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John Records On His Work With Homeless People

In the early 1980s John Records was practicing law in Oregon, where he and his wife, Glena, were raising two young daughters. Their lives seemed ideal, except for their growing concern about the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan, along with his secretary of state and advisors, had made public statements about the country’s ability to win such a war, and in 1983 Reagan delivered his famous speech calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” Born in 1950, Records had grown up the son of an engineer who worked on guided-missile systems, and in elementary school he had read his father’s copy of On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn, which had frightened him with its horrific descriptions of a large-scale nuclear conflict. Reagan’s talk of war revived those old fears.

A few years later Records heard about the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, an upcoming nine-month cross-country trek planned for 1986. For the sake of their children, Records and his wife decided to participate. Records, who had been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s strategies of nonviolence and meditation as a solution to even the biggest, most frightening problems, was no stranger to activism. He’d protested the Vietnam War while he was a college student, and his antiwar views had put him at odds with his conservative parents, who’d cut him off financially, forcing Records to put himself through college with scholarships and various jobs.

I, too, took part in the Great Peace March and got to know Records and his family along the way. As we were crossing the Mojave Desert, the group that had coordinated the march fell apart, and the marchers elected Records to chair the organization’s board of directors. He also became the march’s primary media spokesperson and, in his words, “a shock absorber, a lightning rod for people’s discontent and problems.” Before the journey was over, he had lost fifty pounds, and Glena had contracted pneumonia. Physically and emotionally spent, Records was unable to return to being a lawyer. He wanted to learn more about service as a spiritual path, so he and his family moved to Petaluma, California, where he assumed directorship of a program teaching meditation to people with aids and other chronic illnesses.

In the late eighties Mary Isaak and Laure Reichek, two Petaluma residents concerned about the growing number of people sleeping outdoors in unsafe conditions, founded the Committee on the Shelterless, or cots. Records and his family started volunteering on Friday nights at the organization’s small homeless shelter.

In 1992 Records became the executive director of cots. At that time, the organization operated an emergency family shelter with thirty-five beds and a winter shelter, open during cold or wet weather from November until March, where seventy to eighty people could sleep on mats on the floor. Today cots provides nearly three hundred beds each night and serves more than a hundred thousand free meals each year. The organization’s budget in 1992 was roughly $200,000; it is now $2.8 million. COTS employs forty-five staff people, and volunteers donate more than fifty thousand hours annually.

Of the old shelter, Records says, “It saved some lives, but in a way it also enabled and encouraged people to stay homeless.” Under his leadership, cots has taken on a transformational mission, providing its clients with the support they need to make the transition into independent living, including  free classes in parenting, job skills, yoga, meditation, and qigong.

I had lost contact with Records over the years, and when I looked him up in 2007, shortly after my wife and I had moved to Sonoma County (where Petaluma is located), I discovered that he had become a local hero. While he has been executive director, cots has won a Jefferson Award for Public Service and multiple awards from the United Way. The Van Löben Sels Foundation of the Bay Area gave the organization a grant to document its program so that it might be replicated in other communities. COTS has a website (cots-homeless.org) and even its own YouTube channel (youtube.com/cotspetaluma).

This year, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, cots has published Invitation to Service, a book of stories and testimonials from staff and clients, available from www.lulu.com. I sat down to talk with Records at his home in Petaluma last January, just before the book’s release.

Polonsky: How did you come to believe that you could help homeless people?

Records: I grew up with mental illness and alcoholism in my family. My mother took her own life when I was eight. My father was an alcoholic and was in and out of mental hospitals. There was a time, I believe, when my father was on the street. I saw the pain my parents suffered and caused, but I also saw their love and kindness and potential. So I’m relatively comfortable with dysfunctional behavior, and part of my own healing has been to realize that these painful experiences can awaken my compassion for people who have similar or worse problems than I had.

Most homeless people have led incredibly painful lives, enduring trauma and neglect that would have killed many of us. With their history, they often feel no hope for a better life. At cots we use something called “explicatory narrative.” We help people tell their stories in a way that honors their struggles, so that they come to appreciate the strength they’ve shown in the face of immense challenges.

We have people on our staff who were once homeless. One staff member was on the street for seven or eight years using methamphetamines and alcohol. Now he manages all our programs and has a family and a great life. He’s living proof that it’s possible to come through homelessness and contribute to a community.

Polonsky: Petaluma is a pretty affluent city, yet even here there are so many homeless. Why is there so much homelessness everywhere in the U.S. today?

Records: We have an economy in which even people who are not damaged are struggling to make it. So suppose you’ve been profoundly wounded as a kid, and those wounds impair your judgment and resilience as an adult, while you’re also grappling with an unforgiving economy. Kaiser Permanente, one of the biggest managed-care organizations in the U.S., took a survey of southern-California patients in their fifties. They found that 25 percent of the women and 16 percent of the men had experienced contact sexual abuse before the age of eighteen. And sexual abuse is just one of eight common traumatic childhood experiences the study identified that profoundly affect emotional and physical health, self-image, and decision-making ability. As a group, homeless people have had a lot of these experiences, not to mention ongoing trauma and neglect as adults.

Polonsky: You’ve been to India. How does homelessness there compare with homelessness in the U.S.?

Records: Many people live on the streets there, but often without the pathology we associate with poverty here. They appear to be members of a functioning community, not mentally ill or addicted or victims of domestic violence. On the streets of Calcutta I saw people in functional relationships, sleeping and eating and cooking together. It was much different from, say, going to a homeless camp in Petaluma and finding people who are disturbed and addicted and often involved in criminal activity. We tend to think of poverty in strictly economic terms, but there’s also impoverishment of community and relationships.

Polonsky: COTS also does a lot of work with homeless families and children. Do they present special challenges?

Records: Well, they have different needs. We offer parenting classes for homeless mothers and fathers, in which they learn about child development and also get emotional support from others in the program. Often parents who come to cots use abusive methods of discipline. They scream and hit, because that’s what was done to them as kids, and it’s all they know. So we say, “We respect your desire to control your children, but you can’t hit them here.” And since we’re telling them they may not hit their kids, we have to show them nonabusive ways to discipline.

Meanwhile we teach the kids how to express their needs, and we encourage them to develop big, healthy dreams for the future. At one point in the course, the kids make collages that represent their dreams, which they present to their parents. This encourages parents to behave in ways that support their children’s dreams. Again and again I’ve seen how people’s love for their kids has prompted them to get their lives together.

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