Volume 125 Issue 112
kansan.com
Monday, April 29, 2013
eKU
6047
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
REACHING OUT. GIVING BACK
University students volunteer at Jubilee Café, get face-to-face time with Lawrence homeless community
The Jubilee Cafe is run by student volunteers who prepare and serve breakfast to the community on Tuesday and Friday mornings. Students who are looking to get involved in Lawrence should visit the Center for Community Outreach's website.
GEORGE MULLINIX/KANSAN
MARSHALL SCHMIDT
mschmidt@kansan.com
In the early hours of a recent Tuesday, Bailey Fee, a freshman from Kansas City, Kan., arrived at the Jubilee Cafe at the First United Methodist Church with a smile and a willing spirit to spend several hours serving breakfast to the homeless.
less hits close to home. In October 2011,
her father Larry died from a heart attack while
working at the Wyandotte County Water Department
For Fee, working with the home-
Fee
"My dad was my best friend and someone I could talk to about anything." Fee said.
While Fee was close to her father, she could not say the same of her mother, who Fee said suffers from alcoholism and a gambling addiction.
"My mother and I'm relationship was never healthy." Fee said. "We would yell at each other. I felt like if I lived with her full time, things would be bad for everyone. It was never an option to move in with her."
She said she did not feel a connection to her step-mother either and described her as mentally and emotionally abusive.
Less than a week after her father's death, Fee's stepmother told her she knew Fee wasn't going to live with her anymore. Fee said her stepmother blamed her for her father's death.
"I got in a car accident two weeks before his death and almost died," Fee said. "She said the stress of my accident was too much for my dad to handle. He was working a lot, and in her mind, he was working too much to save up for my college, so that was my fault."
"Then the funeral came, and the question everybody had was, 'What's going to happen to Bailey?'"
Fee said. "I didn't know what I was going to do."
With no other place to stay, Fee
A couple days later, Fee returned to her stepmother's house to pick up her clothes. To Fee's surprise, she discovered that her stepmother had changed the house's locks to keep her out. She had no place to go.
lived at friends' houses for the following week.
"I just don't exist in her life anymore," Fee said.
But, Fee still had another option. She had always been close to her cheerleading coach at Turner High School, Sybil Nicum. After her father's funeral, Nicum took Fee out to lunch and told her that she would always be welcome at Nicum's home.
Fee's father would have approved. She said that before her father's death he had asked Niccum to accompany Fee on a school trip to Paris.
So, after recovering the clothes that her step-mother left on the curb for trash day, Fee moved in with Niccum. Soon after, Niccum became her legal guardian with assistance from a friend who is a lawyer.
"I was lucky I didn't actually have to live on the streets and I have people to take care of me,"Fee said.
Fee lived with Niccum for the rest of high school, but Niccum insisted that Fee live on campus to experience college life. Now, Fee is a member of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and lives in the dorms.
It was at sorority recruitment that she heard about Jubilee Café as a community service opportunity.
The cafe was founded in 1994 by Joe Alford, the cafe's former director who continues volunteering today. Jubilee Cafe was intended to give college students face-to-face time with homeless people.
"This gave students a way to sit down and talk to homeless people," Alford said. "They find that they are just like them. Everyone is one or two paychecks away from the street."
On Tuesday and Friday mornings from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. 25 to 50 students arrive to serve food and wash dishes at the café while they get to know members of the homeless community on a more personal level than seeing them on
the street.
In the past year, the cafe has seen fewer patrons. Jessica Sheahon, a graduate student from Salina, is the volunteer coordinator for the cafe. She attributes the decline to the relocation of the Lawrence Community Shelter. Last December, the shelter moved from its location at 10th and Vermont Streets to its new location east of Kansas Highway 10.
The shelter's move was pushed by Lawrence business leaders feeling threatened by the homeless population, said Stephanie Higinbotham, current coordinator for Jubilee Cafe and next year's coordinator for Concerned, Active & Aware Students, a student group dedicated to volunteering at the homeless shelter.
"The business owners wanted to remove the homeless element from the downtown area," Higinbotham said. "They don't view them as people."
"They don't have enough food, money or people," Higinbotham said.
The Jubilee Cafe acts as a supplement to the shelter, but Sheahon said that a lack of transportation for the homeless population has caused the number of patrons drop from around 100 to close to 50.
While the new location accommodates more families and serves more meals daily, the shelter is still struggling, Higinbotham said.
For Fee, it is important to keep things in perspective while volunteering.
"A minor event can turn your life upside down," Fee said. "Whenever I look at these people, I think, 'this could have been me.'" Fee said.
Through volunteering, Fee has become friends with the people who eat at Jubilee Cafe, knowing several by name. When she missed volunteering for a couple months, one of the people she usually serves, Ed, greeted her as if she'd never missed a day when she returned.
"Whenever I see someone on the street, sympathize with them." Fee said. "Homelessness is a societal problem, and we need to handle it together."
Brown Bag Drag concludes Gaypril festivities
LGBTQA
Edited by Hannah Wise
EMILY DONOVAN
edonovan@kansan.com
Hallway through Friday's Brown Bag Drag, a 6-foot-tall femmic mimic in a Disney's Snow White dress raised an experiential painted eyebrow to draw a laugh from the line "He's gotta be larger than life" as she sang Footloose's "I Need a Hero."
"The fact that we can have a drag show on your campus and not give two shits what anybody thinks — I love it," said Daisy Bucket, the emcee of Friday's burlesque performance.
The event filled Woodruff Auditorium's 300 seats to capacity and left it at standing room only. Lipsyncing and renditions of songs from "Hairspray," Beyoncé, Cyn迪 Lauper and John Lennon marked the last day of Gaypri, a
month-long celebration of LGBT, sexual and gender diversity. Throughout four weeks of April, Queers and Allies coordinated panels about intersexuality and religion, showed plays and films, brought in guest speakers and coordinated social events including Pride Night at Wilde's Chateau 24 in outreach and activism efforts.
The popularity of a drag show — more commonly seen in clubs and bars — performed in the heart of a campus in Kansas at noon on a Friday was no surprise to Detmer or Queers and Allies president Ailee Cassel. Cassel, a junior from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, thinks the
"There's way too much gay pride at KU to only fill up a week," said Michael Detmer, the graduate student advisor for Queers and Allies and the LGBT Resource Center coordinator.
As head of the Gender Neutral Restroom Task Force, Detmer has already seen success in bringing greater awareness of LGBT issues to campus. By purchasing unisex restroom signs with both male and female figures, the student coalition of more than 40 members has already changed the designation of two single-person bathrooms in Wescoe this past fall and hopes to designate two more by the fall semester.
"We had a really decent turnout at all of our events," Cassel said.
"That's something we've struggled with in the past. We could always draw people to Brown Bag Drag, but we couldn't always draw people to a trans talk event."
increasingly pro-gay political climate has helped encourage more people to speak out in support of gay rights.
Queers and Allies meets Thursday nights at 7 p.m. in the Sabatini Multicultural Resource Center classroom. Detmer urges LGBT allies to speak up if they overhear an offensive comment at the grocery store, to hang the Human Rights Campaign sticker up in their offices or on the bumper of their cars and to attend events to learn more about LGBT issues.
Daisy Bucket finished the drag show with Gloria Gaynor's "I Am What I Am," tearing off her curly blonde wig and bowing to a standing ovation.
Edited by Allison Hammond
Three performers sing and dance on stage at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union as a part of last year's Brown Bag Drag performance event.
"The first and foremost thing that people need to think about when being an ally is being visible," Detmer said.
KANSAN FILE PHOTO
CLASSIFIEDS 2B
CROSSWORD 5A
CRYPTOQUIPS 5A
OPINION 4A
SPORTS 1B
SUDOKU 5A
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