Trust First summary

Before coming to the Westside, Deel had assumed that if people were experiencing social problems like poverty and alcoholism, it was partly of their own making. After all, no one was forcing alcoholics to drink – or poor people to spend more money on junk food than education. 

Working with his Westside congregants completely shifted his perspective. He realized that these people suffered from chronic opportunity injustice: the odds had been stacked against them from birth. The detrimental choices they made hadn’t caused the situation – rather, their decisions were compelled by their skewed circumstances. 

Deel and his wife, Rhonda, were committed to serving the Westside community. Unfortunately, they had no idea how. Their own lives were miles away from those of their congregants. 

They realized that if they were serious about getting to know the people they worked with, it wouldn’t be enough to just drop in now and then and hand out some food. They needed to live in the community.

We’ve all been faced with situations that stretch us almost beyond our own endurance and force us to take stock of our lives. 

For Deel, that happened when he had an upsetting confrontation with a homeless man named Michael. Michael was a regular lodger in the men's shelter, and his behavior had always been exemplary. One night, however, he pulled down his pants and demanded that a staff member apply ointment to wounds on his genitals. When the staffer refused, Michael exploded in rage. After he was removed from the shelter, he started stalking Deel and his staff members. He got into a violent confrontation with, and tried to punch, a staff member. He even threatened to come back and kill Deel’s wife and daughters. 

Deel desperately tried to get to sleep. He was lying between two former gang members turned security guards in a drafty warehouse, in the roughest part of town besieged by rats the size of cats. As he lay there, he wondered what on earth he had done to land in this situation. 

Deel wasn’t lying in just any warehouse. This was the property for his grand dream – the one-stop shop where people living on the margins of society could access the best possible services all in one place.

In the early years, Deel and his colleagues had been lurching from crisis to crisis, putting out fires. They never had enough money or staff, so they just did what they could with the limited resources available to them.

But with their newfound credibility came an outpouring of support. Donations began flooding in – and so did offers of collaboration.

Today, City of Refuge can rattle off extremely impressive statistics about how many lives they’ve helped transform. But success, Deel has realized, can’t only be measured in grand transformations.

He didn’t always think like that. When he first started working on the Westside, he’d had very set ideas about what it meant to provide support to communities and how successful interventions in people’s lives could be measured. In his mind, a program could be seen as successful if it resulted in people permanently giving up destructive habits – and embracing new, independent lives of sobriety and productivity. Essentially, he thought outreach projects needed to have a neat end point.

When Deel decided to embrace the principle of trust first after he intervened in that fateful altercation in the liquor store parking lot, he probably hadn’t realized that the person he would have to learn to trust most of all was himself. 

Time and again, he had to wrestle with the gap between his intuition and the reality of a situation. His intuition told him that a policy of unconditional trust was the answer to doing effective work in Westside, but the trust he extended was abused time and again. His intuition told him that they needed an enormous one-stop relief project; in reality, he ended up with a rat-infested warehouse and no funding.