Hugh Hollowell

Creating a compelling vision of a better world.

Quarry Street

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The house had been a rental for years and years, in a neighborhood where it did not make economic sense for the landlord to spend too much money fixing it up. It had been built in 1964, part of a neighborhood built for working-class black folks. We are constantly reminded of this when we note the cost-cutting measures the builder made – it was designed to be cheap housing, to be built fast and sold fast.

Even the land serves as a reminder of this history. The house lies in Southeast Raleigh, in a neighborhood built in the remains of an old rock quarry, the same rock quarry where slaves cut giant blocks for the state capital building. The rocks that are dug up every time I plant something remind me of the slaves who cut rock here, the land that was thrown away and sat empty after it was used up until they could find a way to build houses on it for the poor descendants of those slaves 100 years later.

The house is a small three bedroom with one tiny bathroom. There is a basement that in the early 90’s was converted into two small apartments, forever sealing the house’s destiny as a “rental property”. When we moved in, it was obvious no one had loved this house in a really long time.

We didn’t pick this neighborhood – it picked us. The house was owned by a friend who owned a lot of real estate and was in the process of letting go of some of the lower end things he owned, and he offered it to us on good terms. Like most of our new neighbors, we moved here because it was where we could afford to live.

When we moved in this house 5 years ago, we were the only white people for three blocks. I know this because the black neighbors I would talk too would constantly tell me that. A neighbor once introduced me to another neighbor as, “The white guy that lives on Quarry St.”

Shortly after we moved in, the police were called by a neighbor for a domestic dispute. I recognized the officer – a white man – from my work, so I went over to say hi. He asked what I was doing there.

“Oh, I live here,” I said, pointing to my house.

He was amazed. “You live here? On this street? Why would you do that? I wouldn’t even drive down this street if my job didn’t require it. No way would I let my wife live here among these animals.”

* * *

Shortly after our moving in, we saw the ways the neighborhood was already beginning to change.

The vacant lot next to our house was bought shortly after our moving in, and the owners built a large duplex on it. The owner told me she felt better building there after she saw “the type of people we were.” I wondered if she meant because we were white, but I didn’t ask her. I wish I had.

A triplex down the street was owned by a woman who also lived on the street. Her aunt had left it to her in her will. She tried to manage it, but she had no talent for it, so when she got one of the hundreds of letters we get every year asking to buy our house for cash, she sold it. I looked it up, and she sold it for less than 1/3rd what a fair offer would have been. She bought a shiny new SUV with her proceeds.

The owner of a rent house on our street wanted me to meet some people from the suburbs who were considering renting. “They want to know what it’s like to live here, and I want them to see that normal people live on this street.”

Normal people.

While Renee and I were talking to the prospective renters, a car went by with a booming stereo.

“Does that happen all the time?” the prospective tenant asked.

It does happen some, I said. The thing to remember is that this isn’t our neighborhood. It wasn’t built for us, it isn’t our culture, and we weren’t invited here. We can’t really expect people to change to make us more comfortable just because we decided to live here.

“Well, it’s our now”, the landlord said.

The suburban would-be tenants didn’t move in.

* * *

The landlord to the house next door called me.

“I just wanted you to know that I called the police on the drug dealers on our street today.”

We haven’t had drug dealers on this block for years, so I was confused. “Drug dealers?”

“Yeah. I was over to look at the building and I saw a group of young black men all standing on the street corner, talking to one another. You could tell they were up to no good,” she said

I sighed. “Well, the reason they were standing there is that is where the bus stop is. They live on this street, and they were waiting for the bus.”

* * *

The next block over was the first to flip. A developer bought a run down fourplex for $100,000, tore it down, and built three houses on the lot that sold for $250,000 each.

Since then it has only gotten crazier. Houses are routinely being flipped after only cosmetic repairs, often bought for pennies on the dollar from poor folks who never dreamed of seeing a check that large who don’t know the value of their property.

The police cruise our streets now. Since tech workers from other cities have begun moving downtown, things have shot up quickly. People that have lived here for years and years are being forced to move.

Ms. Portia lives a few houses down from us – she has lived there now 15 years, and she rents. She has a beautiful yard, filled with rose bushes and flowers, and she is terrified that the owner of her home will sell it. “He says he won’t, but you can’t never tell what a rent man is gonna do,” she tells me one afternoon.

One of the things we are happy about is our decision to sell our house to another couple who will live in it, who will care for the flowers I planted, who plan to keep renting to the tenant in the basement apartment. We left money on the table by not selling it to flippers, but money isn’t everything.

* * *

I was working in the yard the other day when I saw a young white couple looking at the house for sale across the street.

It was bought last year by a flipper, who now has it listed for three times more than we paid for our house five years ago. They tell me they are waiting for their realtor.

“I love this house,” the woman tells me.

“Yeah, the husband said. “It’s great. And I like how close it is to downtown. Tell me, is it a good neighborhood?”

I smile. “We love this neighborhood. It’s been really good to us. I hope it’s good to you, too.”

And then I went back to working in my yard.

Books and authors that have influenced me

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Library

The other day on Facebook, I was asked for a list of books and authors that shaped my belief system.

Narrowing it down is always hard. I read hundreds of books a year and have more than a thousand in my library, but the following list is representative. I am pretty sure that if you read these, you would see how I got where I am.

I will say that the list is male heavy, but that is how I got here. It was after I was more shaped, theologically, that I began to make it a point to read women authors. It also doesn’t have as many people of color writers as is probably represented in my history of how I got here, but that is because if I had read bell hooks and Howard Thurman earlier, I would have gotten where I did sooner.

Anyway – here it is. The links take you to Amazon, where you can read descriptions or so on. The first four are all from the Bible.

  1. The Sermon on the Mount
  2. The Epistle of James
  3. The Sermon on the Plain
  4. The Book of Exodus
  5. Chapter 5 of The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
  6. Jesus and the Disinherited – Howard Thurman
  7. Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
  8. Introducing Liberation Theology – Leonardo Boff
  9. All About Love – bell hooks
  10. The Life You Save May Be Your Own – Paul Ellie
  11. The Long Loneliness – Dorothy Day
  12. Brother to a Dragonfly – Will D. Campbell
  13. The Kingdom of God is Within You – Leo Tolstoy
  14. Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me – Michael Battle
  15. The Politics of Jesus – John Howard Yoder
  16. Peter Maurin, Apostle to the World – Dorothy Day
  17. A Testament to Hope: Essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, JR. 
  18. God of the Oppressed – James Cone
  19. The Prophets – Abraham Heschel
  20. The Powers That Be – Walter Wink

 

22 things I wish I had known about self-care

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For the last six months or so, we have been transitioning leadership at work away from me and to our new Executive Director in advance of my upcoming move. It has been a big shift for our organization, moving from the founder to the successor, and for MaRanda from being an extremely active nonprofit volunteer to being the Executive Director of an organization with staff to manage.

We have been working closely together to make the transition, but things will pop into my head at random times I wish I had known when I was starting this work.  So I have been making a number of lists of what I wish I had known and will share them here over the next month or so.

Here are some things I wish I had been told (and had heard) about self-care.

  1. A surgeon must protect her hands to protect her ability to work. You must protect your energy for the same reason, and just as rigorously.
  2. Make friends who have nothing to do with your work.
  3. Buy yourself a calendar, and write things down. The calendar is an integrity document – things that go on it are promises to yourself and others.
  4. The longer you do this work, the more trite the concerns of “normal’ people will seem. You will have spent the day with someone who was a serial abuse victim, and your friend will want to spend your dinner together talking about the rude customer who came in her shop. Try to remember that it isn’t a competition, and that none of us are getting oppression medals for having it the worst.
  5. Take the vacation. In blocks of 3 days in a row or more.
  6. The more options you have in any given situation, the better you will sleep and the more peace you will have.
  7. Read books and watch movies that have nothing to do with your work.
  8. Eat the best food you can afford. It is both fuel and pleasure.
  9. Sleep is everything. If you aren’t getting at least 7 hours of unaided (without drugs, alcohol, sleep aids, etc.) sleep on a regular basis, do whatever you need to do to make that happen.
  10. Figure out how to turn work off before you walk in the door of your house. Transitional rituals (like stopping at the coffee shop on the way home, or silencing your phone after you park the car in the driveway, or walking around your garden before you go in the house) can help with this.
  11. Develop a life and an identity apart from your work.
  12. Develop rituals in your life. They will ground you and give you things to do when you don’t know what to do.
  13. People you know will often try to respond to your work in one of two ways: They will want to idolize you for it or they will want you to never mention it because it makes them uncomfortable. Both are damaging.
  14. Schedule non-work things – lunches with friends, trips with your spouse, doctor visits – just like you would an appointment. Guard these against work intruding.
  15. You are more likely to keep up with friends if you schedule them as appointments. Like, the 3rd Friday of the month at 3 PM is always “Coffee with Judy” on your calendar.
  16. Your ability to survive long-term in a world filled with ugliness is inversely related to how much beauty you have in your life. Search for beauty like your life depends on it.
  17. You need a few people you can trust without question. Schedule regular time with those people.
  18. The temptation to use chemicals to manage your state is overwhelming. A “beer after work” is easy to become a “bottle of wine after work”. Find non-chemical ways to manage your state.
  19. Daily exercise – even if it is just a walk around the block or riding your bike to work – is crucial. And no, all the steps you get in while at work doesn’t count.
  20. There is no such thing as guilty pleasures. Like what you like. If that is eating ding-dongs while listening to Taylor Swift, own that shit. The sheer amount of guilt people will try to put on you is nearly endless, so don’t guilt yourself.
  21. Most of the time, you can do everything you need to do in 50 hours a week. If it often takes more than that, you need to delegate more.
  22. None of it is personal. The guest who call you a racist because you could not help them, the volunteer who is pissed because you did not approve their project, the donor who leaves because you are not a magician who can solve homelessness with their $10 a month, your friend who doesn’t donate to your organization – none of it is personal. Just show up and do the work. It’s not about you.

What about you? Do you have any self-care tips to share?

A New Chapter

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I remember it perfectly. It was October 25th, 2015. Renee and I were on a bench overlooking the French Broad River. I was wearing a black hoody against the chill, and the leaves were changing colors in a way that only happens in the North Carolina mountains. It was the day after our seventh anniversary, and we were having a conversation we had never had before.

Renee was just three months out of the hospital. The story is long, but she had been born with a genetic heart condition that, at age 35, had her in heart failure. She was first diagnosed at 13. Her mother had the same heart condition and died at 45. We could not have children because the strain would be too much for her body, and the meds she depended on to survive would preclude it anyway. And while we never said it out loud, we fully expected her to die from this condition.

And then things changed. In August of 2015 we got a call at 10 AM that there was a heart available at Duke for Renee – could we be there in an hour? We could and did, and the following two weeks are their own long story.

But now, all that was behind us. We were celebrating our seventh anniversary and for the first time, we realized that we could have a conversation about the future that did not take as a given that she would die before age 50.

We had never had a conversation about retirement. About long-term goals. About what we wanted the future to look like. When you aren’t sure your wife will be with you when you are 50, you don’t waste a lot of energy planning that far ahead.

So, we sat on the bench and watched the water go by and talked about where we wanted to live, where we wanted to do, what we wanted growing old to look like. And the more we talked, the more it took shape.

We wanted a community of people. We wanted to live in a small city. We wanted children in our life.  I wanted to do meaningful work. Renee wanted to shoot photographs. We both wanted to be near our families.

It began to fill out.

* * *

Every founder stays too long. It is what we do. We build organizations by scratching and surviving, and then we convince ourselves the organization cannot survive without us. We over-inflate our egos and tell ourselves that we are the key ingredient. It is easier to do this when the people who started this work with you have moved on, and so you are the only connection to the beginning of the organization.

I began Love Wins Ministries in 2007. It didn’t even have a name then – it was just me and some friends sharing food in the park. But it evolved and grew and one day you look up and we had a staff and a blog and a community center and how did all that happen?

And then the city tries to stop you from sharing food with hungry people, and you decide to fight back. And you win, which gives you some profile and legitimacy. So like all successes, you grow and move to a bigger facility and… then your wife has a heart transplant and all your priorities change.

* * *

In the fall of 2015, sitting on that bench, for the first time since Love Wins began I thought about what leaving it would look like.

Over the next year, we would begin to work on it. We took our list of things we wanted and realized we couldn’t have the life we wanted here in Raleigh. It was getting more and more expensive to live here. Our parents were getting older, and they live 12 and 18 hours away, respectively. I had a nephew who was 10 that I had last seen when he was 2.

And if I am honest, I felt like I had accomplished here what I intended to do. We did demonstrate that a relational approach to homelessness works. We did change the City and how it approached homelessness. The attitude now in Raleigh vs when I got here in 2007 around homelessness? Miles apart. Anything I could do now was going to be incremental, and I am not an incrementalist.

So we looked around. Wilmington was nice. So was Charleston. Chattanooga would have been a definite yes were it not so far to the ocean. Last spring, we began to think about Jackson, MS. It is less than 3 hours to my parents’ house. The cost of living is low there. Two hours to the Gulf of Mexico. Two hours to New Orleans. Three hours to Memphis. An economically depressed city, so I would have plenty of meaningful work to keep me occupied. A new government in place that wants to change things for the better.

It ticked off all our boxes.

* * *

Last summer we went down to check it out. I met with some community leaders. I met some folks at a small church that wanted to change their neighborhood and their city, but they had no money and didn’t have the skills.

We agreed to stay in touch because I have the skills. And while I don’t have any money, I have raised money to make the world better for 11 years now – the prospect does not frighten me.

For the next six months, we would share ideas back and forth. Renee and I would look at houses on Zillow, and marvel that a house that would sell for $400,000 here could be had there for $120,000. We began to contemplate a cross-country move with three cats and a thousand or so books.

By the end of the year, I had a proposal sketched out for them of what I thought was possible. In January we went back down to visit, meet with the leadership team and work out the details. They are a small multiracial Mennonite church. They are in one of the poorest areas of Jackson, and because of the tension in my denomination over LGBT rights, all the conservative folks left a few years ago, threatening the church’s survival.

I told them that none of that scared me. Because to quote a bad movie, while I don’t have any money, what I do have is a unique set of skills, acquired over a long career…

Two weeks ago I got a letter in the mail saying to come on down.

We’re going to Jackson.

* * *

In June, we are closing Love Wins Ministries. The Community Engagement Center will continue operations with MaRanda Kiser as its Executive Director. I will remain on the board of the Community Engagement Center for at least another year to provide continuity and institutional memory. I plan to begin work in Jackson on July 1.

The truth is, I have outlived my usefulness here. I am a starter by nature and have tons of energy around the creation of a thing, and not much around the maintenance of that thing. I have done good work here. I feel good about the work I did helping Raleigh change how it addresses homelessness. I feel good about the thousands of lives I have impacted here, and the way I have done it. But my role here is over. It’s time to hand it off to someone else.

MaRanda will do a fantastic job. In her first six months, she has added a peer support specialist position that is filled by a person who was formerly homeless, increased the meals we serve here from one a week to 10 a week, drastically increased our volunteer engagement and amount of in-kind donations. In short, she is taking what I built and is making it better, and the best thing I can do is get out of her way.

As we wrap things up here, I am astounded by all the good that was done here the last 11 years. My feelings around all of this are complicated – excitement about what is to come, and sadness about what I am leaving behind. I hope you will continue to hold us in your prayers as I take the “Love Wins approach” to another southern city.

* * *

So that’s the story. We are in the process of selling our house (we have a buyer already!) and beginning to contemplate packing, figuring out what to take and what to lay down.

I am excited about the future. It is close enough to what I do to be competent at it, while different enough I will grow and learn. I am excited to be near my family again for the first time in 11 years. We are excited at the prospect of buying a nicer house than we ever dreamed possible and having a nice backyard to plant vegetables and flowers. Renee is already plotting out potential photo shoot locations.

And I am sad to leave here. But it’s time. Past time, if I am honest.

I will have a lot more to say over the coming weeks and months – it will be great to be able to talk about this thing that is consuming all of my energy. But right now, I am just grateful, and hopeful, and tired just thinking about moving three cats.