How the Poor Save Us

Carol Fennelly woke up one morning in her Delaware beach house a couple of years ago to a divine commandment. "Go to Youngstown," the voice told her.

"I was really pissed off," Fennelly says. "You know, I'd spent 17 years working in a homeless shelter. I figured I'd done my part. I had worked really hard to buy a house, on the beach, and it was like, 'God, it's not fair.' But I had learned, as Tina Turner would say, `You can do it the rough way, or you can do it the easy way.' And I decided that rather than go out kicking, I would do it myself. I visited Youngstown."

The city that inspired so much dread in Fennelly is hub to five prisons, including one run by the Corrections Corporation of America. After Washington, D.C.'s one prison, which had been plagued with mismanagement problems for years, was ordered closed by the court order that federalized the district's public works, CCA's Youngstown facility absorbed some 1,300 of the district's inmates. Fennelly, a political commentator for the local National Public Radio in D.C., wrote about how being moved a six hours' drive from home had devastated the inmates' family relations.

From the mid-'70s to the mid-'90s, Fennelly had lived in and operated D.C.'s federal homeless shelter. She had finally wanted to taste the comforts most of her middle-aged peers had enjoyed for much of their adult lives.

The voice, however, was clear. So she drove to the former steel town, with its boarded up storefronts and ragged blocks with houses missing like a boxer's teeth. "When I first drove through that town, I could not breathe," she recalled. "I knew it was economically depressed, but I was not prepared for the visual desperation of this place."

That night, at a hotel dingier than any she had endured on her political road trips, she prayed to the God who had sent her there: "Let me see this place with new eyes." In the morning, she came across one sweet house in the midst of the desolation. That beauty convinced her that the difficulties could be endured, and inspired the name for her new project, Hope House.

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