c. 2004 Religion News Service

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WASHINGTON _ When Lora Hymes was in high school, she was concerned about other young people who had been dealt some bad breaks so she volunteered at the local youth homeless shelter. She never thought that one day she’d end up there herself.

“My mom got sick, my sister couldn’t take me in. So I was left on the street,” Hymes, 20, said on a recent sunny afternoon in Washington, a city where one in every five people lives in poverty. “Thank God for Covenant House.”

A member of Hymes’ church called Covenant House, a privately run organization in the city’s rough-and-tumble Southeast neighborhood that provides food, shelter and counseling to youth in need. She arrived at Covenant House’s emergency shelter last November. The nearly three months Hymes spent at the shelter not only helped her get back on her feet, they also taught her a lot about standing up for herself.

“Being here helped me see that I count,” Hymes said. “I don’t need adults to talk for me. I can talk for myself.”

These kinds of statements are exactly what the Catholic Campaign for Human Development likes to hear. The CCHD is the premier anti-poverty office for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Since 1998, the CCHD has given $81,500 in grants to Covenant House, part of more than $200 million it has distributed to thousands of anti-poverty programs around the country since 1970.

The nation’s capital has been particularly hard-hit by poverty. When listed alongside the 50 states, Washington ranks as the nation’s poorest, with 31 percent of its children living in poverty, and about 40 percent of all families making less than $25,000 a year.

“You look around here and there isn’t even a regular-sized grocery store,” said Christian Wainwright, the CCHD liaison for the Archdiocese of Washington, on a recent tour of CCHD-funded programs in the city’s Southeast section. “Even the McDonald’s is all boarded up.”

The CCHD uses an annual nationwide collection to fund programs that help the poor help themselves. It doesn’t often fund homeless shelters, but Covenant House is much more than a homeless shelter _ it is a $4 million community service center for at-risk youth between the ages of 16 and 21.

In addition to emergency social services, the center houses a day-care center, computer labs and a cafeteria. The center also runs job-training programs and a daily “spiritual reflection,” though being Catholic _ or any religion, for that matter _ is not a prerequisite for receiving a CCHD grant.

“Young people face a confluence of factors which make it hard to escape poverty and a sense of hopelessness,” said Vincent Gray, executive director of Covenant House, pointing to inadequate housing, the rising high school dropout rate and the closing of vocational schools in Washington that have made the city one of the few where poverty rates rose during the 1990s.

“We wanted to give young people the opportunity to learn to be self-advocates. Young people are a hundred percent of our future.”

The Rev. Bob Vitillo, national director of CCHD, agrees with Gray’s attitude. He said CCHD supports programs that help poor people in Washington and elsewhere who are “empowering themselves by analyzing their poverty situations (and) learning ways to advocate for themselves and to solve their own problems.”

CCHD knows it’s working in the face of formidable odds. The program’s strategy is twofold: First, it gives grants to programs like Covenant House that fight what Vitillo calls the “root causes” of poverty, including lack of education, inadequate health care and unaffordable housing.

Second, CCHD is raising awareness of the plight of poor people in America. In its annual “poverty pulse” poll, CCHD found that nearly two-thirds of Americans think poverty affects fewer than 5 million people. The real number is closer to 35 million.

“The poor have become increasingly invisible in our society,” said Barbara Stephenson, communications director for the CCHD office. CCHD attempts to encourage people to “see and understand `poverty USA,’ the `other America,”’ she said.

Vitillo conceded that eliminating poverty is a slow process, but one that is marked by small victories at every turn. Covenant House, for example, opened the doors to its new, two-story brick center on Mississippi Avenue last year. Living Wages, an adult education center in Southeast Washington that has also received CCHD funding, is about to graduate its fourth class of adult high school students this summer _ its largest group yet. And St. Thomas More Catholic Church, in cooperation with the Washington Interfaith Network, has just broken ground on a new youth center, which will be built in a neighborhood where the only other place for young people to play is in a park that has been plagued by gang violence.

Hymes is celebrating a number of small victories herself. She moved out of the shelter in February. She took the self-advocacy lessons she learned to a city budget hearing in March where she argued for continued funding for Covenant House. The city’s Department of Human Services approved the funding. She is living with relatives and has applied for an apartment at a transitional living facility also administered by Covenant House. She has nearly finished the six-month carpentry program that she hopes will help her get a good job.

“I’m in the I-can-do-it spirit now,” Hymes said. “There are a lot of young people who are lost. But when a young person can see another young person doing well and say, `Yeah, I can do that too,’ that’s really good.”

And as for her future plans?

“I want to be a carpenter. And as side goals, I want to be a cosmetologist and a chef,” she said. “I want to do it all.”

DEA/PH END FINUCANE