Conversation with John McKnight, Peter Block and Guest Edd Conboy

TalkShoe Radio  ~  August 8, 2015

 

For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work.  All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.

 

A Place at the Table:

Conversation with Edd Conboy

August 8, 2015

 

When the late Edd Conboy took over orchestrating the Breaking Bread meals at Philadelphia’s  Broad Street Ministry, he wanted to counteract the constant messages about being deficient that receivers of service encountered every day. Like having to stand in line for food, or for this service or that program. He realized that waiting is one of the most powerful reinforcers of the class system. It symbolizes helplessness, hopelessness, and the constant concern that there is not enough … and that it will run out just before it is my turn. So, Edd did something about that.

 

Peter Block: Welcome, Edd and John and other guests that are joining us. I met Edd about three years ago when I was a guest at a daylong conference, and I was able to get a sense of the ministry that he was involved in. I want to read you something that caught my eye after I met him. This is from an article that he wrote in April 2013.

 

When Edd Conboy took over orchestrating the Breaking Bread meals at Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia, he focused on developing as many ways as possible to counteract the constant messages about scarcity that the guests, they call them guests instead of members, encountered each and every day, like having to stand in line. The constant lining up for this service or that program is one of the most powerful reinforcers of the scarcity mindset. Lines are also a symbol of political imbalance. The wealthy do not wait in line. They have reserved first-class seats and priority access. Having to stand in line symbolizes helplessness, hopelessness, and the constant concern that there is not enough. Then it will run out just before it is my turn. Edd did something about that.

 

Then the article goes on, but we have Edd right here. So, Edd, welcome. I just read that and that was a wakeup call to me. Could you talk a little bit about your work and what led up to it and introduce yourself to the callers and us and tell us about what you are up to these days?

 

Edd Conboy: I would be happy to. We have a number of different services for our guests on Broad Street in Philadelphia. We are right on the Avenue of the Arts if anyone is familiar with Philadelphia and right in Center City. It is an old Presbyterian Church though our program is quite secular. We still share many of the values of some of the early congregants.

 

I guess the cornerstone of our service offering is our Breaking Bread meal that you talked about, and we have actually transformed the sanctuary, which was in a very large and old prominent church. We took all the pews out and I think that is where you were, Peter, on the engagement. We have tables and chairs and about two hundred people who come and sit at round tables with tablecloths and regular dinnerware and silverware. We try not to use disposable things, or as few disposable things as possible, because we think that gives a message to folks who are our guests that they are not disposable as well. We really want them to have a feeling of being included and being part of something that is vital and vibrant.

 

So, we don’t have a soup kitchen model. Our focus is on the dining room and not the kitchen. Actually, our guests never see the kitchen as the kitchen is in the back. The food is not our central focus. Our central focus is on hospitality. We have a hospitality model and think that radical hospitality does lead to radical change and that is really what our focus is.

 

Our volunteers come and serve our guests tableside, so there is no standing in line for a meal and there is no cafeteria style service. Our sense is that many of our folks are experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity or food insecurity, and often living on the streets. We have a sense that they have essentially forgotten who they are. We really want to have a place and engagement where they can remember who they are and that they are vital members of our society and culture, and that they matter and that we care about them and that we notice them. And we want to address the chronic problem of scarcity in all of its forms.

 

I think that in a nutshell is what we are trying to work with.

 

Peter:  That is stunning to me, Edd. To take something so concrete as the idea of no disposable silverware because we are not disposable. You are offering them the notion that we are permanent and that they are here and that this is a meal of remembrance, which is remembering themselves.

 

Just to stay with that, are there other things that occur during the meal –– everybody is fed at the same time, aren’t they?

 

Edd: Well, technically we have room for 186 of our guests. The room could hold 500 if we had long, rectangular tables, if the focus was just on the food and the meal itself. But the focus is about the hospitality and so the fact that we are using round tables and limiting the number of people really does create a sense of spaciousness because that is also one of the things our guests have a scarcity of and that is social space. So, social friction is also a concern.

 

Actually, we count numbers very carefully and we see the trends. The numbers that we have will vary from the beginning of the month to the end of the month because of the benefits that have been cut over the years. On average our guests with SNAP benefits have about four meals a month that they are missing and so those folks will show up later in the month. So, we have more folks that come in that we can feed immediately, but the way we handle that not having lines or tickets. Actually, our founder told me very clearly that if we ever have meal tickets he wanted to shut the place down because that is not what we do. My challenge has always been to not have meal tickets or any kind of numbering system.

 

We have a host or hostess who meets our guests and takes their name and greets them. Then we have a second seating area where they can see the meal being served as people are leaving. We have people bussing tables. Then we have the opportunity to go up to the person who just came in and say, Peter, your table is ready and we take them to a table rather than having them stand in line worrying that they are not going to be seated. So, we are giving them the assurance that when it is their turn, they will have a turn.

 

There is a constant turnover. The reason it works now is because our guests trust that our kitchen will never run out of food, and we never do. In the early days they would come in at the very beginning of the meal. So, for lunch they would come in at 11:45 to be first in line and the first to be served because they were afraid that we would run out. Now more than half our guests will come in after the meal has begun, which is very gratifying for us because now it is embedded in the culture that they do not have to come and stand outside beforehand to be first in line. They can come a half hour after the meal has begun knowing that there will be a place for them at the table. That is really why it works: because it is a constant turnover and the immediate rush is not there like it might be at some other places where you see people standing outside for quite some time.

 

John McKnight: You have created an environment that has the message of hospitality. You had people who once stood in line who are now sitting at a friendly table. Do you see any effect on the people who are at the tables now? This kind of setting against what it might have been like standing in a cafeteria line?

 

Edd: There are a couple of things that happen at the tables, and we try to learn from our guests who are wonderful teachers for us if we just pay attention. They make good decisions in some very difficult situations. What we find is not dissimilar to what my parents used to experience as they got older and would go to McDonald’s on different days. We have guests who sit at different tables on different days, and they have different communities where they would meet on Thursdays or they would meet on Mondays. There is that sense of community and diversity.

 

To speak directly to your question, there is a certain amount of time it takes, and we are never sure how long it takes for some of our guests to become acclimated to the way we do things. One thing they are used to is standing in line everywhere else. So, for some of our guests it can be a little disconcerting, especially the first time they walk into the room. It is quite a large sanctuary. We have the tables and we have music playing. There is artwork around. It is quite a scene sometimes and that can be a little disturbing for some of our folks, and we try to make sure that people that come in at that moment and they stop and their eyes are getting as big as saucers fell welcome. So we go over and talk to them and they want to know where they are supposed to sit and what they are supposed to do; we tell them they can sit anywhere they like. It is often a little bit disconcerting at first.

 

We like to spend some time with them. We are also very aware, more and more, of what we call returning citizens. People who are leaving prisons. We have to be very careful with them because too many choices can also be traumatic after they have been in situations where their choices have been severely limited and here we are giving them choices –– they can sit anywhere they want or anytime they want. Those are kinds of things we try to work with them on, to reassure them it is okay and that they are going to be all right.

 

So, we are learning from our guests to how to engage with them in ways that are truly hospitable. Hospitality is a very dynamic engagement. It is not the same for everyone. We have to be aware of what is truly hospitable in that context. It takes constant learning on our part to see what radical hospitality means to that person who is walking in the room and not necessarily what it means to me theoretically, but how it is implemented in the moment.

 

John: That is a wonderful point of realization. A restaurant probably does not have that kind of sensitivity, but you add to traditional hospitality that recognition of the distinctness of each person, and you are addressing that as well.

 

Edd: That is our aspiration. This is not new. We always like to think that we are the latest thing. The Benedictines have been doing this for centuries. So, we are trying to add our version to a very long tradition of what it means to be a guest and what it means to be a host. It is a very complicated relationship when you really delve into it.

 

Peter: Say more about the complication of the guest and host relationship.

 

Edd: Sure, especially in the situation where we are dealing with vulnerable adults who come in.

 

There is an intriguing power dynamic, and we have to really work to balance that as best as we can. It’s not going to be a perfect balance because in that moment being the host can become transactional if we are not careful and we are not really paying attention. There are certain needs that people have and there are certain capacities that we might have to fill those needs. It is very easy to get into a complicated and, I think, damaging power relationship. That is why we speak about scarcity as the trauma and not about being homeless or being hopeless and things like that or being necessarily hungry or being poor or being rich.

 

One of the things that we are paying attention to –– and this is where we work with our staff more and more to be informed –– is that we believe one of the universal human conditions is to experience scarcity. I mean even the wealthiest benefactors we have talk about how they don’t have enough time. They have plenty of money and great resources, but we all experience scarcity in different ways. With our guests we are aware, for example –– and we often tell folks in our orientation with our volunteers –– that every time I go to the airport to catch a flight and I am in the TSA line, I have a moment that I am going to miss that flight. I don’t have enough time and this line is moving too slowly. I go through the whole mental gymnastics about scarcity, and this time I am going to miss that flight and there are no more flights and it will wreak havoc on my work or my vacation. Then I calm down and I watch the line and it is moving okay and we are going to make it. I mean, in the many years that the TSA has been doing this I have never missed a flight, but I always think about that possibility.

 

So, I entertain this thought with our volunteers: Imagine that moment or that 30 seconds when I go through the mental gyration and imagine that is my entire week, and then imagine if that is day after day and that is all I think about. That is the trauma of chronic scarcity that it is very different for our vulnerable adults who are living in that moment.

 

That is the distinction that we believe makes the difference: the relentlessness of the scarcity, not just the experience of it.

 

Peter: It’s also very visible, as is most of scarcity we make invisible.

 

Edd: Exactly and we are masters at covering it. Our guests are beyond that. They have let that go.

 

Peter: You know, you talk about waiting in the TSA line. It is not only that you wait in line and you wonder if you are going to make it, but also that the reward at the end of the line is to empty your pockets and raise your hands. I always feel that I am being arrested.

 

John: Edd, one of the things that you mention in your article “Seeing Blue” is how you came to see things that you had not seen before even though they were all around you. One of the things I think our book The Abundant Community is trying to do is help people see that very thing. There is in locality an abundance, but we don’t see it because we are in a sense blinded by the institutional consumer world.

 

I was wondering, do you have a way, a practice, that you could tell other people that would help them see what is there and have the experience that led you to the kinds of actions that you take? How can we see?

 

Edd: Well, for me, part of my meditation practice is having a softer focus of widening my view.

 

Historically, as a therapist in my periods of incarnation, I would be working in a very small room in a therapy setting. It would be a very narrow focus and I would be very focused on the client and myself and the client’s family. It would be very tight. In this work with Broadway it is about softening the focus and really widening the view. To let in more, not just more information, but more experience. I keep asking myself what am I not seeing because I am looking too closely and the I begin to suspend my judgment about knowing what is in front of me.

 

I think that there is a real value to sitting in the practice of not knowing and allowing what is occurring to enter into my consciousness rather than me trying to find something out. It is an uncovering rather than discovering.

 

John: You think that you discovered the meaning of the line. Was a part of that discovery looking inside yourself? You didn’t have to read about it. Your own humanity helps you once you see it in relationship to others to see the others.

 

Edd: I think that’s right, John. It is also an awareness of what the relationship is like in the moment.

 

For instance, when we first took over the orchestrating the Breaking Bread meals, there was a clothing closet that people could go in and choose some items of clothing. When I first took over it was a first come, first served and we could serve about 40 people. Our Thursday lunch doors open up at 11:30 and at about 9:00 people would be lining up in front of the building. We would open the doors and they would be racing up the stairs and quite literally stepping on each other to be first in line. Our folks were not violent or mean spirited. They were just desperate. They were desperate for a pair of pants. They had been wearing the same clothes for three weeks and that was all they could think about.

 

So, I just became aware of how untenable that was for me to be watching and to be part of that and in some ways coconspirator in allowing that to happen. It was just untenable to me. So, we had to find a new solution and we finally came up with a lottery, and it wasn’t that brilliant, but just a way to use some game theory. So, there is no first come, first served. Almost immediately, like within a week or two, the line disappeared. People started coming later because it didn’t matter if you came in one minute or ten minutes after the doors opened because the lottery was in place.

 

We were looking for ways for us to notice our own experiences and our own sense of awkwardness. This is not just a host–guest relationship. This is something more conspiratorial. I think there is a sense that we found something unspeakable. So, we began to speak our experiences, and say that this is not how we want to live our lives. This is not how we want to engage with our guests. Then we were forced to look at new ways of looking at the room and our relationships and then looking at new possibilities.

 

Peter: The more you talk, Edd, the more I feel that your guests are transparent in conditions that we are all living in. If you think of Black Friday, you see people stomping over each other to get things. The consumer culture is based on the fact that no matter how much I have it is not enough.

 

Edd: Yes, and that is the mantra that we have. I love your Abundant Community book and its sense of abundance. We have learned that is a very complicated language about abundance because it is experienced in different ways. In our early days we used to have huge bowls of fruit on the tables. We now like to say that was well intentioned and ill-informed in equal measure. We thought that if we had massive amounts of fruit overflowing on the tables that people would be so happy to see all this fruit, but it really did traumatize our guests. When you are living in chronic scarcity, and again when we spoke with them and learned from them, then of course it made sense that having all that fruit was not a good idea.

 

At first, we could not figure out what was going on and why it was so tense. If your experience of yesterday is that there was not enough and if your experience of today is more than you can imagine, then your thought might be that tomorrow there might not be anything again, so I’d better hoard as much as I can. So, we do one serving a meal and say that there is exactly enough. There is never more and never less. Even though we are not a religious organization we have some spiritual component. Our colleagues from the faith side talk about the manna of the Israelites. They could not refrigerate food and so there was just enough. They could not store food. So, there was a sense of the abundance that was in the moment and not abundance over time. There was enough manna for everyone.

 

There was abundance, but it was not overflowing, and you could not store it away or lock it up in a safe deposit box and worship it. So, abundance even then, I think, doesn’t necessarily mean surplus.

 

Peter: About the power imbalance: John and I and a lot of other people raise the question of charity and philanthropy that acts as if I’m whole and you’re not well and need fixing. So, the volunteers then are as much the targets or objects or beneficiaries of this radical hospitality as are your guests. Talk a little bit about the impact it has on them.

 

Edd: We have an orientation before every meal. We have a debriefing afterwards and we talk about their experiences. We try to make ourselves as transparent as possible about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

 

The other piece that is very important is that we encourage our volunteers to work a little differently from other organizations. I know when I go and volunteer some place, I want to be hyper-productive and I want to do some really hard work and feel good about myself. I want to leave saying that I did something wonderful and I’m really tired and sweaty.

 

With our volunteers, sometimes there will be a lull in the meal when there will be some free time and they know it is perfectly fine to sit down and chat with our guests. We don’t have to be busy to be effective. It also changes the way they think about how they can be in the room. So, it’s not just about doing, but also about how you are going to be.

 

It has a profound impact on many of our volunteers. This is the first time that they have ever sat down with someone who in the past they just walked by or did not know what to do or say. It is a transformative moment for many of our volunteers to have that kind of very natural moment of conversation just sitting at a table. What can be more natural, more normal, and more human than sitting at a table and literally breaking bread with another person?

 

Peter:  What strikes me is the meaning and symbolism that you create out of the every-day-ness of life. I think that is enormously powerful. I don’t know if John told me this, or I read somewhere, that you ask the people you are serving, your guests, what are they best at and what are they good at. The number one answer is, I know how to cook. I don’t know what to do with that. For the people in ministry and the church the thing they are most proud of and is most measurable is how many people they feed every week. One church in Cincinnati has a club, called Club 5000, because they feed about 5000 people in a year or something like that. You think, my goodness, the people we are feeding know how to cook –– I don’t know why I just mentioned that.

 

Edd: Yes, I think that is an important notion here that we talk about, and among the staff as well, that there is a sense of that measurability in our field and implied in that is the question of how we continue to grow. Every year our funders like to see how many meals we are serving and how many guests come over. It’s a capitalist model. I mean it’s like how many iPhones did you sell this quarter as compared to last quarter.

 

In fact, when we take a softer view and step back and say the fact that we are serving probably about 75,000 or 80,000 meals this year and last year we served 52,000 means that as a society we are failing. Every year that I grow and feed and have more people coming in to be hospitable to our vulnerable guests that means our city and our country are failing those people. These are markers of shame for me. I should be out of business.

 

John: Yet this is a positive sign for many funders. As the need increases, the funders are doing nothing about the cause. They are more than happy to increase funding for an increase in people who don’t have food. An endless and self-serving hypocrisy.

 

Edd: Then the question comes up, and I try not to laugh, but the question comes up, is it scalable? Can I scale it? At what point do you scale your Thanksgiving Dinner before it ceases to be a Thanksgiving Dinner? What’s that number? I don’t know, but I know that there is a number when it stops being a Thanksgiving Dinner.

 

Peter: At Johnson & Johnson years ago, the ones who make Band-Aids, the president looked at the group and said that the only way we are going to increase sales in Band-Aids is to increase the number of wounds.

 

Edd: Right, a perfect metaphor for what we are doing.

 

John: Let me ask you one other question and I bet you that people who are listening might have it in their minds too. Let us imagine that you are in a place where you have two hundred people who you would like to offer hospitality to, but in fact you only have a hundred meals. You have said you always have abundance, but we often hear of food pantries that have run out of food. How do we deal with that?

 

Edd: That’s a really difficult question, John. The premise of your question is probably where I would divert a little bit. Again, our focus is not on the food. I think that is the way we have decided to enter into the space and into this conversation and the focus is on how we are with each other.

 

So, I’m sitting with people and not feeding people. I think I would have a different conversation and perhaps not even sure how I would address that. I don’t think it is about splitting the atom. What we generally do if we do not have enough for everyone is not open our doors. We have a personal care hygiene item box like socks, underwear, and various items, and we have an order fulfillment system. If we don’t have enough, and if every single person ordered the same item and if we don’t have enough to fulfill that order, we would not have that item on the order form because our belief is we have to serve everyone. That is not a perfect model, because we can see that Jefferson said half a loaf of bread is better than no loaf at all. I think there is some sense of that, but that is not how we have decided to enter into this conversation.

 

Peter: Somebody on the chat asked, how do you relate to guests who are a bit more psychotic than the rest of us? Could you respond to that concern?

 

Edd: I just saw that. I love the way the question is framed. A bit more psychotic than the rest of us. That is exactly right.

 

Part of it is to remember, as my Unitarian friends say, I am that, too. We have a number of people who have some serious mental health issues. Most of time we use a model where we make sure that people are safe; we have high latitude for aberrant behavior as long as the safety concerns are well taken care of. We tend not to be confrontational, and we are not worried about how we look. Sometimes some of our guests will say things and act in a way that is very bizarre. We are very careful to let our volunteers know to expect to see that and to hear that and to know that most of all the time those folks are quite safe even though they might say some very scary things.

 

The key for us is the same key we have been talking about, and that is relationships. Most of the time we know those folks and we can engage with them, and we can begin to marshal some of their resources. For some folks it is about how they have learned to navigate in the world where they see an option and often look for it. We have a fair number of people who have significant mental health issues. We have not called law enforcement into a Breaking Bread meal in over six years. So, I think that is something we strive towards and to make sure that our folks are safe.

 

There is an expectation that we create an environment where people have that sense of safety. Quite often many of our guests will take care of some of the other guests without us having to intervene. That’s been working for us for a long time. We pay attention to it every day. We try to make sure we are intervening in a stressful situation as early as possible, and all of our staff members are trained in crisis management to be able to see things sooner. In the old days we would come in when someone was experiencing some illusions and delusions and we would come into that too late. Now we are able to intervene and engage with those folks much earlier than we used to be.

 

Maggie Rogers: We’ve got some comments in the chat room and we have a caller from California. Hello, Susan Clark.

 

Susan Clark: I really want to thank you for this wonderful discussion.  I was curious about what role, if any, certain guests have in planning how you arrange the experience or how this wonderful organization evolves over time.

 

Edd:  Well, that’s a great question. Let me address it in two ways.

 

One is I can give you a very short answer. Once we had a gentleman that was very new to our Breaking Bread meal and he stood up and began to quote unquote act out. He was very dramatic in his acting out. As I was walking to the table one of the guests next to him said, “That does not work here.” The gentleman just stopped right away and sat down. It was a wonderful moment that our guests can see some things. I thought I was dealing with somebody who was dealing with a serious mental illness, and I was actually dealing with someone who has been surviving and has a way to survive. So, sometimes we are not sure what we are encountering. Guests are so smart, and they see things we can’t see. So, there is that and that is one aspect.

 

The other piece speaks to a role as guest and host. A lot of people ask us, “Shouldn’t the guest being doing some of the work? Shouldn’t they be coming in and doing some of the volunteer work?” We have looked at that and it has not worked well for us because it blurs those lines, especially for folks living in chronic scarcity. There would be the expectation that if I do something and if I am volunteering in the moment then I would I expect to get something in return that would be more than someone who is just a guest.

 

The way we have dealt with it, and I’m not sure if it is ideal, but our mantra is that you can be a volunteer or you can be a guest. You just can’t be both on the same day. You can choose your role. If some of our guests volunteer, then they have relinquished access to the clothing closet or personal care closet and to the meal that day. Some of our guests will come in with the idea of volunteering and then they will decide they really need the services and then we say that’s fine, join us as a guest. So, you can relinquish that role and be a guest or a volunteer; it is all equal value to us.

 

Peter: That’s a beautiful structure. Somebody on the chat asks, “Does everyone eventually have access to a change of clothing?”

 

Edd:  That’s a great question, too. The answer is unfortunately no and that’s part of our scarcity. As our mutual friend Jill Janov would say, sometimes we catch our client’s or guest’s disease and we have a scarcity of time and a scarcity of human resources with our volunteers to keep the clothing closet open as much possible.

 

We are working on expanding that beyond the meals and we have some wonderful volunteers who have organized our inventory. So, we are able to get to many more people, but I would say that one of the areas that we are looking at very closely is how to expand that capacity and still do it in a way that is relational, meaning that we just don’t leave clothes out on a table for people to just pick through. People go down now in small groups and we have personal shoppers to help them to pick out clothes.

 

Peter: You are kidding.

 

Edd: No, we have some menders who are wonderful women who come from some of the churches. They showed up about four years ago and said that their spiritual practice was mending the world by mending clothes, and they asked if they could do some mending. So, guests will come in and pick some clothes out and the clothes might not fit, so the mender will hem them or fix their favorite jacket.

 

What we say at Broad Street is, it’s never about what it is about. So, the meals are not about the meals and the clothes are not about the clothes. Even our mail service is not about the mail. We have 3,000 people who get their mail here at Broad Street. It is also not about the mail. It is about the relationship and all the things that could happen and the opportunities that can be opened to them by having that sense of being anchored in a place and in a time. So, it is never about what it is about.  So, the clothing closet is not just about clothes. We really do want to expand the services whenever we can and that is an area we have been working on carefully.

 

Maggie: We have Frankie Lee to invite on now.

 

Frankie Lee: First of all, Edd, I think it is very beautiful what you have distinguished. I have had similar awarenesses. I feel like what you distinguished about time is such an important thing. It’s a lot that people don’t have time because they are operating in isolation to a large degree. So, they orientate to it as a scarcity, and I feel like when we come together at the next level that is the greater possibility.

 

Edd: Your comments reminded me of years ago when Alan Watts once talked about the carpenter’s apprentice. The apprentice showed up and the carpenter said there is no work today because they ran out of inches. He could not understand because they had plenty of inches yesterday, but they just had a shortage of inches. The story goes on and on. It sounds quite crazy until you imagine that we just put in time as a measurement.

 

We say it all the time: I have run out of time. If I said we ran out of inches, you would say that’s insane, but we act as if running out of time is any less insane than running out of inches. I think there is something about that scarcity, which is a default that we go to. When we stop paying attention I think we move into scarcity quite effortlessly. I think the effort is to stay awake to what is abundance and what is enough, and it is there all the time. It is not our default consciences. Our default conscience is to look for scarcity.

 

John: Time is an excuse for not paying attention.

 

Edd: I wish I had more time. Suddenly we have time.

 

Frankie Lee: When we are really present often times there is a solution or a way to forward someone in the moment that can take really no time. But when we are orientating to the scarcity of not having enough time it just avails, you know, that moving forward that forwarding action that could actually be the thing that would make the difference that affirms connection.

 

Edd: Yes, I believe that.

 

Peter: Edd, I noticed that on part of the ministry you have sense of subversive theology. I was going to ask you earlier: What do you mean by that, but I think that I have been listening to it.

 

Edd: I am not on the theological side there, but our theological and faith community really does a great job in informing us. We have a lot of conversations back and forth about that.

 

So, when we have the conversations about values and our principles and practices, that subversive theology is really about doing what we do every day. The ministers here, by design, made sure that their communion table is in the dining room, and we use that as a table where we do a lot of the administrative stuff. It is by design. They wanted to make sure that what was occurring on Sunday at their worship is also happening during the week. That doesn’t mean that we have any religious obligations. There is no prayer before the meal. There are no criteria for admission like in some places where you have to listen to a sermon or something.

 

We are very secular in our approach. From their point of view, we are one organization and we own the secular expression of that. It is just as vital a part of the religious community as they are to us. So, it is a way of holding both the sacred and the secular in a way that we think works and clearly makes the most sense.

 

Peter:  It is also that they call it subversive theology and not subversive religion. I think what you are doing is an embodiment of that. It is very powerful.  There is a question here in the chat: Can we use the idea of a softer focus to deal with the larger communities’ scarcity?

 

Edd: I think you would be the ideal person to answer that question, Peter. You and John.

 

Peter: Okay. Even the word “homeless,” you know, you talk about them as people who are experiencing a kind of vulnerable scarcity. These people are not homeless. I keep thinking that is not who they are. They may not know where they are sleeping tonight, but to call them homeless is a dishonor in a way. Could you comment on this in this world of charity?

 

Edd: I think it is an important notion. I think about it sometimes when I’ve worked with some of my clients who are particularly damaged.

 

This idea of home is also a very complicated issue. Many people have housing, but not a home. I know people who are experiencing enormous wealth who are homeless. They do not have a sense of home. Some of them don’t even have a sense of place. So, home is a very complex social construct. Our folks, about 30% of the folks that we engage with, are what we say “living outdoors in the city.” Another maybe 70 or 80% –– and I’m not sure we have hit a hundred –– are living in some sort of housing shelter insecurity. They may not know where their next shelter is. Maybe 15 or 20% at any given time have what we consider to be a stable housing situation, but they all come for a reason.

 

This is about what you folks, you and John, are so adept at expressing. They come for a sense of community. This is where they belong. I believe that wherever you belong is your home.

 

John: That’s a wonderful way of defining it. Maybe your tables are becoming home for an awful lot of people because it is a place of hospitality rather than feeding.

 

Edd: That’s our hope, John. That is what we absolutely hope.

 

Peter: There are a hundred other questions that I would love to ask you about, but this would be a good point to end. Somebody asked how you are funded. Any final thoughts you have about funding?

 

Edd: I will be happy to talk about the funding. Most of our funding comes from several wonderful benefactors. There also are a number of foundations. What we have learned is that when people come to visit us and see and experience what we are up to, they have a sense of being part of what we do. We have no public funding. It is all private and that allows us to be very experimental. We love to pilot things and we learn from you that you can’t fail if you pilot because you are always learning. So, it is a learning organization.

 

Peter: Well, you are learning, but when we talk about the social innovators and the way you reframe the common and everyday in such a purposeful way, it so wonderful. Since I read your article and after having been with you, I thought, wow, this is available to all of us. Hearing you talk about it is more amazing. John, any final comments you want to make?

 

John: It’s been a wonderful and informative session. I appreciate your giving us your time.

 

Edd: Thank you very much and to you and to all of the people who are listening, a heartfelt welcome. Come if you are in Philadelphia. Come and experience our hospitality and us. We would love to meet you and have you meet our guests and us. That is a heartfelt invitation.