X-Committee Provides Leadership Opportunities

“X-Committee is by the homeless and for the homeless. Our goal is to end homelessness.”

Those words open the mission statement of Saint Paul’s X-Committee, a group run by people staying in downtown St. Paul emergency and transitional shelters who are organizing both for political change and for self-reliant projects that improve conditions for the homeless community overall.

The X-Committee has been meeting for almost a year. I am an Americorps-VISTA volunteer, and part of what I do is help the X-Committee organize and connect to resources. All the decisions, all the ideas, all the planning, come from homeless folks themselves.

“We call ourselves the X-Committee because we are outside of society and treated like outcasts, like the X-Men and X-Files – and like them, we will overcome.”

One of the X Committee’s first projects was to create 50 lockers where people without stable housing could store their belongings and have some privacy. They came up with this idea because many people experiencing homelessness have to carry everything they own around with them throughout the day, and while they are sleeping their things are not secure. Members of the X Committee got the materials donated, designed and built the lockers, and came up with the payment system for renting the space. After a lot of hard work, construction of all 50 lockers was completed this month, and over 45 are already occupied!

For the 2004 presidential elections, X-Committee also ran a campaign to encourage and support voting among people experiencing homelessness. Many barriers block people without a steady home from participating in the political process. For example, people must include a mailing address on their voter registration form in order to pre-register. Luckily, Minnesota is one of the few states that allows same-day registration, and if you don’t have a permanent mailing address then someone else registered in the district can vouch that you stay there. Members of X Committee vouched for people staying at Dorothy Day and Mary Hall shelters, enabling many people to vote who otherwise would not be able. In Saint Paul, over 600 people experiencing homelessness voted in this election!

Other X-Committee projects include:

• Hosting Job Fairs at Dorothy Day Shelter, the main emergency shelter in St. Paul
• Creating a jobs directory & maintaining the Dorothy Day jobs board
• Homeless rights/Connecting the homeless to legal aid
• Preparing and recruiting for the Homelessness & Housing Lobby Day
• Bringing the Mayor to Listening House, a day shelter & drop-in center
• Presenting to networks of service providers on X Committee work, and how people experiencing homelessness can be their own advocates and take a role in ending homelessness.

For more information, contact Hannah Hafter.