Vermont woman's 'dream job' bringing joy to the homeless

BARRE, Vt. (AP) — Judi Joy has found “the call” when it comes to taking care of others.

Joy has been the shelter manager at the Good Samaritan Haven in Barre since 2013, which she describes as “her dream job.”

It took her a while to get there and started on a long path decades ago, and says she owes it all to her faith.

Joy, 77, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and moved to Rumson, New Jersey, when she was in seventh grade, and to Lakewood, New Jersey, in 1984.

Two years later, she started working with multi-handicapped and emotionally disturbed children at a school at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in nearby Beachwood.

“I loved my job, but I just wanted to do more. I felt called to follow Christ and do good,” she said.

Joy said she saw a poster at the church about the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, a volunteer youth corps connected with Luther Place Shelter Ministries in Washington, D.C.

In 1986, Joy and her husband moved to the nation’s capital and were based at Luther Place Church at Thomas Circle.

“When you join the corps, you make a commitment to social justice, which you do through your job, a simplified lifestyle, because you don’t have any money, and Christian community, which is the hardest part of the whole thing,” Joy said.

Joy branched out into other programs run by the ministry.

“I worked at a Lutheran transitional house for homeless women, a year commitment,” Joy said. “It was hard but it seemed like such a wonderful thing to do, which was to be able to offer sanctuary, every night, to these homeless women.

“The 37 women would sleep on mats on the floor and they received a simple supper of a baked potato and a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. That was all they could afford to do,” she added.

Nearing the end of her volunteer year, Joy said she didn’t want to have to go back to New Jersey.

The minister’s wife asked her what she would like to if she stayed in D.C. Joy said she would like to work in the church’s women’s night shelter. She began in 1987 and continued to work at the shelter until 1992.

Joy noted that Lutheran church provided the first shelter for the homeless in D.C. after the de-institutionalization of people with mental health problems.

“But de-institutionalization of the (mental health) restrictive environment should not necessarily be the street corner,” Joy said. “They shut the doors but there were people who had been in there for years and had no idea how to live on the streets.”

Joy said some of the homeless would congregate in the nooks and crannies of the church’s neo-Gothic architecture, for lack of a better place to go.

“People were literally living and dying in the architecture of the church,” Joy said.

The church would go on to open shelters and develop a “continuum of care from homelessness to independence,” called Luther Place, that would become a highly successful housing and human services model popularized by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros.

“He loved that concept and he adopted it as the mantra of HUD,” Joy said. “He asked if he could borrow it and they said ‘yes’ and he did. I was there when that happened. That was really cool.

“That’s what we have tried to do at Good Samaritan Haven, that bridge and support for people to get from here to there and still feel good about themselves,” Joy added.

Joy has three children by three previous marriages, and took the opportunity to change her married name to Judi Grace Joy when she was divorced from her first husband, adding Grace and Joy, “because I wanted to manifest grace and joy in my life,” she said.

Joy said her divorce came in Maine, where she moved in 1992 because her then-husband was having a difficulty living in Washington, D.C.

The couple decided to move to Ellsworth, Maine, after Joy made contact with a nun had also started a new homeless shelter, Emmaus Center, for men, women and families, and wanted to find someone else to run it.

Joy said the shelter’s mission and motto was: “Serve first those who suffer most.”

Joy said she and her daughter by her third marriage, decided to move to Plainfield in 2001.

Joy worked at Twinfield Union School as a paraeducator for four years, as a crisis intervention specialists at Washington County Mental Health Services for 13 years, and then for a year as a family time coach for Easter Seals Vermont, working with children separated from their families.

While working for WCMHS, Joy was able to go back to school to get a bachelor’s degree in psychology and spiritual ecology at the former Union Institute at Vermont College in 2008.

Joy said she was a member of the Bethany Church in Montpelier and would organize a monthly meal for Good Samaritan Haven shelter, where she was also a member of its board of directors for several years.

“When they needed a shelter manager, they asked me if I would like to apply for the job, and I almost fell off my chair, because it was my dream job,” Joy said. “It allows me to live my faith, to be able to serve and to be able to provide hospitality and to show people that I care about them as human beings.

“I do that be by being me, just by being welcoming. I don’t like to call them homeless people. They are people experiencing homelessness. It’s not their title or who they are. It is what they are experiencing that has brought them to the shelter,” she added.

Guests at the shelter have to work on a program to help them transition out of the shelter into employment and housing, and with the help of mental and substance abuse services.

Joy said that if someone is asked to leave, shelter staff will try to find them another shelter.

The Good Samaritan Haven has 30 beds in Barre and oversees overflow shelters at the Hedding United Methodist Church in Barre and the Bethany Church in Montpelier with 20 beds. There is also another recently opened shelter in Hyde Park managed by Good Samaritan.

Joy acknowledged that people entering the shelter often come with a lot of “physical and emotional” baggage that can be difficult for staff and guests.

“It’s hard for them and it’s hard for people around them,” Joy said. “We have people with dual-diagnosis mental health and substance abuse. We have people just with mental health issues. We have people just substance abuse. And then we have people who are just poor.”

Joy acknowledged that there was a long waiting list for subsidized, public housing, although Pathways Vermont is one organization that worked to help people with complex psychological problems find housing.

Despite some criticism of the state relying on the interfaith community for shelter services, Good Samaritan received $500,000 in state funds for its services.

“I think the state invests a lot,” Joy said. “The state’s doing what it can. There just aren’t buckets and buckets of money to throw around where it’s needed.

“I think it’s got to be both, and I think people in the churches are glad of that – I am,” she added.

Joy said there was reward in her work.

“You know what makes it all worth it? Celebrating the small miracles, and even big miracles,” she said. “Someone getting their (Alcoholics Anonymous) chip, someone who’s been sober five years. Once a month, we have a cake for anyone who’s had a birthday. That makes them so happy. When you see people giving back to the house, doing their chores, that’s a small miracle.”

Joy has the words of a song by local guitarist Dave Keller tattooed on her left arm: “You get what you give, the love that you give, that’s all there is. You get what you give.”

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