United Ministries' poverty tour, it changes lives

By Stephen Lintner  

JULY 27, 2010 7:33 a.m. (0)

From the window of a 10-passenger van, life can move by pretty fast.

For Reggie Ellison, the view from her seat on the United Ministries Poverty Tour slowed it to a halt.

And to say that her life was changed would be an understatement.

Ellison took the tour in 2008 as a part of her Furman University degree course and hasn’t stopped thinking about it since.

At 41, the mother of two children is an unlikely intern, but her work with Place of Hope at United Ministries all started with that day two years ago.

“On that van I said, ‘I’ve got to do something and I have to put it into action. I can’t just talk about it. It’s personal now. This is my community and these are my neighbors,’” she says.

The following two-year journey of nights spent wrestling with the faces and scenes she saw in those communities found her in a summer position with the organization.

“One of the most powerful images was the wall there in Nicholtown separating those who have from those who have not,” she says. “That image is burned into my mind. How it was a manmade barrier between people.”

The wall in Nicholtown is a perimeter of privacy fences separating Cleveland Forest from the outside poverty. It is a motley arrangement of concrete, wood plank palisades.

Men on porches holding shotguns, a pit-bull poised at their feet, send glaring statements to the outside world as the United Ministries van, a well-known icon in the community, slowly rolls by. A young girl on the corner looks timidly up at the older gentlemen negotiating her price in drugs.

“I felt just so naïve and so blinded,” Ellison said of that day. “And then I felt an awesome sense of responsibility.”

It wasn’t just the wall, or the crime, or the mistrust that kept Ellison up at night for two years though.

“We drove by and I saw neighbors out talking to each other,” says Ellison. “My neighbors never talk to one another. How many do I even know?”

The sense of community is what we’ve lost, says Ellison.

“And what keeps us from doing that? Fear, misunderstanding, inequity. And I’m just as guilty as anyone else is.”

R.J. March, program associate of Our Eyes Were Opened outreach and recent Furman graduate, found himself equally convicted, and curious, during his first tour.

“I grew up pretty privileged and never saw those kind of conditions. I was cautioned to go into those areas,” says March. “But being a guy who’s not black and didn’t grow up in the hood, I saw that I could actually have relationships with these people.”

After the tour, March began taking pancakes and coffee regularly to the Greyhound Station and the Labor Finders Union during his senior year at Furman, which eventually led him to United Ministries.

“There’s one guy who I got to know pretty well,” says March. “He had just come from church one day and had gotten his first hot meal in probably a long time and was so excited and he was like ‘You guys want some?’ He was just so ready to share everything.”

Generosity extends in both directions. And in a community where homelessness and affluence do more than just graze elbows, sometimes the best thing to exchange is a conversation.

As Ellison and March’s work with United Ministries has proven, it’s the simple things that make a world of difference.

“It’s all about an immediate need,” says Ellison. “You can’t look at it trying to solve the bigger issue, although I’d love to be a part of that. It’s really not about that. It’s about being there.”

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