Doug Schenkelberg
Associate Director of Policy and Advocacy, Heartland Alliance
Chicago, IL

Doug Schenkelberg is the Associate Director of Policy and Advocacy for Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, a service-based human rights organization attending to the needs of the most vulnerable in our society. Founded in 1888, Heartland works with over 200,000 program participants a year on housing, health care, legal protection, and economic security issues. Doug coordinates the From Poverty to Opportunity Campaign: Realizing Human Rights in Illinois, a statewide, human rights campaign focused on ending poverty in Illinois. The campaign successfully advocated for the establishment of the Commission on the Elimination of Poverty in Illinois, the nation’s first permanent poverty commission tied to international human....

Just over 60 years ago, a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was born. This declaration says that all people, regardless of where they are born, the color of their skin or their station in life, have the same fundamental rights. We are talking about the right to vote, the right to live a life without torture, the right to live without discrimination, the right to work and the right to take a break, among others. Included in this is the right to housing – the simple belief that no one should have to be homeless. Everyone has the right to a home.

The United States helped write this list of universal rights. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of its primary authors. Not only that, but the United States was one of the first nations to declare these universal rights with its signature. This document embodies America’s core values: freedom, opportunity, equality and dignity. Every time an elected official gives a speech, regardless of his or her political affiliation, these values are inevitably repeated over and over.

We believe in these ideals here in the United States. We believe in human rights.

For example, I work on a project here in Illinois that is focused on ending poverty in our state. As part of this project, we traveled around the state and talked with people in Vienna, Peoria, Rockford, Carlinville and the south side of Chicago. In each of these places, we conducted a simple exercise. We asked folks to tell us what human rights meant to them.

Over and over, in community after community, the lists were nearly identical. They said human rights were about dignity, about opportunity and about equality. The distance between human rights and our values as Americans is non-existent.

People also said human rights were about housing, health care and education, just like the UDHR. The groups assembled had about the same level of familiarity with the declaration as the general public (which hovers around 8 percent). That did not matter. What mattered was that people knew in their gut that, if human rights are about opportunity and dignity, then they have to be about housing, they have to be about health care, they have to be about education.

But wait. There’s more. We asked the groups a second question: What is poverty? These groups began to list the same words and phrases that are probably filling your head right now – discrimination, lack of opportunity, barriers, illness and, invariably, homelessness. We always ended up with two lists at opposite ends of the spectrum. Consequently, this exercise always brought the people sitting in the community center, the gymnasium, the church basement, to the same conclusion:

Poverty is the absence of human rights.

For many, this definition of poverty is new. It is not based in charity. It does not say that poverty is simply the result of an individual making a series of bad choices. It says that we as a society are not living up to our values. We are not making opportunity, equality and dignity available to all.

Let’s get back to the original question: Can we end homeless in ten years? If poverty – if homelessness – is the absence of human rights, then how can we not?

 “Of course we want to end homelessness in ten years, but look at the economy.”

“It is not that we do not want to do it, it is just that we do not have the resources.”

“I agree we should end homelessness in ten years, but we need to accept that we just cannot reach that goal.”

Here lies the crux of the problem. We need to eliminate the space between what we believe and what we do. We have all heard these excuses or some variation of them. Most of us, including myself, have probably even said something similar at one point or another.

This juncture is often where the space between our goals and our commitments begins to show. We all love a good goal. Saying we are going to end poverty in ten years feels good. It is simple, straight forward. In Illinois, we have a goal to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. Flocks of people have signed on in support.

The problem is that a goal is not a commitment. We make excuses. The current economic crisis provides a perfect argument for why we “can’t” focus on ending homelessness right now. Many ask how can we possibly move towards this worthy goal when our economy is falling apart?

If we had a firm commitment to ending homelessness, the shift in economic conditions would not matter. That does not mean our tactics and strategies do not have to adapt to the current environment, but it does mean that we do not drop our commitment simply because conditions change.

I want to pause here and explain what I mean by “end.” To me, we have not failed to end homelessness if after ten years someone, somewhere, lives on the streets. Pretending that ending homelessness means no one will ever experience homelessness again is not realistic. What ending homelessness means to me is that everyone has a real opportunity to not be on the streets. Last year, a commentary on Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity gave a good look at the policies and programs that need to be put in place in order to provide maximum opportunity while respecting the dignity and right to self-determination of homeless individuals.*

Given this broad understanding of what ending homelessness really means, there is no reason we cannot end it. The problem is that we are not reflecting our human rights values in our actions as individuals, as communities and as a nation.

A few years ago, Dr. Arjun Sengupta—an independent expert of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights—visited the United States to discuss the issue of human rights and extreme poverty. He was visiting many nations in order to investigate the relationship between poverty and human rights in each place. At the end of his visit to the U.S., he wrote a report that included the following observation:

“If the United States adopted a comprehensive national strategy and programmes based on human rights principles it would be possible to reduce poverty and eradicate extreme poverty.”

There is no doubt we can end poverty and homelessness. The real question is: will we?

It is not about resources. It is about will. The will was found to come up with trillions of dollars for bank bailouts and stimulus packages. The will has been found in the past for important programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Food Stamps. The key is to find that will again, linked with human rights values and principles, and then sustain it long enough to see our commitments through.

When we do that, homelessness will finally come to an end.