Interview with Rev. Tom Knoll of CFLS

Interview with Rev. Tom Knoll of Community Family Life Services, Washington, DC
by Michelle Voll of the Center for Public Justice, 2/27/01

At its annual Leadership Award event on March 1, 2001, the Center for Public Justice recognized the ministry of Community Family Life Services (CFLS), a non-profit inclusive Christian organization serving the poor and homeless in Washington, DC. A few days earlier, Michelle Voll, the Center's development director, met with the Rev. Tom Knoll, CFLS executive director, and asked him to tell her about the work of CFLS.

MV: David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, recommended that the Center for Public Justice recognize the ministry of Community Family Life Services during our annual Leadership Award this year. How do you know David, and are there any ministry connections between your ministry and Bread for the World?

TK: Though he was a couple years ahead of me, David and I went to the same seminary together over two decades ago. When I took this position at Community Family Life Services 20 years ago, David and his family were members of First Trinity Lutheran Church, which was also my church. At that time, David was working for the World Bank, having earned a degree in economics after completing seminary. So we've known each other in those circles. After David was considered for the job of Executive Director or President of Bread for the World, we had lunch and talked quite a bit about it.

The ministry focus of Community Family Life Services is with homeless individuals and families. We are not a national organization. We are a local faith-based group and, among other things, provide people with food and clothing. We focus on direct service but do advocacy when we get a chance. I've been a member of Bread for the World since I was in seminary. It's a grassroots advocacy group. So I've been very familiar with Art Simon [founder of Bread for the World], and I knew his brother, [Sen.] Paul Simon. Art Simon is also a pastor and closely associated with another supporting congregation. So that's the connection between David Beckmann and myself and our organizations.

MV: How did you become involved with CFLS?

TK: When I was in seminary I realized that when I was doing fieldwork that the church wasn't preparing me for the youth of today or for the needs in the community. I was learning Greek and Hebrew and didn't quite realize how that would translate into helping people in need. Also I got very involved during seminary in Hispanic inner city work. I spent quite some time in Mexico and in San Antonio in the barrios there. Some of the people in our cities who live in poverty don't even compare to the barrios in Mexico City where there isn't even plumbing.

As I was finishing seminary, I realized I'd like to get a degree in social work, and so I earned my master's in social work at St. Louis University. At that time, I was looking for a call that had some kind of dual relationship, connected to a parish but also providing services to people in the inner city. CFLS has been the perfect place for me.

MV: That's impressive. Who was the founder of this group originally? What was the vision? Has it changed since it was started?

TK: The vision has changed. CFLS was founded by a group of churches, mostly in Northern Virginia and a couple here in the District. In the Lutheran circles we had various kind of divisions of Lutheranism. Now we've merged a lot of that so there's only a couple of main Lutheran groups left. But there was the American Lutheran Church, the ALC. A lot of those churches in Northern Virginia got together to sponsor this ministry and really wanted to focus on ex-offenders. We are in the District near Judiciary Square where the courts are across the street. Every court is here except for the Supreme Court. So there were a lot of people coming in and out of jail. In the early years, in the 60s and 70s, the main breadwinner was male. That has changed. Now in most low-income families the breadwinner is a female. So when the person was incarcerated the family could go without food or without clothing or without a livelihood for a long period of time. So that's where the focus of CFLS was.

When I arrived here, we were working with maybe four or five ex-offenders a week and seeing 60-80 homeless people a day. So I said we really needed to change our focus and the scope of our services, because that was not the population we were serving. We started to focus more on working with homeless families. At that time, too, there was an activist for the homeless named Mitch Schneider, who went on a hunger strike in 1980 when Reagan was president, and he was able to acquire this shelter down the block. It is the largest shelter in the world, but it's not the best place in the world.

While this was occurring, we decided that Mitch and his ministry, which is in our neighborhood, was focusing mostly on homeless men and women but not children and families. The city was having a housing crisis where women with children were being housed in a hotel at the rate of $3000 a month at the city's expense. Families were just watching TV all day. They had no services. They were evicted from that hotel room during the day, so they wandered the streets, and then returned to the hotel to sleep there at night. The kids had to get to school by bus. A lot of the homeless kids weren't going to school. So then we opened up our first transitional units for homeless families, not in a shelter but in an apartment building, and we took the first 20 families from one of those hotels.

The program continued to evolve as we realized that a family could be in transitional housing for up to three years. But even in a three-year period that family had to go from nothing to being able to pay market rent for an apartment, which in the city is about $800-$900 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. So we then started providing them with a holistic array of services. We called this a continuum of care, holistic services that would wrap around the family and provide all that they needed to become self-sufficient. It started with housing, then moved to youth services, and expanded to employment. Now it has evolved to include community organizing, through which we develop and implement strategies for neighborhood participation and revitalization in low-income sections of the city, thus helping residents bring about change in their neighborhoods.

MV: So then you are getting involved in economic development.

TK: Oh, absolutely. That's one of our big things. We currently have a restaurant and thrift store. We are also looking at a couple of businesses that we could start that would flourish and that would help create jobs for people, but at the same time help people begin to start their own businesses.

MV: In what neighborhoods are you working?

TK: We work in five neighborhood locations throughout the city. In the Northwest part of the District, we work in the Fort Totten neighborhood and in downtown DC in the Shaw neighborhood. In Anacostia we have three locations--Brandywine, Livingston, and First Street--all of which are located off South Capitol Street. In the Brandywine Street neighborhood we do our community organizing through one full-time organizer and a full-time youth worker.

MV: Can you describe to me what you think makes your programs successful?

TK: I think it takes dedicated staff members first of all, staff who really believe in what they're doing, who have their resources. By this I don't necessarily mean money or computers or equipment, although that's important nowadays, but who know the resources of the community to help families become self-sufficient. We consider ourselves faith-based, so we feel that our faith commitment is key. We don't necessarily proselytize toward one faith, whether it's Lutheran or Catholic. For example, a couple Jewish synagogues approached us to partner with them, and when we asked them why they would be partnering with us, they said because they appreciate and like our faith-based approach.

MV: Can you describe your faith-based approach?

TK: I think it focuses on all of us being creations of God who have been put on this earth to help and to be of service to others, not to serve ourselves, not to make ourselves good, or build a kingdom for ourselves personally, but to help others. I think that's the faith philosophy that we employ. Our agency's theme, I like to say, is Matthew 25:41ff where Jesus says: "When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I naked, did you clothe me? When I was in prison, did you visit me?" We try to do and live up to all of those things, including taking family members to a prison in West Virginia so that the family can have connections.

Since we serve mostly African-Americans, our clients come mostly from an African American tradition, such as Baptist or African-American Methodist. They have strong religious, spiritual backgrounds already, and so our faith-based approach is not unfamiliar to them. Our clients generally have no difficulty with our faith-based approach, particularly those who are in a substance abuse or 12-step program, which for us is a very spiritual program. One cannot get through struggling to beat substance abuse without a spiritual commitment, and so we learn a lot through those folks.

MV: Can you tell me a little bit more about the people who work here and how many you have on staff?

TK: We have about 40 staff members, 5 or 6 part-time and the rest fulltime. We also have 7 or 8 full-time volunteers on stipends. These staff members come to us through the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and Mennonite Volunteer Corps, as well as from a couple local churches with their own volunteer groups. We have somebody from almost any major church body with a volunteer program. It's a unique, wonderful program where people, mostly college graduates but also some retirees, spend a year living here in the community and serving as full-time staff. We pay some of their basic costs and provide a stipend of $80 a month.

MV: Could you describe CFLS's programs?

TK: We have five core programs. First we have our community services program, which provides people with what we used to call emergency services. It provides people in need with food and clothing. We are the largest purveyor of rent assistance in the city for people who can't pay their rent or utilities. We spend over $50,000-$60,000 to pay rent and to pay utility companies for power and gas for families. Many of these people would be evicted without assistance, and so this is a homelessness prevention program. We also do a lot of one-on-one counseling in that program.

We have a senior caregivers program for neighborhood homebound seniors who have no family. We provide them with food assistance and with visits from volunteers who will call or visit on special occasions because they have no other family. Second, we have our housing program, through which we house over a hundred homeless families in apartments in five locations throughout the city. We also provide permanent housing to a number of homeless men and women.

Our third core program is our youth services program, which works very closely with our housing program, meeting needs not only in each apartment complex where we work, but also in the neighborhood as well. Kids from the entire neighborhood, not just our housing program, can come for after-school tutoring. We serve about 120 kids after school every night at these five different locations.

Our youth program has expanded to include teenagers who have dropped out of school for various reasons: substance abuse, drug dealing (which is a major part of it), or just lack of interest in school. They are probably the hardest population with which we work. We run these kids through a mentoring and leadership program and then help them get their GED through another organization so they can graduate and move on in life. After the 8-10 week course, we will help them get a job, even without their GED.

We also have 60 kids on our payroll, getting a stipend every week, because they're in our youthwork study. They go to school during the day, come home, and then work at a local business, and we pay them. It's a great program. It keeps the kids off the streets. If they're in the local drugstore or grocery store, then that store teaches them a trade, and we hope as the years go by, that if they show some interest the stores will hire them as students after school.

Our fourth core program is our employment program. Even before the Welfare to Work law was passed, we had been involved in for a couple years in the area of employment, because the families living in our housing units really go nowhere without jobs. We provide computers and self-help programs where they get on the Internet and look for jobs, download information, and fax out their résumés. We fax out anywhere from 50-100 résumés a day and help about 500 people per year get jobs.

We also do some employment training. We have two restaurants (one across the street) as well as a thrift store in Bethesda near J.C. Penny and Nordstrom that is teaching retail skills. We also have a computer repair class at one of our housing sites. Students must pass a series of exams, after which they can command $23,000-$25,000 jobs, which we help them get.

One other thing we do, our fifth program, is community organizing. We only have two community organizers on our staff who direct and supervise neighborhood efforts, but they really work hard to help the people. We discuss issues and problems and then develop and implement strategies for neighborhood participation and revitalization in low-income sections of the city. We work closely with the residents and housing developers to help residents take pride in and take charge of their communities.

In one community we've developed already a community association with officers, and they meet the police department once a month. They're starting to build leadership and responsibility among themselves. We have had successful interaction with some of the residents, as well as with landlords. We feel great about that, because a lot of landlords are distant or absentee, and if they don't start taking ownership of what they have and fix up the properties, then it becomes a real problem. These groups become a real force and power to cause change in the neighborhood. For example, in a matter of weeks they persuaded a city to change the flow of traffic on one street from two-way to one-way. That has tremendous impact on drug dealing, car chopping, and drag racing. It was difficult, but the residents banded together and worked hard, begging at city hall, and they were able to cause that change. That's what happens when neighbors get together and try different thinking, neighborhood watch, and crime prevention.

But we also provide ongoing long-term training, because we want most of them to be homeowners. We bring in real estate agents and consultants to teach them how to read a deed, what is involved in a lease, and what all the paperwork means. That helps them reclaim and take ownership of their neighborhood. The next step one neighborhood wants to take is building a community center on a vacant piece of property that the city donated to them. We recommended our architect to them, but they will pay her. We also loaned them $20,000, which they will repay, and they are also hiring their own fundraiser. They may not become their own new agency, but they can take advantage of some of our established program services to begin the process and build the structure for taking ownership of their neighborhood. So those are our core programs: community services, housing services, youth services, and employment services, and community organizing.

MV: Thanks for taking the time to tell us about the ministry of Community Family Life Services.