April 1, 2008
SOC students host forum on homelessness
As we take stock of our lives, author and activist David Hilfiker said we must ask ourselves one essential question: “How do we live a meaningful life?”
The founder of Joseph’s House, a residence for terminally ill homeless men and women in Adams Morgan, Hilfiker said his work with Washington’s poor and underprivileged has given profound meaning to his own life.
“I’d been a physician for more than 10 years, but I felt a separation between my patients and myself,” said Hilfiker, who worked at a small clinic in Columbia Heights in the ’70s and ’80s. Joseph’s House, which Hilfiker founded in 1990, allowed him to “bring compassion and justice into the same place.”
Author of 2002’s Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen, Hilfiker was one of the speakers at last Thursday’s “Homeless and Healthcare: The Struggle of Living in Poverty,” an event organized by students in SOC professor Gemma Puglisi’s Public Relations Portfolio class. Throughout the semester, the students have worked with Joseph’s House to bring attention to the issue of homelessness in the District. The city has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country—even greater than some states—with nearly 10,000 Washingtonians living on the streets.
Patricia Wudel, executive director of Joseph’s House, also spoke of her work with the city’s homeless, who are dying of cancer and AIDS. Residents of the 11-bed home have “changed our lives,” Wudel said.
“We open our hearts as much as we can,” she said. When a residents dies, “allowing ourselves to have an open, broken heart means it will be open to the next person who comes through the door.”
School of Public Affairs professor Jeffrey Schaler provided a libertarian perspective—opposing government entitlement programs, including welfare, and universal healthcare—and instead encouraged the crowd “to do what you can, with what you have, to help others.” We have a responsibility, he said “to help people in our paths” to reduce their suffering.
