Lynn Loveday, Local Saint

Journal Staff Writer

pdavis@providencejournal.com

CRANSTON — At the state’s largest homeless shelter for men, union leader Lynn Loveday delivers Christmas gifts: warm socks and a bit of hope.
“Next year is going to be a good one,” promises Loveday, state vice president of Council 94, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the state’s largest employee union.Sporting a Christmas hat and a red sweater that says “grandma,” she doles out wrapped socks to the 70 men standing inside Harrington Hall, a gym-like building where the homeless sleep in metal bunk beds or on the floor or at tables.
The men — including one in a wheelchair and another on crutches — could use some good news.Some have slept at the shelter on and off since 2009.
“It’s the worst place in the world to spend Christmas Eve,” says Donald Herzog, who had a truck-driving job — and a marriage — eight months ago. The 58-year-old carries his stuff in a backpack, a duffle bag and a suitcase. He looks around the room. A small Christmas tree sits on a table flanked by piles of bed sheets.“What a place to end up in,” he says.
In past years, the shelter has rarely housed more than 120 men. But in the months leading up to this Christmas, that number has surged to 140 on some nights, officials say.Even more troubling is the spike in men living with mental illness, says Jean Johnson, executive director for the House of Hope Community Development Corporation, the agency that runs the shelter. Recently, a 22-year-old autistic man arrived at the shelter. “He was functioning at a six-year-old level,” Johnson says. Shelter workers, she says, scrambled to find him another place. “There was nowhere for him to go. How can there be no group homes or hospital rooms?”
But on Christmas Eve, Loveday brightens the room. Before she doles out presents, she tells the men about a state plan to end homelessness by 2016.“I’m here to fight for your rights,” she shouts. “If I could take you all home, I would. I want you all to have what I have — a place to live, a bed to sleep in and a place to call home.”The men — some of them wearing worn jackets, caps and jeans — tower above Loveday, who is 4 feet 9 inches tall. They bend as she hugs them, pats their chests and holds their rough faces in her small hands.
“You’re special,” she tells them.
The 62-year-old union leader didn’t always feel strongly about the homeless. Like many people, she says, “I thought they were the people who slept under bridges and stood on I-95.” Then she learned that several thousand Rhode Island men, women and children are homeless.
One year she attended a memorial service for the homeless. “I was shocked at how many die on the street,” she says. “It was almost too much to bear.” Loveday, who grew up in Warwick, started thinking that the homeless and the state’s workers both struggle to get by. “I realized their issues were similar to ours.”

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