Mercer’s home front

Connie Mercer is in the real survival game.

By: Michael Redmond
   Connie Mercer is the most dangerous kind of card sharp; she doesn’t look the part. Ms. Mercer’s preferred style of poker is called "Survival: The Only Real Reality Game." It works this way.
   You’re a single father of three. You work hard each and every month, earning a working-class salary. Ms. Mercer hands you a month’s salary in play money. Ms. Mercer then deals you a raft of cards. Housing. Transportation. Food. Telephone. Utilities. Health care. Child care. Miscellaneous.
   There are random cards, too. Some represent mundane disasters, like a $400 bill for car repairs. Others represent the kind of mundane boons that do happen. Winning the church raffle. A tax refund.
   First you discover that you cannot pay all your bills, so you have to prioritize. Rent gets paid first, then transportation (you’ve got to get to work), and … but then you draw what turns out to be a financial disaster card. And your family’s life, already being lived hand-to-mouth, starts falling apart.
   Game over. It’s that easy.
   And that’s the way that many families with one working parent, sometimes two, end up homeless. Including, Ms. Mercer says, families with parents that got off welfare and got jobs (menial jobs), "who did what society told them to do," only to discover that "they’re worse off then ever. They can’t keep a roof over their baby’s head." Including, Ms. Mercer says, "working people in Princeton. With beautiful kids."
   At HomeFront, the Lawrence-based nonprofit service agency dedicated to "helping families break the cycle of poverty," there’s good news and there’s bad news.
   According to Ms. Mercer, the organization’s executive director since its founding in 1990, HomeFront saw a significant increase in support in 2002 — in volunteers, in donations of all kinds. And she trusts that they will keep coming.
   Still, she’s alarmed.
   "The number of clients needing our help is way up. And now we’re seeing a new kind of client, a kind we’ve never seen before — working poor people who thought that (homelessness) would never happen to them. We’re seeing severe shock and depression. These people just don’t understand what is happening to them."
   And it’s happening at a time when HomeFront is already turning away more than half the people who qualify for the agency’s assistance. HomeFront just doesn’t have the resources to help them.
   "Our meetings are agonizing," Ms. Mercer says. "The ‘safety net’ has been shredded."
   According to The New York Times, New Jersey hunger relief agencies reported a 17 percent increase statewide in the number of people seeking food assistance in 2002 — and that the increase in "some of the wealthiest areas" was double that. The choice for many of these families, The New York Times, is between shelter and food.
   Formerly deputy director of the Illinois Division of Children and Family Services, Connie Mercer moved east years ago to do the corporate thing, executive recruiting and headhunting. In 1990 a friend approached the Lawrenceville resident with a problem.
   "He took me to the (welfare) motels on Route 1 and said, ‘Look. There are hungry children here — in Lawrence. What can we do to fix this?’ I know it sounds naive, especially for someone with my background, but at first I thought that what we needed to do was to let people know. This is a very affluent county."
   Ms. Mercer smiles and falls silent. She doesn’t mention that her response was to go home and, working out of her house, begin organizing her friends and neighbors to provide hot meals and winter clothing for the "motel people."
   Nearly 13 years later, HomeFront (initially known as the Exchange Club of Greater Princeton) has grown from a small grass-roots organization into a grass-roots network of some 1,200 volunteers (professional people, all kinds of people), fielding around 30 separate but interrelated programs for the working poor — but especially emergency services.
   Ms. Mercer emphasizes "grass roots." HomeFront leans heavily on a core staff of 35 Americorps/VISTA volunteers, augmented up, down and sideways by community volunteers. She makes a point that 6 percent of HomeFront’s budget goes for administration. Everything else goes to HomeFront’s programs.
   "Our trademark is our frugality. Practically everything in this people has been donated. We’re terribly local and hands-on," she says. HomeFront’s core private supporters reside in Lawrenceville and Princeton, and increasingly from West Windsor, Ms. Mercer says.
   Last spring HomeFront moved into a new headquarters, four times larger than its previous one. Such is the outlook now that HomeFront is crossing an institutional frontier — something that Ms. Mercer does not like to call a shelter, but which would be, nonetheless, a shelter.
   "We’re finally accepting the reality that there just isn’t going to be enough affordable permanent housing in Mercer County in the foreseeable future. So we’re about to open a Family Preservation Center, short-term housing for 44 families, on the grounds of the Katzenbach School for the Deaf (in Ewing). It’s not the right answer, but what’s the alternative?"