Michigan’s Movable Shelters Give Aid, Comfort to the Down and Out : Homeless: Some churches take turns hosting the operation. Clients get food and a bed; volunteers get to see that societal problem has human face.

Steve Smith’s bed for the night was a cot covered with a green army blanket in the corner of a Sunday school room at St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church.

In a few days, Smith, the cot and his tiny pile of toiletries would be someplace else--another Sunday school room, a congregation’s meeting hall, a church’s unused basement.

Like 19th-Century ministers who traveled a circuit preaching the Gospel to their far-flung flocks, an estimated 25 shelters for Michigan’s homeless travel from church to church, depending on the kindness of church volunteers.

The arrangement is not limited to Michigan.

“It’s definitely all over the country,” said Robert Ogilvie, director of volunteers for the Partnership for the Homeless in New York City. Fifty New York churches working with Ogilvie’s organization trade off nights as homeless shelters, he said.

“There’s just not enough permanent shelters for people,” said Maj. Carl Reed of the Lansing Salvation Army. “I’m not sure anybody thinks it’s the greatest idea, but it’s done out of need.”

Organizers insist that they at least provide the poor a warm bed and hot meal, and provide the church volunteers a new insight into problems of the needy.

“You’d think that a shelter that moves every week and where you can’t stay during the day would be a horrible place to live,” said the Rev. Pam Fulton, a Presbyterian minister, director of Advent House Ministries and co-chair of the Lansing Area Rotating Sanctuary.

“You’re not settled. You have to keep moving, getting used to a whole new group of volunteers and new ways of doing things,” she said. “But it’s often the shelter of choice.”

Women and children prefer the Lansing traveling shelter because of the attention lavished by volunteers, the less institutional atmosphere and the greater sense of safety, she said.

Churches take turns hosting the shelter for a week or two at a time. Each evening, volunteers transport guests from a welfare agency or other office to the church hosting the shelter. There they receive a hot meal donated by a church volunteer and a cot to sleep on.

Breakfast is served in the morning. Then the guests pick up a sack lunch and leave for the day. In some areas, they are given bus tokens for transportation. Some churches provide transportation back to the place where they were picked up the night before.

At the end of the week, volunteers pack up the cots and bedding and ship them to the next church, along with the guests’ belongings.

In Fowlerville, St. John hosts the Livingston County shelter two weeks a year at a cost to the congregation of about $300, including the pots of chili and pans of lasagna that volunteers bring.

“It makes you appreciate what you have,” said Eliisa Walter of Webberville, one of four volunteers at the St. John kitchen. “You realize that they’re real people. They’re not just bums, drunks. They’re just people that have had some bad luck. Most of them are really nice people.”

Some of them, like Steve Smith, have jobs. He works at a fast-food restaurant in Fowlerville, trying to save money to get his own apartment, but had been sleeping in friends’ cars for several weeks.

Though Smith, 20, previously had worked for a lawn-maintenance and snowplowing company, he never managed his money well enough to afford his own place and he ran out of friends to stay with.

He appreciated the warm place to stay and the good food, but the roving shelter could pose a problem for him, because he may have to sleep miles away from his job with no public transportation to get him there.

“It’d be nice if we stayed here,” he said after a home-cooked dinner of pot roast, potatoes and carrots. “It moves and that’s not good for me. If I have to, I’m willing to walk or hitchhike, but I ain’t going to lose my job.”

Inconvenience is not the only criticism of the movable shelters. They’re a good stopgap to help the homeless, says Beverley McDonald, executive director of the Michigan League for Human Services, but that’s not enough.

“I certainly would not want to diminish their contribution. However, I think that we have to look at why they’re there and how we can get them (the homeless) into more permanent situations,” she said.

Still, there are unique benefits to the rotating shelters--and not only for the homeless.

Lillian Melville, executive director of the South Oakland Shelter--the only shelter in the 25 miles between Detroit and Pontiac--says the volunteers shed preconceived notions of the homeless as unwashed, crazy derelicts.

“That stereotype exists, but you are not expecting a mother and a 2-day-old baby. You’re not expecting somebody you went to high school with, and that has happened. You’re not expecting a mom and dad where the dad is doing dishes because he just wants to thank you,” she said.

“Even if it is that stereotypical person, all of a sudden this old drunk is ‘Charlie,’ and Charlie is a person.”

Fulton, of the Lansing shelter, said middle-class volunteers sometimes have helped shelter residents find jobs or persuaded congregations to get involved in homeless issues in other ways after glimpsing the problem up close.

“I’ve just talked to so many people who say, ‘I didn’t know there was so much suffering,’ or, ‘I don’t know how they survive,’ ” she said. “Some have said, ‘My life will never be the same again.’ There’s been a real awakening.”