Atlantic City Weekly

Bill Southery

As temperatures plummet, and we recuperate from plentiful holidays inside our warm houses, thoughts of a man like Bill Southrey add a special perspective. Southrey’s CEO of the Atlantic City Rescue Mission, which provides the area’s homeless with a place to stay and services aimed at helping them live life off the streets. An Absecon native, Southrey has devoted his efforts to the Rescue Mission for some 30 years.

Holidays can’t be an easy time for the Mission.

Actually, they went wonderfully. It was a beautiful picture — so many volunteers, volumes of food served, and we gave gifts to over 300 children. It’s hard for many, because they’re not with family. And you can’t falsify a family atmosphere. But you try to provide at least a good memory for the holidays, letting people know that you’re with them. And there was the annual candlelight vigil, where we remember the homeless who have stayed with us sometime in the past, and died during the past year. Yes, that gets difficult, but it still is a beautiful gathering. This year we brought back memories of 30 years of people who have passed. Some of them had succeeded and others never really got off the street.

What motivated you to work with the homeless?

It comes from the gospel teaching to care for the poor, the strangers that come to your city. You don’t leave them without a place to be. That has been a part of my life for a long time. My parents took people in a lot, and that also paved the way. At one point I had eight people living with me, who I just kind of gathered from the streets as a personal effort. Then, there were a couple incidents that stand out. On an 8th-grade school trip, I saw a guy sleeping on a bench near the United Nations, with all his belongings. That image stuck with me for many years. Another time, at a mall in Pennsylvania, there was a little girl about six years old, all alone. I talked with her, bought her food, and asked ‘Where’s your mommy?’ She said, ‘Well, mommy doesn’t have a place, so she can’t take care of me anymore.’ It was heartbreaking. Some years later, I lived next to the Rescue Mission’s executive director. He took me over to the Mission one night. He said, ‘These are people who have no place to live, and I just take care of them. I find places for them to be, and I try to give them hope.’

One of the Mission’s slogans is “Hope happens here.” In this economy, how can you promise hope?

The Mission itself is an example. When I started, we had very little money to operate. At one point, we all worked without pay for 13 weeks. But we were able to keep the place open, keep people cared for, keep them safe and warm. When we first began, a big day for us was 40 or 50 people. Now we’re seeing 300, 350, sometimes 400 people. People help us, God helps us — it’s all part of the package. When you have a community that gets around you and tries to assist you, you can always offer hope.

The Mission offers a range of services.

Beyond the fundamentals — food, shelter, clothing, and encouraging words — we work with other agencies with expertise in, say, psychiatric, or drug and alcohol, or counseling. AtlanticCare provides a huge number of visits for individuals without insurance, at clinics that the Mission has partnered with. Healthcare is essential. If you’re homeless, with no roof over your head, you’re facing elements and environmental concerns every day that you need not even think about if you are living inside a home. You’re exposed to — well, people come in with feet frozen to the point they have to be amputated.

Do you arrange off-site housing?

We place about 300 or 400 people a year into housing. There’s a big need for more units and specialized housing. I recently asked the Department of Community Affairs for assistance with 14 townhouses we’re trying to acquire. The property will go back into the bank’s coffers if I can’t secure financing. The government has a program they’re calling “Housing First” and I asked the commissioner to get me to the resources. Well, it never happened. It’s a very difficult process, even though the state has a housing trust fund of a couple hundred million dollars. But we’re still committed to trying.

How can people help?

Anything’s welcome. The Web site (www.acrescuemission.org) has forms for volunteers. Donations are always wonderful, in whatever form — food, clothing, cash. We have a farm down in Cape May County now, where we’re growing food to feed people at the Mission. In 2009, we planted five acres, and produced about 12 tons of food. Anything’s possible. In Somers Point, the Calvary Church was just built by a crew of men who, eight or nine years ago, were homeless. We worked with a contractor to develop a program to train them, and, now, this is their third church. One of the guys on that crew is always saying to me, ‘I can’t believe that eight years ago I was sleeping on a grate in Philadelphia.’