Tarcea

1
Brian Tarcea
Honors 232 CA June 9, 2014


Reflections on Teen Feed: My experiences as a volunteer, student, and service learner.

Introduction: History and mission of Teen Feed and my role within the organization
During my orientation at Teen Feed, I was asked to imagine the day-to-day life of a
homeless youth living in Seattle, specifically the University District. I was asked: what are
someones basic needs? How do you yourself achieve your basic needs? Where do you get your
resources to survive? In a small group discussion, we came up with food, shelter, health care,
education, and leisure. I have had the privilege of growing up as part of the upper middle-class,
where each one of these things was always provided for me. I can honesty say I have never once
experienced not having access to any of the resources for survival, thanks to the privilege of
having parents who are willing to support me whenever I need it. But for the many homeless
youth in the U-District, struggling to meet these basic needs is a constant reality, and failing to
meet one or more could be a matter of life or death. Teen Feed is one member of the University
District Service Providers Alliance (UDSPA), a coalition of nonprofit organizations whose
mission it is to help homeless and street-involved youth meet these basic needs. If the U-District
is a residence of sorts, the various members of the UDSPA can be seen as rooms of that
residence. The ROOTs shelter provides the bedroom; Street Youth Ministries (SYM), a drop-in
day center, acts as living room, laundry, showers etc; and Teen Feed acts as the dining room, a
place where homeless or food-insecure youth can come each night to get a free hot meal and find
some company to eat it with.
Teen Feed was founded in 1987 when UWMC nurses noticed severe malnourishment
among homeless and street youth accessing ER services. In an effort to combat this problem,
Tarcea
2
members of the community (including religious organizations and service providers) joined
together to provide hot meals each night to the homeless youth of the U-District (TeenFeed.Org).
The Teen Feed meal program is a low barrier program where the only requirement to access
service is to be within the age of 13-25. Their mission statement is to Offer support to meet
basic needs, Build strong relationships, and Ally with homeless youth as they meet their futures
off the streets (TeenFeed.Org). At program, while guests sit and eat the food donated and
prepared by rotating volunteer meal teams, they have access to support coordinators who can
help them meet access services such as getting an ID, applying for health insurance (Youth
Access to Care program), finding housing, jobs, or getting registered for classes. The support
coordination, known as Service Links for Youth (SLY), is tailored to the strengths and
weaknesses of each guest, and uses guests self-identified goals and input in helping them access
resources needed to be successful in life. Teen Feed also provides opportunities for employment
through the STOP (Street Talk Outreach Program) Peer Youth Internship Program, a $15/hr.
program-support internship that helps guests earn money for housing, food, etc., and provides
employment experience.
My position at Teen Feed is as an Advocate. During each program, I set up the dining
space (donated by a church or synagogue), and simply share a meal with the guests and have a
conversation with them, listening nonjudgmentally and with an open mind, in order to create a
sense of community and build alliance.

Part I: Teen Feed as a space of encounter with a potential for alliance and change
The Teen Feed dining room provides a space of encounter in which different groups
come together with the potential to form alliances and the potential to challenge dominant
Tarcea
3
conceptions of what it means to be poor or live in poverty. It is important to note that I say it has
the potential to challenge dominant ideas and not that it is guaranteed to challenge ideas. In
Spaces of Encounters, Leitner explains that while the encounter has the possibility to create
change and transformation by overturning stereotypes and challenging dominant discourse on
poverty, it also has the potential to reinforce the ideas and stereotypes about those who are
labeled poor (Leitner, 2011).
Within the dominant neoliberal poverty knowledge framework, the conception of the
competitive individual, one who can lift themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps
through hard work and drive into the middle class, has been embedded into common sense to an
extent in which it is never questioned as an assumption (Hall et al., 2013). Because it is assumed
that this facile upward mobility exists as a tangible possibility, those who do not achieve it, the
poor, are labeled as lazy, flawed, lacking and immorallaw-breaking, and dirty, and are often
framed as causing violence in and destruction of a clean and peaceful environment built with
hard work by the successful and aspirational middle class (Lawson et al., 2014). By framing
peoples social standing as a product of individual choices and faults rather than due to structural
oppression, these stereotypes of the homeless are reinforced over and over again, which is why
the words homeless and poor conjure up an image of a dirty, smelly, violent, lazy bum
begging for change on the sidewalk.
A space of encounter like Teen Feed is a place where such dominant conceptions of the
poor can be confronted, either to be broken-down, or reinforced stronger than ever. There was
one night at Teen Feed that stands out to me as an example of such an occurrence. During
nightly debrief, a new volunteer, Joe (not his real name) said of a guest he had just interacted
with, I was really surprised when I found out he was a guest. He looked like the type of people I
Tarcea
4
go to school with. He totally didnt look homeless. He looked clean, put together, like a student.
He looked so normal. This is the perfect example of someone using a space of encounter to
challenge beliefs about the homeless instilled upon them through dominant discourse on poverty
knowledge. This was a moment where you could see him begin to change his views, seeing
homeless people as people first, like you and me, who happened to be un-housed and in need of
assistance. But then, problematically, our coordinator, Bill, replied with, Yeah it is really
important for us to remember that not all of our guests are homeless. Some of them are food-
insecure, people who have housing but struggle with having consistent access to food.
This really bothered me, not because it is untrue, but just because of the timing of the
statement in relation to Joes comment. Bills follow-up seemed to subtly and implicitly divide
Teen Feed guests into two categories: those who are food-insecure and housed (who are just like
us middle-class folks, but simply down on their luck), and those who are homeless (who
reinforce the dominant image of homelessness by appearing dirty, lazy, and drug addicted).
While this may have not been how anyone involved interpreted the conversation in the moment,
I think it definitely had the potential to subtly shape how the volunteers continue to interact with
guests and perhaps prevent their views from changing. Furthermore, as Keating describes,
categories and labels, although sometimes necessary can prevent us from recognizing out
interconnections with others (Keating, 2007, p.2). Not only does the labeling have the potential
to reinforce stereotypes, it has the potential to prevent alliance formation between different
people in the space of encounter.
Alliance and relationships between middle-class volunteers and guests labeled homeless
is one of the great potentials of Teen Feed as an organization. That being said, my ability to form
alliances was drastically different depending on how I framed the reason I was present in the
Tarcea
5
space and in what role. No spaces are simply neutral and equally open to everyone; peoples
presence in any space is always coded (Lawson, 2013, p.212). On my first night on the floor, I
was asked why I was there. How did I reply? I answered honestly with something like, well, I
am taking a geography class at UW about poverty and privilege, and I am here for its service-
learning component. Wrong explanation. Immediately, I was coded as an outsider, coming into
the space from a position of power, with intent to study guests, take what traumatic stories I
could from them, and transform them into a product that I could use for my own goals, say, for
example, something like this paper, in order to prove a point or elicit an emotional response from
my reader. The minute I said that, the guest ceased having any interest in talking to me and
began to ignore me. The next time I was asked the same question, I replied with, well my
roommate Hana has been volunteering here for four years and Ive been wanting to do it too.
And I finally found time. This was received much more positively and we talked for a full hour,
finding common interests discussing books, movies, games, and we had a great time. The
interaction was so different just because I was coded into the space as someone who actually
wanted to be there, and thus alliance formation actually seemed possible.
While the potential for alliance at Teen Feed is great, one large barrier is that guests
and volunteers are not allowed to have any contact outside of program. When I encounter a
guest on the street, I must allow them to make first contact, so that I do not out them as
homeless. Of course this is for safety reasons for both the guest and me, so that the power
dynamic is not exploited by either party. But unfortunately, it creates this tangible divide
between us. Regardless of how close of a relationship we may form in program, how similar we
may find ourselves to be, similarity does not equal commonality (Lawson, 2014). And even if we
could find some commonality of shared experience, difference (defined in binary, either/or
Tarcea
6
terms) trumps commonality (Keating, 2006, p12). When we label ourselves as middle-class
volunteer and homeless Teen Feed guest, that difference prevents formation of alliance outside
of program.

Part II: The Role of Privilege in Teen Feed: How is it addressed or does it go unnoticed?
In my few months at Teen Feed, I find it odd that the only time privilege has been
explicitly addressed by the organization itself was during orientation, when we discussed how
youth come to be homeless. There was a focus on family crisis (violence and abuse, runaways,
getting thrown out, etc.) or aging out of the foster system as being among the main causes of
youth homelessness (Teen Feed Orientation Packet). They mentioned the differences between
homeless youth population and the general population, how people of color are
disproportionately represented and how LGBT youth make up 20-40% of homeless youth. The
way Teen Feed addressed structural oppression was by focusing how the marginalized
communities are oppressed by the system, rather than address how cis-white-heterosexual-male-
middle class actors (and other groups of high privilege) benefit from the system. In other words,
their framing of the causes of poverty was individual, that people are poor because they dont
benefit from the system, rather than relational, where people are poor because of powerful
others (Lawson, 2012, p.5). The only time that I really felt like we volunteers were told to
confront our own privileges was during The Ropes Training (very similar to the homelessness
simulation role-play that my group facilitated during class). Only when volunteers (all of whom
were white/white-presenting POC) were given constructed and temporary marginalized identities
was there really any overt discussion about how privilege allows us (our normal identities) to
benefit from societal power structures.
Tarcea
7
One thing I was weary about was the form in which this privilege recognition took place.
It was in a training with all white participants, led by white people. In the end, there were
sentiments of I realize now that I have privileges XYZ. While this type of confessional is good
method to get people to acknowledge previously unrecognized privileges, it is problematic in
that it restates and reinforces existing oppressive power structures rather than help to overturn
them (Smith, 2013). As Smith eloquently states, the undoing of privilege occurs not by
individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think about themselves into a new subject
position, but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the system that enables
these privileges (p.264). I would have liked to have seen Teen Feed staff engage volunteers in
conversation about how to think about redirecting powers we may have due to privilege, and
using them to critically reflect on our experiences in an effort to develop new subjectivities and
power relations during program.
While privilege was never explicitly addressed after that initial orientation, I have found
Teen Feed to be a good place for me to confront my own privilege in a personal reflective
manner. One evening stands out in my mind, where I went to sit down with a guest who had just
gotten his food. As I sat down and attempted to engage, he ignored me. I figured he probably had
a hard day and just wanted to eat by himself. So then I changed tables and tried a group of three
guests who were in busy chatting loudly. As I sat down they did not even acknowledge that I was
there after I said hi. I became really frustrated and was in a bad mood for the rest of the night,
having spent an hour of my time feeling ignored and invisible. On my way home, I had this
guilty realization that my feelings had been a perfect manifestation of my privilege. I thought to
myself, what makes you feel like you deserve to be listened to and heard by the guests? Why
should they listen to me when frequently people like me ignore and render them invisible on the
Tarcea
8
street? I had assumed that the guests were just unpleasant and did not like me, never considering
that I belonged to a group (housed/middle-class, etc.) that is oppressive to them on a daily basis
and regularly denies their existence. The ability for me to not notice my lack of understanding of
their experiences is an artifact of my middle-class privilege (Kendall, 2006). Kendall illustrates
this idea well when she explains that while [homeless youth] understand the necessity of being
able to read the [normalized middle-class/housed] system and to know what life for [middle-
class] people is like, those of us who are [middle-class] are able to live our lives knowing very
little of the experiences of [homeless youth] (originally quote referring to POC and white
people, p.65). While in no way am I claiming that I now understand exactly what guests
experience on a daily basis, and in no way can I empathize with them, I am beginning to
understand how to interpret my feelings in a framework of privilege and oppression. This
reflection did not change how I felt. I still felt extremely frustrated with being ignored and
invisible. But it did help me process how I was feeling and understand the broader implications
of my actions and the actions of the guests in our space of encounter.

Conclusions
Throughout this quarter, both in class and at Teen Feed, I struggled to figure out what I
actually was learning. Many of the readings seemed over my head or irrelevant to what I was
experiencing during volunteer work. But then, every once in a while, something would happen
where I would experience something and then find myself analyzing the situation, taking into
account my privileges, how my thoughts have been shaped by dominant discourses on poverty,
and how I play into existing power relations. I find myself trying my best to abandon
oppositional politics, as they are of limited effectiveness today because they inhibit our ability
Tarcea
9
to envision alternate possibilities (Keating, 2007, p.8). I hope to take what I have learned in this
class and carry it with me as I continue on at Teen Feed, hopefully staying critical of my actions
and the actions of others and working to be more little p political in how I work to effect
change.

References
Hall, Stuart; Massey, Doreen; and Rustin, Michael. After Neoliberalism: Analysizing the
Present. In Soundings and The Kilburn manifesto. (2013) Ch.1: 1-15.
Keating, Analouise. Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogues. Pelgrave.
2007. 1-21.
Kendall, Frances E. Chapter 4: Understanding White Privilege. In Understanding White
Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race. Routledge. 2006,
61-78.
Lawson, Victoria. Decentering Poverty Studies: middle class alliances and the social
construction of poverty. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. No. 33, (2012): 1-
19.
Lawson, Victoria; Elwood, Sarah. Encountering Poverty: Space, Class, and Poverty Politics. In
Antipode. No. 1 (2014): 1-20.
Lawson, Victoria; Elwood, Sarah; Canevaro, Santiago; and Viotti, Nicolas. Poverty Politics
Post Crisis in Argentina and the US: class subjects and relational practices in urban
neighborhoods. Unpublished. 2014. 1-25.
Leitner, Helga. Spaces of Encounter: Immigration, Race, Class, and the Politics of Belonging in
Small-Town America. In Annals of the Association of American Geographers. No. 4
(2012). 828-846.
Smith, Andrea. Chapter 11: Unsettling the Privilege of Self-Reflexivity. In Geographies of
Privilege, edited by France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardner. Routledge, 2013,
263-279.
Teen Feed Volunteer Orientation Packet and Advocate Handbook (2014). Pages 1-12.
TeenFeed.Org Website