By Thea Jarvis

When Betti Knott took a job with the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988, she thought her stay would be temporary.

Four years later, the former executive director of Atlanta’s particular council of St. Vincent de Paul says she is happy with her work down under and has no immediate plans to return to the States.

“I never wanted to leave Atlanta,” Ms. Knott said. “I always assumed I would live and die here.”

But the move to Melbourne was something she felt called to do.

For a year, she was consultant to the Society in the province of Victoria, and was later asked to serve as the organization’s assistant general secretary. She held that position for two years.

Currently, Ms. Knott directs the Ozanam Community, a project of St. Vincent de Paul which provides accommodations for homeless men in the city of Melbourne.

On a spring visit to Atlanta, her first extended stay since moving to Australia, Ms. Knott admitted her first year so far from home was desperately lonely.

“People there are not as warm or bubbly, not as huggy” as folks in the South, she said. “I was there six months before anyone touched me.”

Living alone in a small house in Melbourne, Ms. Knott said her personal contacts were limited and the phone bill soared as calls to Atlanta became a lifeline.

“Not even the work sustained me,” she remembered. “I know how homeless people feel because nobody will touch them.”

The year of isolation was a proper preparation for her present work. Charged with restructuring a community of homeless men, some of whom have been living at the Ozanam shelter for 20 years, Ms. Knott was able to approach the task with a sense of solidarity borne of her own experience.

“I’m still the hard-core administrator,” she laughed, but less-inclined to distance herself physically and emotionally from the people she serves.

Ms. Knott has reduced the numbers in Ozanam’s shelter and settled many of Melbourne’s homeless in permanent, low-cost housing. Since she took over, Ozanam Community is down to 145 shelter beds. Fifty former shelter residents have been placed in boarding houses, flats, apartments or townhouses that St. Vincent’s maintains with help from the government.

Ozanam Community is made up of people with overlapping problems, Ms. Knott explained, men with multiple mental and physical disabilities and substance abuse problems.

One man had been institutionalized for 30 years and homeless for five. St. Vincent de Paul had his condition assessed and he was found to be schizophrenic and intellectually disabled, capable of living on his own with some supervision. He now resides in a Vincentian personal care home, takes medication for his schizophrenia and is visited weekly by Society staff.

“They thought he was mentally retarded,” Ms. Knott said. “It was a series of misdiagnoses. He had been victimized.”

Before beginning full-time Vincentian work, Ms. Knott had been a planner for the Atlanta Regional Commission at a time when the mentally ill and developmentally disabled were being released from institutions and mainstreamed into society. Part of her job was to develop a program where such individuals would receive adequate out-patient care and shelter.

“The basic premise was that if you threw people out of a unit, you had to give them a place to go,” she said.

None of the plans were implemented because of opposition they met at the time. But in Australia, Ms. Knott has had the opportunity to make use of her Atlanta vision.

“That was in the back of my mind” in restructuring Ozanam, she said. “It all translated over” and “it’s working very well.”

Ms. Knott has found Melbourne similar to Atlanta in many ways. The city was built 150 years ago and has a sense of newness about it, much like Atlanta. Its change of seasons resembles Atlanta’s weather and the area where she lives reminds her of Midtown.

Unlike Atlanta, however, the city is 25 percent Catholic. The archdiocese of Melbourne has 275 parishes and Catholic churches are within walking distance of most homes.

Australians, said Ms. Knott, have a laid back attitude and are not faced with as many choices as people in the States.

Visiting the Toco Hills Super Kroger, Ms. Knott was reminded of how different the two countries can be. She found a cart to hold her groceries but discovered it had a small television screen and an aisle-activated voice that announced weekly specials. Trying to keep track of her grocery list and push the talking cart was more than she could handle.

“I was overwhelmed and had to leave,” she laughed, adding that she left her half-filled cart and fled the super store for a smaller establishment.

During her visit, Ms. Knott observed an increase in the number of people begging on the streets, a non-existent sight in Australia, where incomes are guaranteed by the government.

Stopped four times as she made her way from the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to the Georgia State MARTA station, she said her rule of thumb is simple.

“If I have money in my pocket, they can have it.”

Ms. Knott credits the St. Vincent de Paul Society here with focusing her attention on the homeless.

“My great conversion experience came at Central Presbyterian (Church) at two in the morning,” she said, when she saw the face of homelessness in those sleeping on Central’s gymnasium floor.

“It was a great opportunity. It changed my life.”

Her recent visit to Atlanta gave Ms. Knott a chance to see the growth of St. Vincent de Paul under current executive director, Sheila Bissonnette.

“It’s looking fantastic,” she said. “Sheila has done such a good job of focusing on the spiritual link” between the Society’s apostolic work and the personal growth of Vincentian members.

This core of committed people in parishes around the archdiocese are “doing such good things,” she said. “I feel good about having been part of that growth.”