In San Diego, one nonprofit arts organization has taken it upon itself to provide paths to success for a community whose lives exist below the sightline of typical arts audiences: the unhoused.
There is a lazy maxim about unhoused people in San Diego, California. It is the idea that if people were to choose to be homeless, they might as well be homeless in San Diego.
No one chooses to be homeless.
The dangerous myth of homelessness being a positive choice stems from a desire to refuse to acknowledge the issues involved. Unhoused individuals remain in the background of even the busiest of cities, haunted by the demons that led to their situation and exacerbated by a privileged class who would prefer they didn’t exist at all. A right-wing pundit once said that the solution was to bulldoze entire neighborhoods and institutionalize people who are unhoused to eliminate what he called “drugged-out zombies chasing barefooted babies through piles of garbage with hypodermic needles and fire everywhere.”
No one chooses to be homeless.
Unhoused people want to be housed. They want to be seen. They just want to get their footing to find a way to get to tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that, oftentimes in an area of town that might be construed as dangerous, maybe even one that has few that speak the same language as they do. In San Diego especially, they want to be heard.
Welcome to Voices of Our City Choir.
“Steph [Johnson, the CEO and creative director], and I hear that San Diego thing all the time,” said Lindsey Seegers, Voices of Our City Choir’s executive director. “I mean, all the time – ‘this is a nice place to be homeless.’ It’s offensive, especially to those who are unhoused. One of our first choir members was a homeowner in Seattle and moved down here. He thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to enjoy San Diego for three months. I’m going to hang out my van, live near the beach, then I’ll get my place, and then I’ll get all settled.’ The cost of living and other factors forced him to stay in that van. So here’s a professional, an educated homeowner in his late forties, finding himself homeless. When we hear that San Diego must be a nice place to be homeless, we respond directly. ‘No, we haven’t heard that from the people actually experiencing a housing crisis. Talk to anybody in this choir. That’s not what we’re hearing.’”
Seegers told the story of a thirtysomething veteran who slept under a bush in Balboa Park for over two years. He’d sung in a choir when he was in the military.
“One day, he told us that we’d helped him discern the difference between his wants and his needs. He’d come to believe that his basic needs were selfish wants and our program showed him that it was okay to ask for help because he was worth it. We see people through music and art, having these ‘aha moments,’ cracking open their own sense of agency through creativity.”
That young man, Michael, secured both a job and housing. He credits Voices of Our City Choir with the support, friendships, and motivation to rebuild his own life.
At its core, Voice of Our City Choir is not a social service agency, but a nonprofit arts organization.
“Our intention is clear. We’re here to use music and art to help people better their own lives, not to do it for them,” summarized Seegers. “We struggled about the idea of putting housing into our mission statement, but we kept getting back to what we actually do: using music and arts to help people like launch to that next thing, which often includes housing. We use music and the arts as the tools to help people identify what they want. Some folks like to sum our work up by saying that we give people a voice. We’re not saviors. We don’t give anybody their voice. They’ve always had the voice. We just give them the microphone.”
“There are unique talents in each of us,” said Johnson, “and that is especially true for all of the people I have met experiencing homelessness. By providing a safe community space for art and music making, individuality positively thrives. The journey of self-expression is the root of awareness and healing.”
In 2020, Voices of Our City Choir advanced to the semifinals of the television competition program America’s Got Talent. You need to watch the performance for their talent and for the special “golden buzzer” moment that only a select few performances receive.
To understand their success as a nonprofit arts organization, all you have to do is witness them. Even while unhoused, they work as a team to make their own lives better through art, which is amazing to behold. It deserves not only amazement and renown, but dignity and respect. They deserve to be paid well for their services: singers and as representatives of the kinds of people their community needs to serve better.
Most organizations that hire Voices of Our City – and many of them are nonprofit organizations unaffiliated with the arts – do so out of love for the choir and its purpose (especially in San Diego). These smart companies on both sides of the commercial/nonprofit line partner with them to further both companies’ causes. Hiring the choir is an inspired, affordable way to provide support to a community of people within the community, helping unhoused people find their standing in a collective venture. After all, what company wouldn’t want to hitch itself to greatness? This kind of collaborative synergy not only shows that the hiring company cares about its community, but also allows for Voices of Our City to press its engagement for all the communities it serves.
Centering dignity. It’s at the core of everything Voices of Our City Choir does, whether it’s in providing services or in presenting the music. The company is not a group of heroes to be gawked at for their ability to be alive and perform. San Diego already has a pretty good zoo for that.
If you need to know why this company deserves that seven-figure check (there are a lot of foundations in San Diego County that have the capacity and the stated purpose of wanting to do this kind of work – all eyes are on you), the following is a typical success story for Voices of Our City Choir.
In 2022, the National Conflict Resolution Center awarded Voices of Our City the Peacemakers Award. The choir members performed. Donors purchased several tables at the gala for the choir members to be fully included. The caterer put sparkling cider in champagne flutes so that the choir members could enjoy the cocktail hour fully along with the guests. It is a perfect example of how the choir can be included in a way that centers their humanity and dignity.
Internally, the members are fully supported. Let’s say you were a member of the choir and wanted help in finding some form of housing. Voices of Our City would connect you to one of their social service housing partners. They would even accompany you so that you wouldn’t have to face the paperwork jungle alone. The social service agency would give you a number and place you on a list that is subject to the Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (SPDAT). The SPDAT is an assessment tool for front-line workers at agencies that work with homeless clients to prioritize which of those clients should receive assistance first. It’s an exhaustive assessment tool that determines need as a competition against other applicants for scant funding.
The SPDAT has become a tool to deny funding, not to enable it. It assesses mental health issues, for example, and takes in other factors such as the applicant’s age and whether all one’s limbs are in working order, for example. However, simple pain is not considered, even if it’s chronic or debilitating. For example, if you simply have a horrifically aching back because you’ve been sleeping in a deserted vacant lot in Southeast San Diego, you would not be placed high on the priority list of getting housed.
The price for getting housed might be the equivalent of an arm and a leg. Literally.
“One of our choir members,” said Seegers, “has been with us for six or so years now. He always says, ‘It took losing my leg to get into housing.’ He was on all the lists, had completed all the paperwork, but still, he was sleeping outside. One night, he got an infection and had to have his leg amputated from the knee down. He said, ‘I was in the hospital, and then I was in housing two days later. It took losing my leg.’”
Most people in this country are about two missed paychecks or one medical emergency away from being in that predicament. Just like you.
In case you’re wondering, I’m a donor to Voices of Our City. They’re a beacon of charity in a nonprofit arts sector in which there are few…for now. And as I would do with a good movie, a great restaurant, or a terrific store, I want you to share in my good fortune for having found them. Send them a donation. They deserve it.
And it goes without saying, but the cynics among us request this: no, they paid not a cent for this article. This is not an “advertorial.” In the coming months, I’ll continue to feature more companies that walk the walk — if for no other reason than to show you that it is, in fact, possible to use art as a tool and not as a product. And to national foundation program directors: do a mitzvah and include Voices of Our City in your giving portfolio. They’ll make your foundation more valuable.
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