Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411280069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETSY BIESENBACH STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Besides providing the poor with emergency funds for rent, utility bills and other necessities from the Good Neighbors Fund, RAM also houses the Roanoke area's only day shelter for the homeless. And Owens knows what it's like to have nowhere to go.
Three years ago, she and her daughter, who was then 21, spent a year living with friends and relatives while they tried to save enough money for an apartment. Owens even found herself sleeping in her car occasionally.
Her life has stabilized since then. After pooling their resources for several years, Owens is now living with her boyfriend and her daughter has a place of her own.
Besides being an intern at RAM since June, Owens also is an employee. In August, she was hired to co-manage the shelter's kitchen, which dishes out free, hot lunches to the needy seven days a week. It's a job Owens loves. She is in charge of meal planning, inventory and ordering. She also has a knack for walking into a pantry full of odds and ends of food and making something good out of it, she said.
For instance, when a restaurant service donated more French dressing to the shelter than it could ever make enough salads for, Owens and the staff called the dressing manufacturer, who gave them all kinds of ideas and recipes for using it in other dishes.
Since she has been managing the kitchen, Owens and her staff have been making most of the food from scratch, rather than ordering it ready-made. It has saved RAM "tremendous" amounts of money, she said, and brought back volunteers who had grown tired of dishing out canned food.
Lately, though, Owens has not been spending as much time in the kitchen as she would like. Dannie McLain, who screens applicants for emergency funds, has been ill, and Owens has been filling in for him as part of her internship.
Because she has been poor and homeless herself, Owens said it is easy to listen and sympathize with the people who come in and tell their stories. It also has given her the ability to spot someone who is working the system and is not truly in need. But people like that don't come in very often, she said.
Like many of the people she sees, Owens is having trouble making ends meet. She has earned a variety of grants, loans and discounts to pay her tuition, but she doesn't earn enough money in her 18 hours a week of work at RAM to live comfortably.
So Owens soon may become a RAM client.
During her work at the shelter, she and her eyeglasses somehow managed to part company. Money for a new pair will come from the Good Neighbors Fund, said RAM Director Julie Hollingsworth.
Owens will graduate from Hollins in May, after working seven years for her degree, she said. She is majoring in psychology with a minor in sociology, and she plans to go on to graduate school to get a master's degree in sociology. Her ex-husband and her boyfriend both are Vietnam veterans, she said, and she has a special desire to work with veterans.
Although her life has not been easy, Owens is grateful for the good things that have come her way.
"I'd like to pay back the world for what I've been given," she said.
Checks should be made payable to Good Neighbors Fund and mailed to Roanoke Times & World-News. P.0. Box 1951, Roanoke 24008.
Names - but not amounts of donations - of contributing businesses, individuals or organizations, as well as memorial and honorific designations, will be listed in the newspaper. Those requesting that their names not be used will remain anonymous. If no preference is stated, the donor's name will be listed.
Gifts cannot be earmarked for any particular individual or family. Gifts are tax-deductible.
by CNB