79 JFK AND BEYOND

Empowering the Homeless
Organizing for Change in Homelessness Policy

AS A YOUNG GIRL growing up in New York City’s Upper East Side, Eliza Greenberg MPA 1998 was walking to her apartment at 75th and 3rd Streets one day when she noticed Buddy, a homeless man who had sought shelter in the doorway of the school across the street.She wondered to herself, “Why do I get to go home to my home and my bed tonight when Buddy’s going to have to sleep out here?”

Greenberg, now director of Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission and the

mother of two children, never did figure out the answer to her question. It makes as little sense to her now as it did then why anyone has to go without shelter. As a result she says, “evening the playing field” has become her passion. “Why does one child get born into a family that has means and another child doesn’t? It’s our responsibility to make sure that each child gets what he or she needs, regardless of the circumstances they were born into,” she says.

After spending nine years in direct service with Bridge Over Troubled Waters in Boston, where she counseled and educated homeless adolescents in empowerment, self-advocacy, and community building, Greenberg came to the Kennedy School to see if government work was for her.

Her list of favorite classes and professors is virtually endless, but it was more than her classes that got this former New Yorker fired up about working in government. For her, it was also the act of seeing in her professors, such as Julie Wilson and Elaine Kamarck, examples of “smart people who had cycled in and out of government.”

She hopes to bring the skills she learned in MPA 1993 Marshall Ganz’s class, “Organizing: People, Power, and Change,” to include more homeless voices in the policymaking process. Laughing, she remembers a woman named Thelma who called her recently to say, “Last time I looked at the Constitution, it said [government] had to be ‘for the people.’ It’s not just talking about cuts to the poorest of the people. It’s talking about being ‘for the people.’ What happened to that?”

Greenberg, who has been heading up Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission since October 2002, couldn’t agree more. “What did happen to that?” she asks. “When the state starts cutting shelters by 15 percent, you have to wonder. These are the poorest of the poor. These are people who have been failed by every system. And you’re going to say that the poorest people aren’t going to get beds now?”

This past winter’s Arctic chill — with temperatures dipping to zero — presented even more challenges for Greenberg. “Still,” she says, “no one was turned away from Boston’s shelters, even though they were way over capacity. If we couldn’t get people into the first shelter, we’d transport them to another one.”

One issue raised by January’s cold snap was that of “protective custody” — laws on the books in Philadelphia and New York City that require the removal of homeless people when the temperature dips below a certain point. Boston has more of a “compassionate treatment” approach, says Greenberg. “None of us want to see people freeze to death,” she told the Boston Globe, “but people have dignity and rights, and who are we to make those decisions for them?

“We’ve always had street outreach workers out there 24 hours a day, offering people anything they need, from detox to medical care,” she says. “[Outreach workers] are the backbone of the system every season — not just on the coldest nights — and they’ve developed relationships with these homeless people through the years. There’s a lot of trust there. We got 25 hardcore homeless people to come into shelters during the coldest nights. That wouldn’t have happened if we had violated these people’s trust by forcing them to come inside.” — AC