving food in its Chinatown building, it now uses the facilityʻs kitchen to cook hundreds of hot meals that are delivered in vans each weekday to different Oahu churches, businesses and nonprofits with whom it partners.
“What River of Life has done has made a tremendous difference in Chinatown. We could see the results right away. Their building is no longer a magnet for homeless, I only wish it had happened sooner,” said Fran Butera.
Butera is a small-business owner whose office is across the street from River of Life. She and other Chinatown businesses tried unsuccessfully for years to get the mission to move its operation.
Gates explained why the mission’s new model works.
“So many groups in Hawaii want to make a major impact on ending homelessness, but they lack the facilities to do it. We bring the meals to them so they can do the ministry. They open up their doors to us and we get them up and running,” he said.
River of Life calls it M and M — Meals and Ministry. It calls the food delivery points “hub spots.”
The mission started out with one hub spot in the parking lot of the Institute for Human Services in Iwilei. Now it has 79 of them all over Oahu.
“Our number of partnerships has exploded. It is miraculous,” said Gates. Besides bringing food to its hub spots, ROL coordinates and connects the participating nonprofits and churches with service providers skilled in helping homeless people transition off the streets.
The approach is much broader than handing out individual takeout boxes of chicken long rice, corn and bacon chowder and hamburger stew cooked by the mission’s kitchen director Hilda Gibson.
ROL president Rann Watumull said some of the hub spots have become like service fairs offering multiple benefits such as haircuts, showers, clothing, legal advice, wound care and one-on-one attention from volunteers.
Watumull said in the first eight months of this year, by partnering with other organizations, River of Life has encouraged 98 people to transition into detox programs or shelters or to fly home at ROL’s expense to live with relatives on the mainland.
He said in the 35 years ROL served meals at its Chinatown building, it would have been lucky to get nine or 10 people off the streets in a year.
River of Life attributes the success of its new mobile outreach to five key elements:
- Food is brought to each hub spot only once a week. Gates said that keeps homeless people from getting too comfortable like they were in Chinatown where they could count on meals at the same place every day. “We donʻt want to facilitate people in ways that allow them to stay on the streets,” he said.
- The hub spots serve only 50 clients meals each to encourage one-to-one contact with homeless clients. If a church or business starts to experience more than 50 visitors, it is urged to get a neighboring organization to set up its own hub spot to deal with the overflow.
- Volunteers at each hub spot are encouraged to make personal contact with homeless clients to gain their trust in order to better understand what each person needs to improve his or her situation. “The challenges homeless people face each day are so intricate, the solution does not lie in trying to help people in large crowds but rather in one-to-one interactions. The houseless often need someone to hold their hand through the difficult process of recovery,” Gates said.
- River of Life created another easy way for volunteers to help by reaching out to clubs and community organizations to help fill so-called midnight snack packs to give to homeless clients coming to the hub spots.
- Removing barriers for volunteers to participate by making time commitments shorter. It is easier to volunteer at one of the hub spots for a few hours once a week than to have to promise days and days of personal time to help.
“Many homeless are up and on their feet at midnight. That’s when they get robbed or raped or worse. They sleep in the day and stay awake at night to keep themselves safe — and that’s when they get hungry,” Watumull said.
School groups and community organizations or businesses pitch in at one-time events to fill the midnight snack bags called “Grace to Go” with energy bars, dried fruit and bottles of water. The volunteers write on the outside of each bag encouraging messages such as “Stay strong” or “You can do it.”
By making it easier to pitch in and help, River of Life said it has increased its volunteer count from the 2,000 who showed at various times up each year to help at the building in Chinatown to more than 6,000 who now volunteer at the different mobile hub spots or participate in one-time outreach events such as bingo nights at homeless shelters or filling midnight snack bags.
When Gates spoke an international gathering of homeless rescue missions in Orlando, Florida, in May, he said some establishments were eager to know more about River of Lifeʻs model.
Since then, the organization has put together a 16-lesson plan to help other communities — including the San Diego Rescue Mission, one of the largest in the country — learn how to set up their own mobile, hub spot programs.
“The response to what we are doing has been off the charts. Our little River of Life is trendsetting all over the country,” said Watumull.
Watumull said it was not easy in the beginning to take such a dramatic pivot to go mobile after the missionʻs 35 years of working only out of its building in Chinatown.
“We had no pattern to follow. It was a big step of faith. But we felt strong it was the work we were called to do,” he said.
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