Waveney Ann Moore: Acknowledging homeless persons in life and in death

G.W. Rolle is getting ready to give a eulogy for 84 homeless people who died in Pinellas County this year.

His former girlfriend, Margaret Tamang, was among them. She was just 42.

Rolle, pastor of Missio Dei Community, a storefront ministry for the homeless off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street S., and who has been homeless himself, says the list provided by the Pinellas County Medical Examiner’s office inadvertently missed others who have died on the streets so far this year. He’s aware of at least 10 others, he says.

Even without the names of each person who died without a home in the past year, the Homeless Memorial Service at which Rolle will give the eulogy Dec. 17 is designed to acknowledge all with compassion.

The service will include the reading of each name of those known to have died without a home. A reader will also say, “We remember those whose full names or history we do not know,” and invite those at the service to call out additional names.

“We hold these services to remember those who did not have the privilege of having a roof over their head in death and invisible to many of us in life,” said Reggie Craig, president of Celebrate Outreach, the interfaith group organizing the service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg on Mirror Lake. “We hope to offer some dignity in their remembrance.”

Those whose names are known are mostly male and white. The youngest was a 25-year-old man, who died of “multi-drug toxicity.” The oldest was a 90-year-old woman, who lost her life to “complications of blunt trauma.”

“It’s quite sobering to read through them,” Craig said of the dozens of names of men and women who died in St. Petersburg, Largo, Pinellas Park, Seminole, Palm Harbor and other Pinellas cities.

Celebrate Outreach secretary Sabine Von Aulock said the memorial service “is part of telling the history and giving voice to the people who are often disappeared.”

She added: “Many of us like to pretend they are not there. They are people with their own stories, with families who love them. They are somebody’s son, daughter, mother, father. They are somebody’s relative.”

And friend.

I remember two years ago, when the service was held at Trinity Lutheran Church downtown, seeing homeless men and women with their backpacks gathering to pay touching tribute to friends and acquaintances they’d lost.

Besides the memorial service, Celebrate Outreach  – “a partnership of St. Petersburg-area faith-based congregations and individuals … dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness” – also is known for its annual, poignantly relevant “Still … No Room at the Inn” Christmas caroling at downtown homeless shelters.

Next week’s memorial will include a bagpiper, readings and tolling of bells. Similar services are held nationally around Dec. 21, the first day of winter and the longest night of the year.

Such nationwide events “honor those who have paid the ultimate price for our collective failure to adequately address homelessness, and often include calls to address the systemic causes of tragically avoidable deaths,” says the National Health Care for the Homeless Council.

Jon Arterton and his husband, James Mack, of One City Chorus, will sing during the service, which is expected to include a proclamation from City Hall. Council Member Amy Foster, CEO of the Homeless Leadership Alliance of Pinellas, is expected to attend. The service has an important purpose, she said.

“When you have to account for the names of individuals who died on our streets for lack of housing, it helps us put a name to the problem,” Foster said.

Foster spoke Thursday about the money the city received from the American Rescue Plan Act. St. Petersburg has dedicated $20 million to housing affordability and support.

“We started at $15 million and administration bumped that to $20 million,” after hearing from the public and the Council about the need for additional funding in this area, Foster said. “It’s certainly not going to get us to where we need. The only solution to homelessness is housing.”

There is other ARPA money that will become available, she said. “Hopefully, with all of those various funding pots, it will help us leverage more sources to provide additional units.”

Specifically, the city has allocated $2.5 million to provide emergency shelter for families at hotels and apartments. Another $1 million will go to supportive services.

Rolle has distinct ideas about how the homeless problem should be tackled. He believes empty buildings, schools, churches and warehouses, for instance, should be transformed into homes for those without.

“St. Petersburg has the mentality to sell those properties. We have to be creative. I think that human beings are born into two mutually possessed worlds. The world as it is, and the world as it should be. We have to transform the world as it is into the world as it should be,” he said.

“The world as it should be, should contain no homelessness. As a society, as a nation, we have to solve this. We have the technology, we have the money, but do we have the will?”

He hopes Mayor-elect Ken Welch will consider his ideas.

“I am hoping that he will, in some way, grasp my modest proposal. You shouldn’t have to build your way out of it, because there are structures built already.”

Rolle, who runs his homeless ministry at 900 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St. S with co-pastor Samuel Pichard, and cooks for his congregation after the 4:30 p.m. Sunday service, shared some of what he’ll say next week.

“I am going to say that we are failing the people,” he told me Thursday. “I think we should at least talk about concrete solutions for homelessness.”

The 66-year-old lives in a garage apartment in a poor, African-American neighborhood and is concerned about the high percentage of Black people who’re homeless. He knows what it’s like to be without a roof over his head. In 2007, when St. Petersburg police seized and slashed the tents of homeless people, he was among the city’s growing homeless population.

This year, he experienced a short bout of homelessness and was forced to sleep across from the Williams Park bathrooms, near First United Methodist Church. He explained that he had used his money to try to find safe, healthy living quarters for his ailing girlfriend — the same one whose name will be among those read next Friday.

Homeless Memorial Service

4:30 p.m., Dec. 17, 2021, Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg, 100 Mirror Lake Drive, N.

Point in Time Count

Volunteer to help count the number of homeless persons in Pinellas County on Jan. 27, 2022. The count includes sheltered and unsheltered persons. Go to PinellasHomeless.org, or email Victoria Kelly at VKelly@HLAPinellas.org