By Rita McInerney

There is a new advocate for the abandoned, the poor and the homeless in rural northeast Georgia. Since November, 1985, the Athens office of Catholic Social Services has been helping answer the needs of people in five counties surrounding the university town.

Based at St. Joseph’s Church, the branch is there because “We realized that we needed to get beyond metropolitan Atlanta, especially in the rural northeast section of Georgia,” Father Jacob Bollmer, executive director of Catholic Social Services, Inc., in Atlanta, says, “We envisioned Athens being the center of the services.” Before the office was opened, he says, a feasibility study was made and needs examined in talks with the directors of social agencies serving the counties of Clarke, Oconee, Oglethorpe, Jackson and Madison. People consulted in Athens were from St. Joseph’s parish, the United Way, social service agencies and at the University of Georgia.

“Father Richard (Kieran) and the parish have been terrific.” It’s exceptionally generous for a parish to provide office and consultation space, Father Bollmer says.

We have established our ties, established our image, very positive, with the community. The hard part will be to maintain it financially,” the priest says. The satellite branch was established with funding from the Archdiocese of Atlanta and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the domestic counterpart of the Peace Corps.

“The program is beginning to generate its own financial fees and is attracting donors in ways that we cannot do down here.” For those people who “fall through the cracks” and can’t afford the services they badly need, Father Bollmer adds, support from donors allows Athens’ CSS to provide the services.

The program provides help in four areas: emergency assistance, clinical services, Hispanic outreach, and psychometric services. Mark Baggett, with a graduate degree in social work from the University of Georgia, has been with the office since it opened. As program coordinator he directs the staff and has become a force in community organizing. Two VISTA workers, Beth Roach and Mayra Coira, and an intern, Kay Langford, a student in the School of Social Work at the university, work with him.

In an interview with the Georgia Bulletin they discussed their work and some of the areas where the fledgling agency has begun to make a difference. Baggett speaks of the effort he launched last March to organize the Domestic Violence Council for victims of spouse abuse. The need for such a group was apparent to him after he asked the question “Where do they go?” and found there was no place for such battered women. Response to the announcement of the first meeting was good, with about 25 people, representatives of social agencies, churches and the Athens police, attending. Once the council was formed, an application for a $26,000 grant from the Governor’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, was approved. Then a matching grant from the city of Athens and Clarke County brought in $18,000 and Project SAFE (Spouse Abuse Finally Ends) was ready to help women and children in inhumane situation.

One woman being helped by SAFE is a Kenyan whose condition is worsened by a clash of cultures. Her husband, a student at the university where she also is enrolled and employed has been physically violent to both the woman and their son, six. Ms. Coira says she is in “great conflict. Divorce is taboo in Kenya where the woman is expected to take everything from her husband.” Her family in Kenya follows the traditional viewpoint and offers no moral support for the battered woman, she says.

SAFE will provide a month’s rent for the woman as she attempts to make a new life for herself and her young son. And Ms. Coira has brought the woman’s status as a J-2 visa holder, (spouse of a student) to the attention of Sue Collussy, immigration counselor with Catholic Social Services in Atlanta, with the intent of getting an extension of her visa.

“She has dignity, something in her rebels.” Ms. Coira says in an expression of empathy for the woman, a stranger in a country where women are learning not to submit passively to violence.

Ms. Coira, a native of Puerto Rico, does a lot of work with and for the Hispanics in the area, estimated to be several hundred. In this work she has found “there is a lot of isolation because of the language barrier, the lifestyle, lack of public transportation, and because there is no established Hispanic community.”

She works directly with her clients. The day the Athens staff people were interviewed she arrived back from Atlanta where she had driven a woman seeking immigration help from CSS. She acts as translator, counselor and soother of rough times for people who don’t know where to turn and don’t know how to ask for what they need.

She also is active at St. Joseph’s parish as coordinator of Hispanic outreach editing the newsletter “El Vocero,” and planning liturgies such as the Peruvian celebration honoring Christ of the Miracles which packed the church on Friday evening, Oct. 1. The First Friday evening liturgies at St. Joseph’s draw Hispanics from all around the area and from Jubilee Partners, the Christian service community in Comer which offers sanctuary to Central American refugees enroute to new lives in Canada.

She is hopeful that, in line, with the VISTA objective, Hispanics will be able to carry on the projects and programs she has developed during her year as a VISTA worker. One way of promoting continuity of outreach was the educational workshop held at St. Joseph’s in August on the topic of understanding and serving Hispanics. Co-sponsors with CSS were the Northeast Georgia Community Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center and the Mental Health Association of Athens and Clarke County. Participants heard discussions on recognizing cultural differences, using interpreters and translators and serving undocumented aliens. The day’s fiesta luncheon was a combined effort of the Hispanic women of St. Joseph’s parish and Mexican restaurant owners in the area.

Baggett is immersed in a project that becomes more pressing as the calendar moves toward winter, the ever-growing needs of the homeless for shelter. In Athens, he notes, the attitude has “been one of denial.” Only recently, he claims, have people begun to admit there is a homeless population. He estimates this population could be anywhere from 100 to 300 people, plus an unknown number of semi-homeless people. In the past, he says, there seemed to be a fear that homeless people were going “to hop on a bus from Atlanta to come here” once services became available.

As chairman of the Clarke County Shelter Project, another example of the community organizing that CSS is committed to, he is trying to convince area churches of the need for shelters. The only shelter in operation in Athens is that operated by the Salvation Army where the stay is usually limited to three nights. Baggett estimates there are 20-25 beds available for the homeless there.

He says the Housing Authority has been “real supportive,” making available a community building and one apartment to the shelter project. In addition, the project has received a $10,000 grant from the Georgia Department of Human Resources.

A big obstacle to housing the disadvantaged is the Clarke County zoning ordinance passed in the fall of 1985 which prohibits more than two unrelated people living in the same house in residential areas. This affects the number of personal care homes for the elderly, foster care homes for children and group homes for the mentally disabled. In fact, Baggett says, the county has brought suit against a group home where three mentally disabled people have been living for about 18 months.

Baggett and other social agency representatives have been lobbying since last June to have the ordinance modified to allow four unrelated persons to live together in foster care and group homes.

Easing this ordinance is important to Baggett who sees the future for many older Americans to be in personal care homes and shared housing. At the present time he is visiting a man, 70, living alone out in the country in an old sharecropper’s shack that does have a wood stove. The man, he says, has always lived by himself and wants to continue on his own. So Baggett, for the present, must be content with “moral intervention, looking in on him weekly,” thereby letting him know that someone cares about him. A visiting nurse also stops by once a week. Baggett feels the man is “marginally able to take care of himself – until he gets sick,” when other measures will become necessary.

Beth Roach, the other VISTA staffer, works chiefly in the emergency assistance area. That’s how she started to visit “Belle,” a woman in her 60s who has taken up residence in a dilapidated abandoned house. “Belle” came to the attention of CSS when a neighbor called the St. Joseph parish conference of St. Vincent de Paul about her.

The house has no water, heat or electricity and Ms. Roach is trying to place “Belle” in a personal care home before winter sets in. The older woman has told the young VISTA worker she would go “almost anyplace” if she can keep her independence. While they wait for a place for her to go, Ms. Roach brings her food that doesn’t have to be cooked and thrift shop garments to offset the damp cold in the derelict bungalow.

The fragile blonde, 22 and an Auburn University graduate who could easily pass for 17, sees her VISTA stint as a good learning interim before graduate school. She and Ms. Coira feel a deep concern for the people they help and sharing a house makes it natural for the two to work and learn together. The third female in the household is Ms. Coira’s six-year-old daughter, Mei-Ling, a first grader at St. Joseph’s.

Father Kieran, pastor at St. Joseph’s, expresses himself as “very pleased” with the satellite agency. “What we’ve accomplished in a year is a fine presence in the community, reaching out in new ways, especially in cooperative efforts with other agencies,” he says. In the parish there is “a very fine cooperation with the social action service committee and our conference of St. Vincent de Paul.” He says the staff has accomplished a great deal while the agency is still in a stage of development as to the services to be offered.

The agency, Baggett emphasizes, doesn’t like to see clients “bounced” from one service to another. “We’ll call ahead, make the appointment then check back to make sure the service has been delivered.” But these days, he says, with the drying up of so much funding under the Reagan administration, funding which the private sector is not picking up, “agencies are narrowing boundaries of who they serve.”

He mentions ACTION, begun as an agency of the “war on poverty” program of the Johnson administration, which distributes surplus food, provides emergency energy assistance and weatherization of dwellings. The ACTION people make a lot of referrals to CSS, he says, when applicants can’t meet the federal guidelines making them eligible for such assistance. “We’ll try to take care of the gap in services” for these people falling through the cracks, he says. “We also have a pretty good idea of what they require” and send people to them. “We have more discretion in guidelines, in filling the gaps, but less funds.”

The most important thing to him is to stay in focus, “to pick out what we do and do it well.”