a retired educator who runs the program as a volunteer.
“But sit with me for 45 minutes and you might find out
you’re eligible for $176 in food stamps.”
Michael Polembro, a resident nurse, is also on site
every week to perform health checks and monitor
medications. In keeping with Breaking Bread’s holistic
approach to meeting the needs of the homeless, Michael
recently introduced a pre-lunch meditation session
that has become very popular. One homeless man,
who struggles with anger management issues, credits
meditation with giving him “a longer fuse.”
The hair salon began as another practical service that,
with Bruce’s empathetic and ebullient personality,
soothes troubled men’s spirits as well. As he carefully
guides his razor across a man’s scalp, Bruce responds
to what he thinks each customer needs: cheerful patter,
advice or a listening ear. “I don’t just cut their hair,” he
says, “it’s a little ministry, too. I got you in the chair, you
can’t move,” he jokes, then turns serious. “Sometimes
when you get these men one on one, you break them
down. I say ‘Great. It’s all right to cry. It eases the soul.’”
In many ways, Bruce embodies Broad Street Ministry’s
participatory, holistic model for serving its urban
community. He was himself homeless when he first
came to a church service, drawn in by the choir’s
“heavenly voices.” Bill and Wendy recognized his talents
not only as a musician, but also as a trained carpenter
and plumber. By Bruce’s estimate, he has renovated
at least six rooms in the century-old church to keep
expanding and improving the services Broad Street
Ministry can offer the homeless, including an office for
a psychologist who comes in three times a week, and his
own cozy, welcoming salon in a corner of the basement
boiler room.
Street Ministry aims to expand. The church’s location
and mission made it an ideal setting for one of Bethesda
Project’s winter “cafés, ” providing temporary shelter for
the most intransigent homeless in the coldest months of
the year. “If we hadn’t provided this space these people
would be out in this bitter cold and dying,” says Sgro.
“There’s something about [a church],” he adds, “that gets
people inside. And if you don’t get them inside, you can’t
work with them. We have placed a lot of people from the
cafés into more permanent housing.”
“It’s a dynamic, growing place,” says Cy Schwartz. In
addition to Breaking Bread, the church offers free
dinner after worship services on Sunday, and hosts
a monthly No Barriers Dinner, designed to bring
Philadelphia residents from all walks of life together for
a family-style meal. A plan is also in place to renovate
an ample but outdated kitchen, and Bruce hopes that
showers will be the next amenity he’s asked to build.
Right now, though, Bruce is sending a customer off
with a bracing splash of Aqua Velva. He might run
into the same guy later in the week, sitting on the
street or camped out on the Parkway. Wherever he
sees his customers, he greets them as friends. Freshly
shampooed, hair well trimmed, “they look,” he says,
“like a million bucks. And they’re feeling like a million
bucks.”
“It’s an amazing retrofitting of a space that wasn’t
designed to do anything but provide utilities for the
building,” says Cy, the Benefits Bank counselor, of
the back-room salon. In a space not much larger
than a coatroom, Bruce has set up a barber’s chair, a
shampooing station with sink, a lounge chair for waiting,
and a mirror, donated by a mosaic artist. Assisted
by Camille, a student at University of the Arts who
volunteers as hair washer, Bruce typically cuts “twentytwo heads in two hours.”
As other programs that serve the homeless are being hit
by increased numbers and dwindling funding, Broad
The Exemplars Project
is funded by a grant from
the William Penn Foundation
Sacred Places • Spring 2010 • 10