Will Eberle: Go and say it to their face

Aug 24, 2023

By Opinion

Jun 6 2023, 7:10 AMJune 5, 2023

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"The history of the world my sweet is who gets eaten and who gets to eat." — Stephen Soundheim

"I don't put a cup out because it makes me feel poor." — Woman experiencing homelessness, sitting on the street in Montpelier yesterday asking me for money as I walked by.•••This commentary is by Will Eberle of Northfield, executive director of the Vermont Association of Mental Health and Addiction Recovery and Recovery Vermont, and founder of Mission Driver Consulting.

When we make real investments in people, customized to their needs and aspirations, they make transformational progress in their lives and we get to live in communities that have fully catalyzed the gifts of their citizens.

So doing, our collective goals of equity are no longer murky or inflammatory but operationalized in palpable ways we can all see and touch and feel as we collectively revel in the success, happiness, health and prosperity of future generations.

Instead, Vermont's elected and appointed leaders are letting hundreds of families across our state go back to living in tents and cars and whatever scrap of couch or floor they can talk their way into from one night to the next.

Keeping our extended emergency housing program in place is as critical as keeping our highway bridges in place but it's also just the roughest Band-Aid on the most festering wound. We need robustly enhanced investments in, and a near total rebuild of, our entire social safety net and system of care in Vermont.

For two decades, I’ve been trying to convince our elected and appointed leaders of this with data and return-on-investment figures and examples of evidence-based practices and approaches that are working elsewhere. I give up. Today I’m just going to tell them what keeping those systems the way they are has done to people, in hopes they will be sufficiently moved to really try to make things better.

If they hear these stories and still want to not just keep things the same, but also rip off the tiny scrap of Band-Aid our most vulnerable neighbors have been given to stave off the hemorrhage, I just ask one thing: Don't do it in a quiet office somewhere. Don't use numbers to describe people and arrange them in ways that seem to suggest things are going to be fine. Don't tell us we can afford to gild our Statehouse roof but we can't afford for people with absolutely nothing to be able to at least use a toilet anymore.

Go to the hotels and see how little people have and how hard their lives are. Then, if you still decide to take away the humble scraps they have managed to string together, look them in the eyes. Go and say it to their face.

If you’re going to take away their chance, don't hide in your office; don't use numbers to describe people and arrange them to pretend it's all going to be fine. Go and say it to their face.