See Beautiful Grant Applicant: Lantern House

The feature below is brought to you by Lantern House, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about Lantern House, please visit their website page: here.

Shelter from the storm

The COVID-19 pandemic has left me, and I think most people, feeling out of control. An invisible virus had upended daily life for the entire world, changing the way we work, socialize, and think about the future. It has been another reminder that no matter how intelligent, inventive, and advanced our species has become – there are forces of nature we cannot, and will not ever, control.

At Lantern House, Ogden, Utah’s 24/7 homeless shelter, the virus has highlighted the already vast disparity between the affluent and the impoverished. With many lower paying service jobs reducing staff hours and implementing layoffs to save their businesses, those already living without a safety net, have been sent into an economic freefall.

Low-income individuals who have kept working in grocery stores or other essential businesses, often risk being exposed to the virus, and statistics show low-income individuals experience both infection and death at higher rates than their more affluent peers. In this way, the virus has taught us what we have long already known; your income level can determine the length of your life, and in the case of COVID-19, may mean life or death.

At our shelter we have always been committed to lending a hand to the neediest in our community, and the pandemic has only fortified our resolve to help the additional individuals now seeking help. We have seen a large increase in those needing both emergency shelter and meals since the onset of the pandemic, and to help our community members suffering from food insecurity, we’ve opened all three of our USDA compliant breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals to any one in need, at zero cost. Even more noteworthy, are our rental and deposit assistance programs which are continuing to help individuals and families transition out of shelter and into a permanent home of their own during the pandemic.

I think the silver lining of living through this pandemic is that we may all take proactive steps to ensure our personal health; we will value good nutrition, exercise, and social interaction more than ever before. We may acknowledge our role in the virus outbreak, and make efforts to stop deforestation, protect wildlife, and restore clean air. In many ways, we have been living on this planet as a virus ourselves, destroying the very earth that brings us life and meaning.  Moving forward I hope we understand more deeply how plants, animals, and humans are interconnected, and make the effort to ensure our world’s ecosystem does not produce another virus like this again.

I think the virus will also make us see the homeless population in a different light. So often, we see someone in a different circumstance than ourselves, and we blame them. We wonder what they did to be in their current position. I am guilty of this; I judge that a person must have made choices that brought them to a certain predicament. This couldn’t be a more flawed way of thinking about homeless individuals, and just as the virus has made us see life as uncontrollable, I think we must also look at our homeless men and women as victims of unforeseen trials and unfortunate circumstances.

After all, we do not have any say about the economic circumstance we are born into. As young children we do not decide that we would like to be the victims of violence, poverty, abuse, or addiction. As we grow, we do not wish to develop a mental illness or hope to be priced out of obtaining higher education or the opportunity to purchase our own home. So, just as we are coming to accept that much of what is happening in our world is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and unjust, I hope we can see our homeless clients as victims of their environments – not those who choose to live in poverty and despair.
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I think the thing I love most about Lantern House is our staff’s ability to do just that; see our clients through a lens of understanding. They withhold judgement and believe that each human that walks through our doors has a young child in them – filled with hopes, dreams, and optimism. They do not blame a struggling individual for their current circumstance, but advocate for them, and help them navigate the complexities of regaining housing and employment, ensuring our community becomes more equitable, one person at a time.

Submitted by: Hannah Bowcutt