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In a roomful of people on the verge of losing everything, why is Tina Scott smiling?
Mothers, fathers, young and old, families living in big houses, families living on the street, some angry, some tearful, some showered, some not, line up at the intake window at Crisis Assistance Ministry every morning, coming at Tina with stories of desperation.
I lost my job. I can't pay the electric bill. My kids are hungry.
Tina listens to their pleas for help, and her response is often unexpected.
Tina smiles.
Who hasn't suffered the indignity of dealing with customer service representatives who defy the title? They're rude and unhelpful – or they're not even human, they're machines – and you end up feeling more frustrated than when you began. Or perhaps you've worked as a customer service rep and know how hard it is to deal with an endless stream of thankless customers.
With 150 people showing up at Crisis Assistance every morning, 50 people a day more than last year, sometimes Tina's smile is what it takes to diffuse the tension.
“Hello, sweetie!” she greets men and women alike. Always with a “yes, ma'am,” or “no, sir” to their endless questions. She compliments a mother on her handbag and tells a child how pretty her dress looks.
She explains the regulations, and re-explains the regulations, and asks the same questions: Have you been here before? Have you had any income in the last 30 days? Do you need anything else?
And, always, the same answers: I lost my job. I'm behind on my rent. I'm being evicted.
For thousands of people about to lose their homes or have their electricity cut off, Tina Scott is a face of hope.
Through the glass
Tina and her co-workers all talk at once, working behind five windows:
“How are you?”
“Hola. En que le puedo ayudar?”
“What's your name?”
“OK, let me have your income information.”
“Who's next?
They treat the poor and the destitute with a kindness that the poor and the destitute don't always get.
Why are they all so nice?
“Why?” Tina asked, repeating the question with a hint of incredulity. “Why?”
More than any other reason, and Tina listed several, is because she understands what they're going through. Not so many years ago she couldn't pay her bills, and Crisis Assistance Ministry helped.
“We tend to look at people or situations and we're quick to judging,” Tina says. “If you can look at somebody without bias, it's almost like you can see clearer.”
Tina stands on the inside, a thin barrier of glass separating her from the line of desperate people. She looks striking in a royal purple kaftan, oversized silver hoops dangling from her ears and silver bracelets jangling on one wrist. “I've heard it said, ‘You're only a paycheck away from being homeless,'” Tina says. “That's true.”
A well-dressed man stands on the outside, clutching a book he read while waiting in line, Phil Jackson's “The Last Season.” He was laid off in April 2008, one of more than 55,000 people out of work last year in the Charlotte region. His unemployment ran out and he's five months behind on the mortgage and is looking for help, swallowing his pride because his wife and small son depend on him.
“A lot of these people live in my neighborhood,” Tina says. “They're people I see at the grocery store, people I see in Wal-Mart. Most of them were very productive citizens at one point. All it takes is to lose your job, or have your car break down, and it's easy to get out of whack. It's not so easy to get back in whack.”
Treating people with dignity
A time or two, Tina has had to back away to hide tears. She remembers a homeless woman in her early 20s who was sleeping under a bridge. “She was a tiny thing,” Tina says, “and it touched me because it was so dangerous for her.”
Tina, who is 45, admits she is no saint. She's yelled back at people. Her hot-button is when someone curses. “That's not only disrespectful of me,” she says. “It's disrespectful of the agency. It's called Crisis Assistance Ministry. I don't care about yelling. I don't care about screaming. But when you start swearing and calling names, that's when my patience runs out.”
A time or two, she's had to ask a security guard to escort someone from the building.
“You have to know people in those kinds of situations are stressed and they may not be on their best behavior,” she says. “When they come at you, you don't have to take it personal. I've been called the B-word and the C-word and the MF-word. But nine times out of 10 if you approach it with dignity and respect and be nice, from ‘giddy up to whoa' as my grandmother used to say, they tend to respond better.”
When the economy faltered, Carol Hardison, who directs Crisis, urged the staff to redouble efforts to make the intake process as smooth as possible. A core value of the agency is to treat people with dignity. That might mean something as simple as giving a coloring book to a restless child, sharpening a pencil – or smiling.
Everyone who walks in the door should be made to feel as if “they're the only person in the world we have to serve that day,” Hardison says. “It's intentional. We don't call them numbers; we call them names.”
A humbling experience
The line for emergency assistance begins forming before dawn most weekdays even though it's not first-come first-served. To qualify, you must be about to be padlocked out of your house, or without power or water or heat, or scheduled to lose a utility that day. So many people need help because of the Great Recession, the agency can usually help people only with today's crisis, not tomorrow's.
The amount of help depends on money available. “It's hard for me to send a single parent home with four kids in the middle of winter with no lights just because we didn't have the funding,” Tina says. “That eats at your conscience.”
Before taking the job, Tina ran looms at Cannon Mills in Kannapolis, worked the front desk for one hotel and in sales and marketing for another, processed loans at a mortgage company and worked in the employee assistance program at United Family Services. At Crisis, where she's been nearly eight years, she gets satisfaction knowing she can make a difference in someone's life.
“One thing this job has done, it has humbled me. If you think you have problems, if you think you're going through a situation, just come up here and volunteer for a day and it will humble you. It almost makes you ashamed of the trivial little thing you're going through. That's not a problem.”
Today's crisis only
An elderly woman stands first in line one morning.
“You failed to pay your rent?” Tina asks.
“I have no way to pay it.”
Next, a middle-aged man. “I live in a rooming house, and I'm three months behind.”
“Have you ever been here before?”
“No. I lost my job.”
Then a middle-aged woman with a master's degree who is living on $395 a week in unemployment benefits. She owes the gas company $494.
Tina processes their paperwork and tells them to sit back down again until a caseworker calls their names.
An elderly woman, who speaks barely above a whisper, hands over some papers.
“This disconnect notice on your power is for tomorrow,” Tina says.
“But my rent's due today.”
“You need to come back in the morning. This is not an emergency.”
“My rent's due,” the woman says. You can hear her worry. “I will be evicted.”
“No you won't,” Tina assures her with the tone a mother might use on a frightened child. She explains the eviction laws. “These are scare tactics. You don't have court papers. You can't be evicted. The emergency is going to be this utility and we can help you tomorrow.”
Tina smiles.
Even when she tells people to come back and stand in line tomorrow, that she can't help them today, men and women on the other side of the glass often find themselves doing something unexpected, too.
The elderly woman, so close to tears a few moments before, smiles back.
