NOTE: This story originally appeared on Your Community Paper.com.
Alan Levi woke up the day after a tense neighborhood association meeting, regretting his decision to not speak up.
The 30-year resident of Wadeview Park in SoDo attended the public meeting in March, where Commissioner Patty Sheehan and Director of Social Services Lisa Portelli answered questions on the proposal to convert the Kaley Street Work Release Center into a homeless shelter. The meeting saw the attendance of the Stop SoDo Shelter group, which ultimately helped to end proposals for the new shelter.
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“This was the ugliest meeting I’ve ever been to in my life. There were very visceral attacks on the commissioner and Director Portelli,” Levi said. “I disappointed myself; I failed to speak up. The next day I regretted it, so I wrote a play.”
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Levi’s play, titled “unhoused/homefree,” follows an unhoused woman sitting on a park bench reading a book. It shows the audience three different ways the neighbors could react — with uncertainty, fear or love.
Levi’s play is just one part of the community response to Stop SoDo Shelter. Levi is also a member of the Support Orlando Shelters movement, a group formed to make it known that not everyone in the SoDo community agrees with the response to the shelter proposal.
Lee Perry, lead organizer of the group, said that many of the residents did not think the Stop SoDo Shelter movement would be so effective, and this pushed them to reach out to her to start a group of their own.
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“We’ve only had about seven or eight meetings so far, but it’s already gained a lot of public interest. We have over 200 people signed up to our newsletter,” Perry said on Aug. 26. “The team has voted to move forward on advocating for the Kaley Work Release Center, since there’s a lot of ambiguity on what the next steps are going to be.”
Support Orlando Shelters also recently made their first big move on Aug. 26, when members of the group attended a Board of County Commissioners meeting to voice their concerns about large amounts of funding provided to Visit Orlando, while homeless initiatives are underfunded.
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“I believe everyone to some extent is one healthcare issue or natural disaster away from being homeless,” Perry said. “If we don’t eradicate this stigma around homelessness, then we’re just going to keep passing more policies to hide people and not help people.”
That’s why Support Orlando Shelters is about education and making their voices heard, Perry said, spreading the idea that people in the community want to help the homeless and won’t stand by while they are mistreated.
“We can’t even start to fix the problem until we, as a society, treat the homeless as human beings with the same rights as all of us,” Levi said. “That’s what the play is about … It’s getting the word out there."
For more information, go to SupportOrlandoShelters.org.
The play “unhoused/homefree” will return Nov. 12 and 13 at the Audubon Park Covenant Church.