Carl DeLine

Back Door can make a difference

“Every time I cried, my father beat me until I stopped. He didn’t want me to be a wimp. When I was 13, my mom finally said, ‘See you later,’ and handed me over to Human Resources in B.C.” –Shawn, 19

“My stepdad was always telling me to pack my bads and move out. I finally got tired of it and left.” –Nancy, 17

“My mother was a prostitute. When she ran away my father wasn’t able to take care of four kids so he placed them in foster homes. My adoptive mother put me in an open custody group home when I was 14.” –Scott, 19

These three teens and others with deep-rooted emotional problems have turned to the Back Door for help to get off the streets.

As well as sharing abusive and unstable backgrounds, all three teens lived on the streets at young ages and have a long history of drugs, theft and running from the law.

“When you look at our participants, and some of these people have been on the street for five or 10 years, their emotional stability, their emotional patterns have been thwarted,” says Carl DeLine, founder and director of the youth program aimed at getting hard-core street people back into society.

“And to expect of them a whole new development of patterns, it’s tough. There’s a lot of stress, a lot of pain.”

Since the Back Door opened last January, it has taken 30 people, ranging in the age from 17 to 24, off downtown streets. It now has 18 participants–the others have either returned to the streets or were placed in other programs.

In theory, the unique project sounds simple. Its three counsellors and DeLine provide participants with life’s basics: food, housing, employment and, if needed, education.

But it’s an uphill battle. The program has to fight to restore participants’ battered self-images and overcome public resistance.

When prospective participants first knock on the Back Door they lack social, communication and daily living skills. Their self-worth, self-esteem and confidence is extremely low.

“They come with all the street garbage,” says John Mungham, the program’s outreach coordinator. “They come with drug problems, coping mechanisms we would see that aren’t appropriate, such as ‘If someone rips me off I’m going to get him and hurt him.’ They come with a background of parties, fighting and rowdiness.”

Mungham, a social worker, says it’s extremely difficult for street people to walk away from the only life they’ve known for years–and to accept and fit into a lifestyle they’ve never had.

“They want to keep one food on the street. It’s hard to break away from that.

“Many have said to me, ‘You can take me out of the street but you can’t take the street out of me.’ I really believe that’s true. It’s all they know.”

DeLine says society usually ignores street people or belittles them. “Everybody has had experiences with someone on the street and they say, ‘What a bunch of losers.’ That’s the mentality of the community at large.”

The project’s major task is to help–and help now.

“The Back Door operates in an anxiety mode while the rest of the world is still investigating,” DeLine says. “Many are saying, ‘I didn’t know there was a problem,’ or ‘How real do you really think the problem is?'”

Part of the project, DeLine says, is to find what it takes for the “normal society” to adjust to street people.

He says the project needs society because most street people trying to go straight need government assistance and community services. “There has to be community involvement; there has to be a healing process.”

The project desperately needs volunteers–people who will lend an ear to individual participants, like a Big Brother or a Big Sister.

“Just to be a warm body for them,” says DeLine. “People believe they have to have some special knowledge or special understanding. No. You just have to be there.” DeLine says it’s unfortunate there is a need for the Back Door. He thinks society should care for its misguided young.

“I would hope people within the community, within the existing services can do what we are doing. Right now that doesn’t seem like that is happening–or will happen.”

Counsellors think the Back Door, a program unique to Alberta, is gradually becoming a success. “It’s working now,” says vocational coordinator Erlend Skolseg. “They (participants) are developing a whole new network of support away from downtown–and that takes time.”

Time is a concern for the Back Door–its anonymous funders are assessing the project and will soon decide whether to continue carrying it next year.

Project tests founder’s faith

Carl DeLine, a preacher who put aside his ministerial duties and gave up directorship of the local food bank to head the Back Door, understands only too well the plight of street people reaching out for help.

“I was a welfare kid,” says 38-year old DeLine, who moved 20 times during his childhood in St. Paul, Minn. “Street for me was we had no place to play. Street for me was when I was a teenager we lived in ghettos and housing projects and we were told we were white trash.”

Like most of the people who come to the Back Door for help, DeLine has deep emotional scars from an unstable childhood. His alcoholic father walked out on his wife and four children when DeLine was six.

DeLine recalls the first time he ran away from home, at 11 years old.

“The final straw for me when I ran away for the first time was the fighting in the family, just constant bickering and fighting.”

With an old television set blaring in the background and wet clothes dripping over his opened schoolbooks, DeLine packed up his little record player, a few clothes and walked out.

After two weeks of sleeping under trees and stairways of St. Paul, he agreed to return home if the fighting would stop. “It did, but it started up again.”

Shortly after, his family moved to the ghetto, to a condemned fourplex across the street from a bike gang and next to an elderly woman who barred her doors and windows.

“Our house was three feet from the street. That was our front yard,” says DeLine of the area where he was regularly chased and beaten by neighborhood gangs. “I can remember just the fear of walking the street. It was not a good experience.”

His chance for a more peaceful life came at 14, when two adult friends asked him to help look after their two children. DeLine accepted and stayed with them for four years.

“Up until then that was the longest time I ever stayed in one place. They really became my family.”

Religion was the only consistent supportive element DeLine had during his youth. “That was what tied me back to the church.”

DeLine received a bachelor’s degree at a bible college, then continued his religious studies in Chicago, where he received a master of divinity degree. His first job was preaching in a violent Chicago neighborhood.

I worked in a black-white neighborhood that was extremely stressful. There wasn’t a single day that a family didn’t come into my office, where someone had been beaten up or there was a threat on someone’s life.”

In 1978, DeLine moved to Calgary to continue working as pastor of the Evangelical Covenant Church. “I’m not a hellbent, brimstone preacher,” he says. “I’m more of a ‘dialogical’ preacher.”

He resigned last month as director of the Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank to head the Back Door, which he founded last January.

DeLine admits that dealing with everyday street problems–drugs, violence and crime–is difficult. And when a participant improves by leaps and bounds and then takes a fall, DeLine says he feels like folding the project.

But he can’t.

“I gave Him my word,” he says. “And sometimes all you have is your word.”

He hopes his extensive church and community involvement will prove a vital bridge between Back Door participants and society.

“The gap between the street life and the non-street life is so great, that to task someone to volunteer into a street life experience, it’s a cultural shock.”

DeLine says the Back Door is his most demanding project, but “it is still not as demanding as living on the street itself.”

Finding a home is biggest challenge

The greatest obstacle to getting a youth off the streets is finding a suitable place to live, social workers say.

Most landlords who own buildings away from downtown don’t want to rent to long-haired, rowdy-looking teens.

“It took me over two months to find a place that would let me in,” says one participant in the Back Door, a program aimed at rehabilitating street people.

“I had the money. It was just a matter of getting a landlord who would rent to someone who looks like a partyer, to let us in.”

And that’s not the only barrier.

Back Door counsellors have discovered it’s best not to put two street people under one roof, yet Alberta Social Services allows only $180 rent for single employables on welfare and doesn’t provide a damage deposit. Most are forced to double up.

“I have a saying. ‘Where there’s two or more people off the street living together, you can potentially have a street scene,’ ” says John Mungham, Back Door’s outreach coordinator. “And you don’t want that. You want people to be integrated into society.”

There is a lack of secure and affordable housing in Calgary, says Back Door director Carl DeLine. Rent of $180 stretches only to downtown rooming houses, with their around-the-clock parties.

Joel Steward, outreach coordinator of Calgary Social Services, agrees with DeLine.

“Go through the classifies and I defy anyone to find an apartment for $180 that is fit for human habitation,” Stewart says.

Downtown apartments threaten street people trying to go straight. It’s too tempting to return to old habits and friends, so they are often sucked back into the street’s vacuum for weeks, months or sometimes years.

“Once you’re downtown you have ready access to drugs and are entering into various levels of crime–it’s on your doorstep,” says Mungham.

Settling into an apartment brings an overwhelming change inparticipants, he adds.

“Their way of thinking is so different. They are so used to walking away from problems and running. What’s nice is when they have their own apartment, their own furniture–and you know, it’s not hot stuff. They are then tied in and think twice before they move.”

Settling down was too tough

Unable to hold down a job and settle into an apartment, Scott struggled to go straight and shake off the streets.

But the 19-year-old couldn’t leave the city’s provocative downtown streets–the only life he knows. He quit the Back Door project and headed back to downtown Regina, where he has spent most of his life.

“Downtown, there’s always excitement, there’s action pretty well 24 hours a day,” says Scott, who joined the Back Door in early June, when he arrived here from Regina.

“I’ve lived in downtowns half my life.”

After years of dealing drugs, breaking into homes and cars, and settling differences in brawls, Scott found settling down too tough. He lost two jobs and lived in three places during the summer months.

He quit a telemarketing position in Calgary after two weeks on the job. “I couldn’t handle the hours and quit.” And after being short-changed in his first week’s wages at his next job, telephone solicitation, he quit again.

“A lot of employers think, ‘These kids are from the streets, they’ve done drugs and and aren’t exactly too brilliant and won’t figure it out.’ “

He calls a former landlord “a real jerk,” after throwing him out for noisy parties. “I said to him, ‘How could that be when I wasn’t even here half the time?’ “

The landlord also didn’t return the damage deposit and a week’s rent.

“He said, ‘If you want to take me to court, go for it,’ because he is a corporate businessman. You find a lot of landlords like that.”

Scott last month moved back downtown, an area Back Door officials urge participants to avoid. Seven project members who moved back downtown left the Back Door, Scott was the eighth.

Even though Scott strolled the Stephen Avenue Mall every day he thought he was different from those other seven participants. But he was mistaken.

“If we moved away from the streets, we’d be running away,” he said.

Last month, Scott was beaten up at a downtown LRT station while walking a 17-year-old girl home around midnight. The incident left him with a torn mouth and gashed head.

Scott, who has lived in six group homes since he was abandoned by his parents at age two, readily admits his temper is volatile. Back Door officials tried to help him curb his outbursts.

“I’ve never really had anyone to help me out,” he said. “I’ve never had anyone to talk to about my problems.”

The Back Door, he said, “gives you the chance to turn your life around–if you really want to.”

Helping out costs society less than jail

It takes years of help and treatment for street people to give up their subculture and rejoin mainstream society.

Many have to be deprogrammed to fit back into society, says Carl DeLine, program director of the Back Door.

“It’s a deprogramming and reprogramming concept. You try to change their values. But it’s not a reprogramming to my way of thinking.”

When hopeful participants first walk into Back Door offices–located on top of an empty mall off Macleod Trail, far from downtown–they are assessed.

“We want to get a sense of commitment out of them and to be sure they really are street,” says John Mungham, the program’s outreach coordinator.

Once a counsellor is convinced a participant truly wants to leave the street scene, goals and expectations are discussed.

But some aren’t even ready to do that.

“In some cases, a new person coming in may spend two weeks sleeping in the back,” Mungham says. “They are so burned out. They are such a mess. Finally we get them moving and going.”

The teen signs a contract listing immediate goals: financial, housing, education, vocation, volunteer work, buddy contact–reintegration into society.

Soon after joining the program, participants receive welfare. DeLine argues it’s far cheaper than jail.

“Take one of our guys, put him on the street, he does a B and E (break and enter) and ends up in jail” at an approximate cost of $19,000, says Mungham. “That’s the same cost for three people on welfare for a year.”

Social services supports the program “because they are very, very frustrated in their system dealing with this population,” he says.

But participants have another financial incentive–they can earn $15 for each of the 100 developmental steps–$1,500 in all.

Equally important is finding the teen a permanent, private home. Finally, participants need to be motivated to find–and keep–a job.

“If you are used to turning a quick deal for $200, why work when you are only getting $3.80 an hour for 10 hours’ work?” asks DeLine.

Program vocational coordinator Erlend Skolseg says finding jobs isn’t hard. “It’s getting the support system in place so they can keep the job.”

About half of the program’s 18 participants have jobs. “Most of the employers have been extremely patient and understanding with our guys,” says DeLine.

Many quickly lose jobs because of inadequate housing, all-night partying, not owning an alarm clock or not having bus passes, says Skolseg.

Some participants become frustrated because employers short-change them in number of hours worked, or refuse to pay overtime.

“Our guys are trying to be legitimate and they are being scammed by employers,” said DeLine. “We see the need for the entire community to take a look at itself.”

And Back Door officials realize street people try to take advantage of the program. After all, those with street smarts know only too well how to scam, says Mungham.

“You get some people who say they want off the street and they really don’t. People come in because it will look good on their probation and they don’t have any intentions of straightening out.”

Then there are some who just want a quick fix of relief.

“People come in because they are in a lot of pain and they don’t really want to move because they don’t know where to turn. And once that crisis stage is over, they move on.”

Originally published September 18, 1988 by the Calgary Herald (Calgary, AB), credited to Carol Harrington.