Shared sacrifice?

The staff at the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries didn't need economists to tell them how devastating the lingering effects of this recession have been. They see them every day, in the faces of the people they feed, keep warm and to whom they try to give hope.

They see people who aren't like the clients they've had before. These are people who never imagined they'd be jobless, let alone homeless. "Recently, one of our volunteers saw a man standing in line for a meal with two children," Chad Audi, DRMM's president and CEO, told me the other day.

The day was bitterly cold; the man tightly gripped the hands of his kids. The volunteer suggested they come inside with him. No, the man said; he just wanted to wait in line like everyone else. They asked about his situation.

He had relatives he could stay with, he explained, but didn't want them to have to feed him too. The volunteers got him and the kids, who looked to be about 12, meals. DRMM has transitional housing available, but he politely said no. He just wanted to get his family some food.

"What we are seeing now is more and more of the working homeless," said Audi, who has a doctorate in business and gave up a high-paying job to do what he feels is the Lord's work.

"You have people who do work full time, but who can't afford somewhere to live. So we try to help them." That's been a special challenge this winter. The weather has been so cold, and money has been so short. But DRMM never turns anyone away who needs a safe and warm place to sleep.

"Sometimes, yes, we run out of beds. But we can at least put chairs together, and they can get some rest," Audi said, in the melodious lilting accent of his native Lebanon.

Money is, naturally, never in sufficient supply. "Because of all the bad economy we've seen, we're not able to get donations at the level we expected in the past, to sustain operations at the level we need," said Audi.

Yet something remarkable has happened. Large institutional donations have fallen off, true. But ordinary people have stepped up — big-time. "We're getting a much broader base at this point. They are actually covering what the bigger donations did in the past, or almost as much."

"But the demand is so much larger," he said. Every day, they serve, on average, 1,400 people. Five years ago, it was about 900. Then the economy tanked, demand exploded, and Audi and his troops have scrambled to keep up.

By the way, there are still those who think of DRMM, which has been around for more than a century, as a soup kitchen. Once it indeed was that, back in the Great Depression, when it was housed in the Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church, and the founder, David Stucky, used to bring in canned goods from his own shelves to keep people alive.

These days they have educational programs, transitional and some permanent housing, and an array of rehab facilities. They have recreation and camping programs for inner-city kids. They've opened a restaurant called Cornerstone in Highland Park — that city's only sit-down restaurant — where they are training people for jobs in the hospitality business.

> Email Jack Lessenberry