By Gretchen Keiser

St. Anthony’s Church, the only Catholic Church serving as a night shelter for the homeless in Atlanta, begins its fourth season Nov. 15 with commitments from over 30 groups to provide enough volunteer manpower to serve throughout the 137-night shelter season.

Don Nye of St. John Neumann parish in Lilburn, who has coordinated volunteers with his wife, Billie, and singly since the shelter opened in 1983, said group leaders have committed to send people for every night in the season. The coordinators, who are recruited by Nye from parishes and groups and entrusted with finding and ensuring that enough volunteers are available to man the shelter nightly and serve dinner and breakfast, come from 26 different parishes and from the Spanish and Korean Catholic communities, from Marist High School, St. Thomas More School and the Burroughs Corp.

Coordinators agree to cover a certain number of nights and then come up with the people to fulfill that commitment, Don Nye said. Some groups are providing people for as many as 10 nights during the shelter season. People who want to work are being asked to contact group leaders in parishes.

Nye, who is a salesman in the textile industry, father of a household of six children and very active in the Cursillo movement in the archdiocese, was not always comfortable with coming to a night shelter and meeting people who are homeless.

The first year he and his wife were asked to become involved, “it was at the invitation of Sister Margaret McAnoy, who challenged me,” Nye said. The invitation from the Cursillo coordinator came just after Nye had heard a penetrating sermon that asked him to consider “would I be happy in heaven with Jesus’ friends?” The homily “sort of opened my mind to the unfortunate,” he recalled, and “I guess when Sister Margaret asked me, that thought was reasonably fresh in my mind.”

Nonetheless his first night at the shelter “I was very uncomfortable” and it was people from the street who approached him and made the first overture.

Now he is instrumental in bringing seven to eight hundred people to the shelter each season as volunteers, some for the first time, crossing barriers of fear, prejudice and resistance on both sides. “I think most people find the persons they meet different than what they had in their minds,” he said. “Most come away with very good feelings,” touched by the people they meet and convinced that the nightly need for food and shelter is painfully real. “Ninety-nine percent of the people we serve need the service,” Nye said.

St. Anthony’s began the night shelter in January 1983 when a severe winter heightened the awareness that other shelters, principally Central Presbyterian church near the state Capitol, could not serve the numbers of those who needed to be brought in from the cold. Men turned away from Central’s doors because the gymnasium floor was filled for the night started to be taken to St. Anthony’s at Gordon and Ashby Streets in the West End. The parish soup kitchen was turned to the use, at night, of the shelter residents and volunteer cooks.

As it has taken root, the shelter has been enhanced by showers and the installation of a donated washer and dryer. A seven-member board from the parish, and including Don Nye, oversees the shelter. Joyce Smith, a parishioner of St. Anthony’s, serves as shelter manager.

Open from 6 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., Nov. 15 to March 31, the shelter can sleep 35 men, but serves dinner to up to 50, according to Katie James, a member of the parish shelter committee.

The group coming in for the night as volunteers provides a casserole-type dinner that can be served in the soup kitchen and brings breakfast for the overnight guests, usually 70 or more sandwiches that are distributed in the pre-dawn hours with hot tea before the men have to face the streets again for the day.

A minimum of two volunteers spend the night at the shelter as hosts and at least two more people serve dinner to the guests, Nye said. “Most of the time we have three or four spending the night and five or six people” serving dinner.

Once involved many people return as volunteers yearly. Nye said his co-workers at the office are aware of and comfortable with his involvement but generally not interested in becoming involved themselves. Sometimes he finds himself a part of a conversation with others who do not know he works in shelter ministry and he is able to correct negative remarks about the homeless and those in need.

Asked whether he is more comfortable now with those who are among “Jesus friends” he said, “Yup, I sure am.”

“In fact, a lot of them know me on the street” or at soup kitchens and approach him and talk to him,” Nye said. “It’s a lot more comfortable.”