It was still dark outside Tuesday morning as 8-year-old Siann and 6-year-old Faith quietly ate their eggs and grits and sausage.
Big eyes, little braids, pink barrettes.
They are the faces of homelessness in Chicago.
The girls and their families, for the moment, live at "Thelma's Place" at 80th & Western.
The shelter, run by a 25-year-old agency called Inner Voice, is a plain brick building that sits just on the other side of Western Avenue from the neat bungalows of the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood where Christmas trees stand in living room windows.
Homes on one side.
Homeless on the other.
Breakfast over, I watched 54-year-old Katherine Kyle take her 90-year-old father, Bennie Miles, gently by the hand and guide him to a chair. Their West Side house burned down last week. "We lost everything," Ms. Kyle said.
Without this shelter?
"We'd be in trouble," she said.
So, it turns out, is the shelter provider, Inner Voice. Brady Harden runs it. He is a big, baritone man who started two decades ago as a volunteer. Today his organization helps operate 28 locations. Everything from warming centers to emergency shelters to job training and GED programs.
Inner Voice, he says, is $300,000 in the hole and soon may be forced to close 300 to 800 beds. As the single largest provider of beds in the city, that would be a drastic cut. He's scheduled a press conference for tomorrow at 10 a.m. at 8040 S. Western to explain their plight.
And to argue that the City of Chicago's reimbursement of agencies like Inner Voice has not taken into account how much private donations have dried up, how the credit crunch has affected cash flow, how costs have skyrocketed.
But there are many sides to this story.
And no villains in it.
Commissioner Mary Ellen Caron runs the Chicago Department of Family Support Services, which oversees payments for Inner Voice and other agencies that help the most vulnerable among us.
"I have been in regular conversations with Brady," said Caron. "I sent in our high-finance person ... to give him some technical help ... [but] we don't have the money to bail him out."
Homeless people are looking for a place to go, the homeless shelter provider is in the red, and the city is strapped for cash.
It's a metaphor for this whole, harrowing, horrible economy. And the stress is overwhelming.
Rev. David Bates knows.
Bates runs Olive Branch, the oldest rescue mission in the city, founded before the Great Chicago Fire.
"Inner Voice is an exceptional agency providing exceptional services," he told me by phone yesterday. "On the funding side, I also understand the city's constraints."
Not to mention his own.
Bates said this year that there was a painful struggle just to maintain health insurance for his overworked, "heroic" staff. It's a staff that on any given day will find a mentally ill person dumped at the mission's door because a family member could no longer cope or care for the person.
"Olive Branch won't turn people away," said the minister. "We just put more water in the soup."
Just about everyone these days is watering the soup. Little girls in pigtails, a homeless father and daughter, shelter providers and city officials.
Caron says emphatically that she does not want Harden and Inner Voice to go out of business, saying, "He is a passionate leader on the homeless front."
Brady Harden, for his part, insists, "We haven't given up hope."
Is there a solution?
Bates argues there must be.
His conviction derives more from faith than logic.
After all, to his way of thinking, "On all sides, these are our people."
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