Spotlight on East Hollywood: The Hope Center with Mike McIntire
/Recovery from Disconnection
Boiled eggs. Small but nutritious. The Hope Center began in the 90s when Reality L.A. Church invited the homeless camping outside their doors inside, serving them what they had, boiled eggs. What started out as a church opening their building during the week, grew into a passionate endeavor to connect the disconnected. From eggs to soup, to the most widely known delicious hot meal in the L.A. region, The Hope Center in East Hollywood invites the most disconnected marginalized people to authentic community. Through partnerships with Trader Joes and Whole foods the nutritious food prepared by amazing chefs attracts homeless from Skid Row, the East Hollywood community, and some from as far as Santa Monica and Venice Beach.
But how do you connect to those experiencing the deepest pain of disconnection? Mike McIntire, Director of The Hope Center in East Hollywood, starts off with a question:
Where would you like to die?
An intense question, yet a very real reality for those on the streets. Hope Center’s heart is to offer Hope in such a way that they can ask someone where you would like to die so they don’t die disconnected. We asked Mike a few questions about how they do that:
Q: What is Hope Center? What is Hope Center’s vision?
Mike: At the Hope Center we’re looking to stop the transaction. Ultimately stop the way we’re offering a basic service for someone to take and then sort of walk away from. We’re trying to build authentic community where we can invite people into our space to ask them the question in a very real way. I know that’s very serious, but it’s a very serious question because the next step usually, when you’re talking about unhoused and those that feel disconnected on daily basis, is death. And so, we are very serious, we take our charge very seriously of rescue, but we also believe in restoration, and we believe in redemption in such a way that says, if you stick around with us a little longer, I promise you, you don’t have to die alone this day.
Q. How do you create authentic community and keep people engaged?
Mike: We do our best to try and create environments where they feel warm and welcome. We stopped handing out to-go plates that we were doing in Covid because it’s purely transactional. Helping can hurt when it’s transactional and doesn’t involve authentic community. Our role is to say, “Stay with us.” Homelessness is a community, but it is a community that takes from one another, and what we’re doing is saying stay with us and we won’t take from you. It’s very easy if you’re high to come grab a hot plate of food and go, hiding your pain and need for redemption. It’s very easy to maintain this facade of isolation and disconnection. And we believe that disconnection is the worst possible sin of all. So, when the state allowed for folks to come eat with us, we said please, join us inside, let us serve you on a plate. Let us spend time with you and just sit together and let’s enjoy each other for the moment. And the coolest thing is happening. Roughly 8 minutes was the average eating time, now we have two tables that are staying the entire hour. That’s a good sign, that means that we are allowing God to do his work by creating a space where community can exist
Q. Why is the issue of homelessness so hard to minister to and address?
Mike: Every city has their equivalent of skid row, but there’s the famous one, and as I spent 10 plus years in that environment a lot of what I see is rescue. There was a massive movement in the 80s and 90s to centralize services. In their quest to centralize services they created some unintended consequences creating more policies like “not in my backyard” - I would rather have homelessness centrally located than in my backyard. What that does is put all the resources in one location, and then it becomes out of sight, out of mind. The Pool of Bethesda in the Bible was filled with all types of people waiting for rescue and ultimately restoration. That would have been that society’s skid row. Who was controlling this? Well, it was the local churches. The Pharisees were like let’s centralize pain in a location where everyone knows you can centrally go to. What that ends up doing is creating poverty and despair in one location, as opposed to everyone naturally feeling it. In sharing the gospel, the hardest thing for me to fight, in the midst of injustice, is this concept of prosperity or I would argue this reality of transaction. This idea that you give and get, you give a little bit of your time and thoughts to God, and you’re supposed to get all this stuff. God is not a transactional God; he is so much more.
We have made a bad habit of centralizing homelessness and then slipping into an “out of sight out of mind” position. As Mike McIntire puts it, “we are called to live with folks and experience this together.” We need to put our hands to the plow and do the work of rescue and restoration through ministering to those who are suffering in our community and our backyard. Let’s acknowledge the man who sits on the corner of Santa Monica and Vermont every day, ask his name, and invite him to join in authentic community at The Hope Center. If you feel called to reach out to the disconnected people of God’s Kingdom, the Hope Center provides training and classes for how to safely interact and communicate with the unhoused and homeless so both parties can safely engage in a non-transactional relationship that embodies authentic Christlike community.
Additionally, if you would like to partner with the Hope Center, they have amassed large contracts for receiving food and supplies to the point of overflow. The Hope Center assists other programs in the area by providing food from their surplus.
God calls us to “bear one another’s burdens”(Gal. 6:2), and to “love one another as [he has] loved you”(John 15:12). So, take a step towards the places of pain and join the amazing work at the Hope Center in bringing home the isolated and disconnected to their restored place as children of the Most High King.