Conversation
Page 10
Street Roots • July 20-26, 2018
Streetwise advice
fo r the novice
R yan D ow d’s ‘The L ibrarian’s Guide to
Homelessness’ offers advice to workers whose
job p u ts them in contact with people
experiencing homelessness
BY TOPAZ
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
"TT n his book, “The Librarian’s Guide to
I Homelessness,” Ryan Dowd provides
JLinsight and practical tools for anyone
(but especially librarians) who encounter
people experiencing homelessness. The
levity and clarity of Dowd’s writing provides
a functional wisdom, which he refers to as
the “tools” he uses at Hesed House, the
second-largest shelter in Illinois. Dowd
began there as a
13-yeaf-old and now
serves as executive
director.
These balms or
alms for the m in d are
a v a s t co llectio n of
reference materials,
though with much
cooler names.
Praying Ninja, in
which you keep your
“The Librarian’s
palms together in front
Guide to
of you and use them
Homelessness”
both to point and
by Ryan Dowd
gesture, demonstrating
an openness and
showing you are not
threatened while still being able to defend
yourself if necessary. Jane’s Addiction (not
the band), in which visualizing that you are
talking to a person trapped in a body hooked
on a substance allows you to express
empathy more easily than in some
situations. There is also The Oprah, The
Barack Obama and The Marijuana Plant
tool, which it seems a lot of people in
Washington use daily.
The ‘Psy’ alms (the Greek word for
“mind”), or psalms, are perhaps not as
poetic as the ones belonging to the desert
wanderers of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
yet the compassion, clarity and wisdom
found within demonstrate the calming effect
that empathy-guided interactions have on a
stressed and emotionally drained patron of
the library.
Topaz: What in your experience do
librarians not understand about homelessness?
Ryan Dowd: It’s less what librarians
don’t understand and more what people who
have lived a middle-class, suburban, semi
privileged life don’t understand, which
librarians are no better or no worse than
anybody else. In our country we do such a
great job of what I eall “economic
apartheid,” which is keeping poor people in
certain areas, having middle-class people
have their run of the land and having rich
people behind walls.
There just aren’t many places where
people of different socioeconomic
backgrounds meet and physically interact
And that’s kind of what makes libraries so
fascinating and so honestly volatile is that
public libraries are one of the last places in
our country where all the socioeconomic
groups meet in the same building. They’re
super critical to the future of our
democracy.
T.: Your book mentions Oz. I t ’s almost like
there is a wizard, an “Ignore the m an behind
the curtain.” B y these economic apartheids,
we’re not allowed to speak or interact with
people ou tsid e our s o c ia l economic, realm s, a n d
therefore no change is actually going to be
made.
R.D.: Exactly. Exactly. But libraries go
against that trend. Because there’s not a
rich person’s library, a middle-class person’s
library, a poor person’s library. There’s one
library. And that makes libraries super
important to our country, but it also means
a lot of ticked-off middle-class people.
T.: I think that’s a really excellent
observation. I remember when libraries had
card catalogues. I f I were to look up an Ursula
K. Le Guin book, “A Wizard ofEarthsea,”
then I would get the same answer as any other
person in the library. These days, we can get
different answers than people who have
different ages, who have different economics,
different search engines. A n d that’s a way
economic apartheid is unwittingly being
continued.
R.D.; Not only do you get different
answers, the more money you have, the
better answers you can get You can pay for
better answers basically with a faster phone,
a better phone, better subscription services
you have. The disadvantage for people who
don’t have access to resources like that is
even greater.
T.: What are some o f the ways you believe
body language enhances or discourages
communication in libraries?
R.D.: It’s not just libraries. Body language
is so key. My day job, by the way, is I’m the
executive director of the second-largest
homeless shelter in Illinois. So most of my
experience is in the context of a shelter, not
the context of libraries. I doii’t know how
PH O TO COURTESY OF RYAN D O W D
Ryan Dowd is the executive director o f Hesed House, the second-largest shelter in Illinois. H is
book, “The Librarian’s Guide to Homelessnes,” teaches people to fin d success with nonviolence
a nd h u m an dignity, rather than forced compliance.
many times where there’s some kind of
blowup. Either a guest yells at a staff or
takes a swing at a staff. And I’m debriefing
with the staff member afterwards and they
tell me what they said, y’know, “I said this,
and he said this, and I said this.” And then I
go pull up the video camera and I say,
“Wow, you might have said that, but your
body language was aggressive and
dismissive all at the same time. So you
might have said something nice, but your
body language was reially nasty.” We tend to
focus on using the right words. We say nice
words, but our body language is just
projecting contempt and dismissiveness and
aggressiveness and all these nasty things,
and then we pretend, “Well I said the right
things. I said nice words, therefore I was
nice.” And we dismiss the fact that we rolled
our eyes, that we had our hands on our hips,
that we were glaring at the person — all
these things that send a message of
nastiness.
R.D.: Nonviolence is something I’ve spent
a lot of time studying, and one of the things
I’ve kind of realized here is that nonviolence
teaches you how to speak truth to power. If
you’re the oppressed and someone else has
the power, you’re the Middle Eastern Jew
against the Roman Empire back 2,000 years
ago. If you’re the Mexican immigrant
standing up to the United States
government, If someone else has the power
and you don’t, nonviolence is how you speak
truth to that power. What I try to teach is
how to speak with power. What do you do
when you’re the Roman Empire, when
you’re the United States government, when
you’re the shelter staff and you have 3,000
times as much power as the person living
there? Or you’re the library security guard
and you have 10,000 times as much power
as a patron? How do you ethically deal with
someone who has so much bloody less
power than you that this is not a contest in
any shape or form?
T.: I ’m honestly completely guilty o f that.
RD: Oh, everybody is.
T: I t ’s one o f the ways we’re taught to be
socially nice, but my tone o f voice is a chisel or
blade.
T.: We’re not enslaving people any longer,
but this economic apartheid is a form o f forced
servitude a nd so, when you have the power a nd
a position o f authority, you are by definition
See DOWD, page 11