How A Hunger Crusader Found Her Voice

Kimberly Hart’s refrigerator stayed humming and cold only because of a long extension cord that slinked out the back door, down the stairs, and around to an outlet in her downstairs neighbor’s apartment.

It was October 2007, and her life was heading for a crash. Kim and her partner, John, managed to keep their TV alive with another cord connected to a power strip. The cable company had not yet cut off their service, so 6‑year-old Arthur was still able to watch his favorite show, Spongebob. He loved Nickelodeon Jr. back then; he wasn’t yet old enough for Cartoon Network. ​“A thousand other extension cords” slipped downstairs from their third floor apartment, Kim said, where none of the outlets worked.

They lived at the time in a three-family home with peeling white paint on Sheffield Avenue, beneath a sloping triangular roof on the top floor. They had gone a few months too many without paying their United Illuminating bills, and the utility company had shut off the house’s electricity. Kim was working two jobs, one at a telemarketing company and another at Burger King. The numbers weren’t adding up. She started paying partial rent. Arthur did not yet feel embarrassed when she took him to soup kitchens.

A handful of days after the unsafe electrical conditions forced the family out — Kim and Arthur to a homeless shelter in Fair Haven, John to his sister’s across town — Kim discovered that her key to the Sheffield Street house still worked. Her landlord lived out of town, and he seemed not to know that she had moved. She went back to retrieve some clothes, and bottles of her favorite Avon perfume. There had been no food in the fridge, but she brought back some cans from the pantry.

As she rummaged through her old apartment for essentials, Kim didn’t know that in a decade’s time, she would use her experience to become one of New Haven’s leading voices on tackling hunger and food insecurity, helping to gather information, confront policy makers, organize campaigns to press for change. She didn’t yet know that at 60 years old, she would be leading a local chapter of Witnesses to Hunger, advocating for policy changes around food access and housing justice full-time, on the front lines of fighting for others facing the homelessness and hunger she survived.

Her path to prophetic voice about the roots and struggles of hunger, about how people end up in those straits and what rules can help or hurt them, began that day on Sheffield Avenue.

Before locking the door, Kim gathered photographs of the people she loved who couldn’t be with her at the shelter — John, her sister, her mother (who had passed away a decade earlier). She brought the snapshots back with her on the bus.

Partial Life(line) Haven

Kim managed to secure a room at a shelter for women and children called Life Haven, where men and, at the time, boys over the age of 12 were prohibited from staying. John wouldn’t be able to live with them there. Every possible choice required the family to split up.

Thousands of unhoused families across the United States have faced versions of the same dilemma. A 2015 study in Child Welfare reported that one tenth of homeless parents in the U.S. were separated from a partner, and one quarter were separated from at least one child. In the United States, around half of families experiencing homelessness, like Kim’s, are Black.

On Sheffield Avenue, Kim packed some clothes for herself and as many of Arthur’s school uniforms as she could fit in a suitcase. He was a kindergartener at Amistad Academy charter school, and every day, he was required to wear navy blue khakis, light blue polos embroidered with the words ​“Amistad Academy Elementary,” and black shoes. She packed some of Arthur’s toys, making sure to take their favorite card game, Uno.

“I was beating myself up because I never went through this as a child,” she said. Kim grew up in New Haven, close to her family, especially her father. If she did something wrong as a child, all her father would need to do was look her in the eyes and say, ​“Kim, I’m very disappointed in you.” Those words carried more weight for Kim than any punishment could have.

That evening, Kim and Arthur traveled across town to their new place of residence: a red-brick former church building turned family shelter on Ferry Street. The shelter had a shared kitchen, a TV room, an outdoor wooden playground. As a family shelter, it offered individual rooms for individual households. And like the majority of shelters, Life Haven had a host of eligibility requirements and day-to-day rules. Residents were allowed to leave at 5:30 in the morning — but only if they were back by 8:30 p.m. on the dot. So Kim and Arthur spent as much of the day as they could manage outside of the shelter. Without her partner, and without the freedom to move about the way she wanted to, Kim said, ​“I never felt like I was home.”

Upon arriving at Life Haven, Kim and Arthur moved into a small room with two beds and a dresser.

“Ma?” Kim remembers Arthur asking.

“Yes, Boom?” she said, using her favorite nickname for him.

“Are you scared?”

If she happened to be scared, Arthur said casually, she could sleep in his bed. He’d be OK with it.

“Of course I’m scared!” Kim exclaimed, knowing that her son, like every six-year-old who can no longer recognize the patterns of his life, just wanted his mom to hold him.

That night, after Arthur fell asleep, Kim cried to herself. I am my father’s daughter, she couldn’t stop thinking. I’m not supposed to be here.

Teen Rule Changes

For two decades, families with teenage boys seeking refuge at Life Haven needed to separate. Life Haven ended its policy of rejecting teenage boys after its 2012 acquisition by a homeless intervention organization called New Reach. ​“We don’t want to break up families,” said Kellyann Day, New Reach’s CEO. Men over eighteen are still not allowed at the shelter — partly, according to Day, because Life Haven frequently serves survivors of domestic violence who may prefer a space primarily for women. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, domestic violence is the most common reason for homelessness in Connecticut. Gender non-conforming individuals can choose to enter the shelter, or any shelter in Connecticut that best fits their gender identity, per the 2016 federal Equal Access Rule.

Prior to 2014, housing insecure families in Connecticut needed to apply to individual shelters, one by one, navigating complicated eligibility requirements in order to find a place to live. But in 2014, Connecticut’s shelter system reached a turning point. The state instituted a Coordinated Access Network system, a centralized unit at the 2 – 1‑1 number where people seeking shelter can seek out housing resources from both government and non-profit organizations.

Steve DiLella, the state’s housing program coordinator, explained that the Coordinated Access system places the burden of navigating the complex shelter system on the state rather than on housing insecure families.

“Instead of putting the onus of solving the housing crisis on the individual household, we put it on the system,” he said. Coordinated Access has made the shelter system more collaborative and cohesive, allowing organizations to fill one another’s gaps and find their niches within the state’s resources as a whole, DiLella argued.

And, crucially, Coordinated Access has allowed the state to find every possible opportunity to shelter a family as a whole unit. ​“For families, we have made a commitment that we will find shelter space for every family,” DiLella said. ​“We may have to move people around communities in order to be able to find that shelter space,” he added, but ​“we don’t want them to sleep on the street.” If shelter capacity is full, the state will sometimes use hotel rooms. (This commitment to find shelter is specific to families, including families without children; individuals entering the shelter system don’t have that kind of commitment from the state. ​“We just don’t have the shelter space,” DiLella said.) Families should not be separated under the Coordinated Access system, according to DiLella. ​“We’ve provided some pretty strong guidance that should never be allowed,” he said. ​“That should never be happening.”

Some people fall through the cracks, though. In October 2020, CT Mirror reported on a case that echoed Kim, John, and Arthur’s situation: a family whose father would have needed to enter a separate homeless shelter from the mother and son. That family rented a motel room rather than enter the shelter system.

For New Haveners, finding shelter close to a family’s employment, school, and support network can be challenging. Over the years, the city’s two to three small family shelters have at times been filled to their limits. The Independent reported that in just one week of 2015, 36 families were turned away from New Haven shelters, shortly after Coordinated Access came into effect. Life Haven has space for twenty families, often accommodating about forty children. The city’s only family shelter that accepts people of all ages and genders, Hillside, has space for ten families. In 2010, an overnight ​“census” run by the city counted seventy-five homeless families in New Haven, a statistic that did not include families whose children were placed in foster care. This number accounts only for people formally enrolled in shelters or visibly sleeping on the street, meaning that more families — sleeping in cars or crashing on couches — are in need of housing.

Fruity Pebbles On The QT

Kim didn’t tell Amistad Academy about their new address at Life Haven. She didn’t want Arthur’s classmates and teachers to stigmatize him for his homelessness. The kindergarten school day started at 7:15 a.m., so Kim and Arthur would leave Life Haven around 6 to ride two city buses to school each morning.

In the chaos of her newfound homelessness, Kim lost both of her jobs, so for a few months, she spent every school day with John, who was also unemployed. She took the bus to John’s sister’s house to spend time with her partner. She spent as much of the day with John, and as much of the day outside of the shelter, as she was permitted.

Arthur’s school day ended at 3:45 p.m. His yellow school bus never knew to drop him off at Life Haven. It continued to stop at the old Sheffield Ave. house every afternoon, where Kim and John waited, as though they still lived there, to pick up their son. On sunny afternoons, the three of them went to the park. Most evenings, they went to Kim’s father’s apartment for dinner.

Kim’s dad, Haskell Clark, was her best friend. She hated that he had to see her homeless. Haskell lived in Tower East, a senior citizen complex run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD rules prohibited Kim, Arthur, and John from staying with him, a policy that pained him.

“I hate to see you guys on the street,” he would say to Kim.

“We’re not on the street,” she would remind him.

Kim would cook dinner nearly every night at Haskell’s apartment, and the four of them would eat together. Arthur craved Kim’s homemade chicken alfredo. Haskell never liked any of Kim’s previous boyfriends, but he and John could talk for hours. John first met Kim when Arthur was an infant in a local grocery store; John started calling Kim ​“Queen” and Arthur ​“Prince.” Eventually, he moved in. When they became homeless, the family stayed with one another for as much time as they could.

Kim and Arthur often had to race back across town, two buses away, to make it back in time for Life Haven’s stringent 8:30 p.m. curfew. John couldn’t see them or visit them once they were inside. When they arrived back at the shelter, Kim and Arthur finished chores and went straight to bed.

Whenever Kim entered Life Haven, she would need to sign in on a clipboard by the front desk. There, she’d get tested for alcohol with a breathalyzer. (“That was never an issue for me,” she says.) A staff member would look through the bags she carried. Any food Kim brought back would need to be stored in the communal kitchen, where there was always a chance someone else would take it. Arguments over who took whose groceries were a frequent source of commotion. So when Kim realized the staff members never rifled through her purse, only peering at the objects on top, she invested in a bigger bag.

Sometimes, Kim would sneak in Fruity Pebbles, Arthur’s favorite brand of cereal. She kept the red boxes in their room, hidden in case of a surprise inspection. In the mornings, she would go downstairs in her robe and pour half a glass of milk. It was impossible to walk from the kitchen to her room without passing by a staff member. ​“You can’t go to your rooms without being seen,” she said. So as she walked back, she would strike up a conversation with the staff members on duty — ​“Boy, it’s warm in here” — hoping they wouldn’t notice the milk tucked in her pocket. Upstairs, in the quiet of their room, Arthur would swallow his glass of milk-dunked rainbow flakes in secret.

Curfew

Staff members at Life Haven could ​“write up” the mothers for being late; for having unauthorized food; for failing a random urine or breathalyzer test, for failing to bring their children outside to meet the school bus, for failing to keep a tidy space at the time of an unannounced room inspection.

Write-ups led to extra chores: cleaning the showers in the morning, sweeping the kitchen after dinner, dusting the TV room, vacuuming the floors. Too many write-ups and a family would have to leave. ​“They were kicking people out like crazy,” Kim said.

Nicole Barnofski, New Reach’s chief programming officer, said that most of the shelter’s rules — like the curfew — are ​“to ensure safety and health.” The rest are due to budgetary limitations, according to Barnofski and Day. Clients aren’t typically allowed to bring food to their rooms, for instance, because the shelter does not have the funds for the extermination of bugs or rodents.

Claudette Kidd, who stayed at Life Haven with her daughter for seven months in 2016, felt as though the staff would constantly write her up for ​“minor, stupid, frivolous things” — like missing a mandatory meeting on days when her back disability flared up and left her bedridden. By her final months there, the shelter was threatening to kick her out.

“They felt like they’re doing you a favor,” she said of the write-ups.

Both Claudette and Kim say that many mothers had to leave before they could find housing. The stress of life in the shelter drove some to drink alcohol or use substances against the rules, or to ​“leave because they can’t take what’s going on anymore,” recalled Claudette.

The word shelter usually implies ​“someone being protected, someone being taken care of,” Claudette said. ​“That wasn’t the experience I had there.”

Every week, Kim met with a state Department of Children and Families (DCF) case worker, who had gotten involved, she said, when they lost electricity. And every Thursday, the mothers at the shelter were required to attend a ​“women’s wellness” meeting from 5:30 to 7 p.m. There, staff gave presentations on women’s health issues. ​“How when you least expect to get pregnant, that’s when you get pregnant,” for example, Kim said.

One meeting focused on how to shop responsibly in the grocery store. ​“I am living in a shelter. I am worried about my son being scarred for life,” Kim said. ​“You think I’m gonna sit an hour and a half and learn about how to shop? Are you kidding me?”

​“They thought they were doing us a service,” she added. ​“They were talking to us like we really didn’t have any sense. Like we were a bunch of idiots. Like all of our faculties went out the window because we had become homeless.”

The hour and a half meetings ate into the time Kim and Arthur could spend with John. The first week she stayed at the shelter, Kim and Arthur were nearly late after spending time as a family. If she missed the meeting, she could get written up.

“I was frantic,” she said. ​“I’m trying to dot all my I’s, cross all my T’s. I’m trying to get out of there.”

Every Thursday after that, Kim and John wasted no time. The moment Arthur stepped off his yellow school bus outside the old Sheffield Street house, the three of them would wait for the first city bus, then the next, taking the trip back to Life Haven together. Barred from going inside, John would walk them to the shelter door.

Cold-Calling On The Road Back

Kim wanted to find housing as soon as she could. First, she would need to get a job — no simple task, given a larceny conviction that had remained on her record since the 1980s. She finally found work as a telemarketer for Lester, Inc., a company based out of the nearby suburb of Branford. Her job was to sell free subscriptions for magazines full of advertisements to corporate offices. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., she called and called. The phones were set to automatically dial a new number when the previous caller hung up. Kim’s coworkers would often turn off the setting and take breaks between calls, but she says she seldom did. ​“My life depended on this job,” she said.

The magazines they had to sell varied from restaurant-themed pamphlets to pharmaceutical booklets. Kim had to make a quota of sales every hour; the number varied depending on the obscurity of the magazine. If she didn’t meet the quota, she would get sent home without further pay for the day, told to come back tomorrow to try again. Kim couldn’t afford to miss a day of work. ​“I got sent home one time,” she said. ​“I promised to God I wasn’t gonna get sent home anymore.”

Most people hung up when she called. ​“A lot of people would quit because they couldn’t stand all the hang ups,” Kim said. ​“I grew a tough skin.” When she heard a click on the other end of the line, she would tell herself that the next person would say yes. She dove straight into the next call.

Over time, Kim learned to look up the weather for the area code she was dialing. She would say something like, ​“Isn’t it nice the sun is shining finally?” The person on the other end of the line would agree. Kim would try to get them to say ​“yes” five times in response to her innocuous questions before pitching the free magazine. By the time she asked if they wanted to subscribe, her interlocutor would respond almost automatically in the affirmative.

Once she had income from her telemarketing job in 2008, the end of Kim’s time at Life Haven was around the corner. Kim applied for transitional housing through Christian Community Action. Once she was approved, the organization provided her with two-year housing in a building with others on the brink of homelessness. CCA asked for 30 percent of her income as a ​“program fee” in lieu of rent. Kim and Arthur left Life Haven after living there for five months. They were eager to live in a place of their own.

The feeling that she was at home wouldn’t come immediately, though. The night Kim, John, and Arthur moved into Stepping Stones, another woman was preparing to move out. ​“Don’t get comfortable,” she warned Kim. The 24 months ahead of her would race by. She told Kim to ​“come in leaving.”

Taking Kendra’s advice, the family lived in the Stepping Stones apartment as though they were about to move out. They left the walls bare. They didn’t add to the furniture that CCA had provided. They kept few kitchen appliances. ​“If you get comfortable, when it’s time to leave… you’re gonna be that much less prepared,” Kim said.

While she was at Stepping Stones, Kim’s poor credit score, previous conviction, and low income made the search for a more permanent living space no easy task. Landlords are legally able to ask for this information from prospective tenants, shutting millions of people across the country out of the private housing market. ​“I had to go to a landlord that didn’t check anything,” Kim said.

She finally found a moldy apartment in her old neighborhood of Newhallville, on the corner of Newhall and Read. It was located on a block where drug dealers tended to loiter. Rent was $750 a month, which Kim and John cobbled together between her income and his disability benefits.

When they moved in, DCF dropped the family’s case. In celebration, one of their case workers — a friendly man who would refer to Arthur as ​“Professor Brown” — gave them a $500 gift card for Bob’s Discount Furniture.

The gift made Kim cry.

She was grateful the case worker never came over again, in part because she never spent the card. As she scrambled to pay her rent, she sold the gift certificate for half of what it was worth. Instead of going shopping, she found discarded furniture downtown as Yale students moved out of their dorms.

Sometimes, rent came at the cost of food. Kim and John’s SNAP benefits weren’t enough to feed the three of them for the whole month. Arthur got free breakfast and lunch at school, but dinner was Kim’s to make.

One day at the end of the month, when Arthur was 9, all Kim had to eat was ramen noodles, half a jug of milk, some bread, and peanut butter and jelly.

“He came home from school. That’s what I fed him. He looked up at me with those big puppy dog eyes, and said, ​‘What, Ma, no meat?’” Kim recalled. ​“That broke my heart. I didn’t have any meat to serve him.”

Kim rummaged for her phone and snapped a photograph of Arthur. She later titled the photo with Arthur’s words: ​“What, Ma, no meat?”

Mothers & Others For Justice

Kim worked as a telemarketer until 2011, when she suffered a brain aneurysm. After the aneurysm, her memory grew finicky. At work, she could no longer recall the words to her sales pitches; she sounded ​“mechanical” reading the script off of a piece of paper, and she couldn’t make sales like she used to. So she filed for disability benefits and quit her job.

By then, Kim had started attending Mothers and Others for Justice, a group of local activists focused on poverty policy, which met on the fourth Wednesday of every month. She first joined the group because her food stamps tended to run out by that last week of the month, and she could count on a takeout dinner of Chinese food or chicken tenders with plenty of leftovers. Over time, she started coming to meetings for the activism, too. At the time, Welfare-to-Work laws required social benefit recipients to undergo job training; Mothers and Others for Justice was advocating for Connecticut to accept G.E.D. classes as part of that requirement. They met with state lawmakers, told their stories, and eventually succeeded in passing a new law.

The determination and thick tolerance for vitriol that Kim built as a telemarketer has come in useful in her activism. ​“My life was not supposed to be like this,” Kim said. She swallowed, then muted the phone. After a minute of silence, her voice came back with new force. ​“I’m trying to keep people from having to go through the same things I went through.”

Since she started the New Haven branch of Witnesses to Hunger in 2017, the group has grown to include forty members, around twenty-five of whom come to monthly meetings on a regular basis. Many of the Witnesses are new to activism; most, like Kim, have firsthand experience with hunger. They have been fighting most recently for SNAP reforms that would extend food benefits to help recently-employed recipients get back on their feed. They are also working to guarantee public school children three free meals per day, every day of the year, beyond the New Haven school system’s Covid-era program.

Kim also serves on New Haven’s Food Policy Council. And she’s a new member of the Democratic Socialists of America, where she has helped advocate for universal legal representation in housing court and for a tenants’ union among Pike renters. She does all of this work as a volunteer — ​“for the next generation,” she likes to say.

Through this advocacy, Kim has learned that poverty is not often a priority for politicians. At many of her meetings, her interlocutors ​“nod their head[s], they rub their chin[s], they say ​‘Good point.’ And then when they go back to their office, we don’t see no movement or nothing.” She doesn’t think shelter conditions are a priority for lawmakers. ​“I think that they think, ​‘At least they have a place to go.’”

The phrase ​“at least” gets on Kim’s nerves. She knows there is a version of her story peppered with those words. She had to separate from her husband in order to live at Life Haven, but at least she could still be with her son. She had to meet every curfew, attend every meeting, spend more time than she ever wanted to inside the shelter’s walls, but at least she had a bed to sleep in that night. But Kim does not want to live on ​“at leasts.” In the world that Kim is fighting to bring into being, having a place to live doesn’t come at the cost of a person’s dignity.

Rent vs. Food

On a sometimes-empty stomach, Kim managed to feel at home in the Newhall Street apartment. She took in evicted friends and relatives on a regular basis. ​“We always had someone living with us,” she said.

Kim placed her favorite photographs all over the apartment walls. In one image, taken by a professional photographer on Mother’s Day at Life Haven, little Arthur is clinging to her shoulders, resting his head in the curve of her neck with a shy smile. Her short, dark curly hair sweeps characteristically across her forehead. In the bathroom, she bought a matching bath mat and shower curtain. In the kitchen, she hung up a favorite poem, by J.P. McAvoy:

Guest, you are welcome here,
Be at your ease;
Get up when you’re ready,
Go to bed when you please;
Happy to share with you
Such as we’ve got:
The leaks in the roof
And the soup in the pot
You don’t have to thank us
Or laugh at our jokes
Sit deep and come often
You’re one of the Folks.

Kim never questioned that rent was more important to pay for than food. Even though Life Haven had begun accepting teenage boys, local shelters were often filled to capacity. Kim worried that if her family became homeless again, they would have to relinquish Arthur.

The risk of losing her son threatened Kim every month for years. ​“That was one of the reasons why I worked so hard to pay my rent every month: to keep from having to go back in Life Haven and being separated from my baby,” she said. She prioritized paying for housing above all else. ​“I learned that no matter what, I’m paying my rent and my utilities.”

Kim still lives with Arthur, who is nineteen now, working at Home Depot and planning to go back to college. They have a cat, Midnight, who darts to the living room with fascination to greet every visitor. They lived with John, too, up until his death in 2011. He simply did not wake up one morning, Kim said. They had been married for two short years, after John proposed to Kim one morning while she was making grits for breakfast. She knows his words that morning by heart: ​“Let’s make this right in the eyes of God,” he had said.

Six months ago, Kim finally secured a federal Section 8 rent-subsidy voucher she could use to rent out a market-rate apartment with financial assistance. The voucher allowed her to move into a spacious two-bedroom apartment in Edgewood, where rent would have been $1,325 a month.

The one thing she wishes were different about her voucher is a rule that only she and Arthur can live in the apartment. She dreads the day that someone she loves gets evicted, or loses their job.

When that person calls her up, she won’t be able to say, ​“Come on in.”