by Ivey Merrill
In a city with one of the largest homeless populations in the U.S., one organization is
striving to help the members of their community through music.
It’s a Friday morning at Living Water Church of the Nazarene in downtown San Diego’s East Village. More than two dozen people gather for choir practice and lunch. Laura Davis is talking excitedly about her recent offer for a job interview as a substitute teacher.
“I’ve been sending most or all of the money I make to my daughter, which is mostly chump change, you know?” Davis donates plasma twice a week, which earns her $30,
and she makes another $45 if she works all day at Alpha Project, the homeless shelter she lives in.
Like Davis, most of the members of the Voices of Our City choir are homeless.
Homeless people in the United States are often vastly misrepresented and even criminalized. The public often cuts off the last part of their label: people. It’s easily forgotten, but the homeless are, indeed, people.
San Diego has the fourth largest homeless population in the U.S.. In the downtown region and all over the county there are the signs — long line of sleeping bags, tarp dwellings and shopping carts.
Voices of Our City choir is working to change the lives of homeless San Diegans and change the way the public perceives homelessness.
The night before this choir practice, a new documentary on Voices of Our City, The Homeless Chorus Speaks, airs on PBS. It’s kind of a big deal. The one-hour movie was produced by noted documentarian Susan Polis Schutz.
“I landed at LAX last night and my phone wouldn’t stop ringing with messages like ‘Oh, we wanna be involved; oh, we want to hire you; somebody donated $500,’” says Steph Johnson, co-founder of Voices of Our City.
“We actually raised $1,300 last night from that one showing,” adds Johnson, who is also a local musician who has released four albums. “I just came back from New York where the film premiered five times a day for a week, while also showing in a theater in Los Angeles. It’s going to show on 100 PBS stations across the nation, then it’s going to be presented to The Academy for Oscar consideration.”
Johnson started doing homeless outreach nearly five years ago.
“I got to know people who were experiencing this crisis, and it’s not just one thing,” she says. “There’s usually some illness, mental or physical. I got to really know people and become friends with them. In the summer of 2016, the city shut down feeding, and they actually threatened churches and people doing feeding, [that] if they were caught feeding people they were going to have [legal] problems.”
Johnson started going to San Diego City Council meetings and learning more about homelessness and seeing what she could do to help. Johnson and Nina Leilani Deering, choir organizer and co-founder, gathered a group and they all began attending city council functions.
If there’s a common thread that holds humanity together, it’s music. Johnson frequently interacts with homeless people who sing or play instruments. She wants a space where they can make music. According to Johnson, there are versions of homeless choirs in almost every city. “We’re different because we have a full band, feature homeless soloists, and also advocate,” she says. “We’re the only group of predominantly homeless people who are organized and go to city council to speak up on behalf of homeless people.”
It all started organically, Johnson says. “The moment the pastor [of Living Water Church] said we could use the church for whatever we want. I called Nina and said, ‘Let’s start a choir,’ and she said, ‘Sure.’”
Nina directs the choir, doing vocal warm-ups and teaching parts by ear. She often asks everybody a question: “What’s something you’re great at?” It has the effect of grounding visitors to choir practice and granting a sense of community. It also makes you reflect on how much more important this question is when asked of people who are largely left unheard.
The streets are harsh and unforgiving. People are afraid of having to live on the streets where they are ticketed, arrested,ignored or are the target of violence. How do you get them to stand up and speak for themselves when they feel like no one is listening?
“First, they need housing,” Johnson says. “They need food, nourishment and time to heal.”
Voices of Our City is more than just two hours of choir rehearsal. It’s a time for people to gather, eat lunch and feel a sense of community together. It’s a couple of hours where homeless people can find a reprieve from the constant threats of danger and focus on something other than pure survival.
After Johnson and Deering started the choir, they held a holiday concert. It was featured by The San Diego Union-Tribune and more than 300 people attended. The next day, however, the whole choir was ticketed and one person was arrested for being homeless. Johnson says she made the mistake of mentioning where the choir slept at night—outside the Living Waters Church.
Johnson’s friend, Martha Sullivan, took the whole choir in. “For the first three weeks they were sheltered, they just slept, because they were so exhausted,” Johnson says.
Through the choir, 27 people have been connected to housing. This choir, started by a couple musicians, are doing the work of a nonprofit or a governmental agency. “It’s kind of hard, but it helped people get from point A to point B. Some people were off the street and in their own apartment or got into a shelter,” Johnson says.
“Something I realized is people have to want it. We can’t be driving the bus. We can be in the bus, in the passenger seat: we can support them, take them to appointments, make them feel like they deserve medical care, and so on, but they have to drive.”
The Voices of Our City choir empowers people who are left largely unheard to express themselves, use their talent and tell the world they have something to share.
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