Housing
advocate leaving town
In 14 years, she's made enduring connections
KEN WILLIAMS / Monitor file By CHELSEA CONABOY
Monitor staff
Concord Monitor, front page, Mar 29, 2007
Housing advocate Martha Yager is moving on to a job in
Rhode Island.
When Senate President Sylvia Larsen wrote affordable housing advocate
Martha Yager a recommendation for a job in Rhode Island, she said
she was tempted to write a bad one to keep Yager local. This week,
as Yager began packing boxes in her Park Street office, 23-year-old
Tony Bias sat a few blocks away at The Friendly Kitchen contemplating
how to change Yager's mind.
"We've got to find a way to keep her here, man," said
Bias, who, like many visitors to the soup kitchen, met Yager while
staying at the emergency homeless shelter she co-founded four
years ago. "I just hate to see her go."
In the 14 years since she started working on affordable housing
issues in Concord, Yager's experience lobbying at the State House
and working one-on-one with many of the city's homeless has made
her one of the leading advocates in New Hampshire and given her
the ability to help people understand the connection between state
policy and the people it affects.
She'll slowly relinquish the work that she's done in her dual
role as the economic justice program coordinator for the American
Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, and the chairwoman
of the Housing Forum, a group of affordable housing advocates
and developers that focus on legislative action. On May 1, she'll
begin work in a Friends peace office in Providence, with a new
focus on the Middle East and nuclear disarmament.
Yager, 54, who is a former Episcopal priest, has become a kind
of pastor to the homeless community, counseling people living
on the street and in shelters and courting state and local leaders
to serve.
"She has extraordinary respect for people, no matter who
they are or what their position is," said Pastor David Keller,
who co-founded the First Congregational Church's shelter with
Yager. "Whether it's with a person in the shelter who has
just made life miserable for us, or if it's a legislator proposing
a bill that would make life miserable for homeless people. . .
. she has a remarkable combination of gentleness and strength."
At the Friendly Kitchen, stories of Yager's impact are as plentiful
as the chocolate chip cookies. Bias said Yager offered to listen
to him when he felt like no one would. Luke Kendall, 47, said
talking with her at the shelter this winter eased some of his
anxiety about being homeless for the first time. A 58-year-old
man who asked to be called only Chief said Yager helped him obtain
identification when his was stolen.
"If she moves, Concord's going to be left out in the cold,"
Chief said. "We won't have anybody to speak for us."
That's not totally true, in part because Yager has recruited others
to work with her over the years. After the shelter opened in January
2002, Yager talked to fellow lobbyists and legislators about volunteering.
Mike LaFontaine, director of the New Hampshire Community Loan
Fund's housing program, said she had asked him several times to
stop by. Three years ago he did and has been volunteering since.
"Just the power of her example finally caused me to no longer
be able to say no to myself," LaFontaine said.
Minister and lobbyist
Yager said her passion for social justice started young. When
a parent would tell her to clean her plate because there were
children starving in Africa, she would take it to heart. .
"It outraged me," she said.
Later, in 1977, she became one of the first 100 women to be ordained
in the Episcopal Church. Five years later, she moved to Concord.
While raising her three children, she became involved with the
peace and justice committee of the New Hampshire diocese, educating
churches about divestiture from South Africa and offering sanctuary
to Central American immigrants.
In much of that work, she crossed paths with people from the American
Friends Service Committee. In 1991, she left the Episcopal Church,
"in part because I was keeping too much time with the Quakers,"
she said. She had always resisted the authority that she had as
a priest, she said. Among the Quakers, she liked "the recognition
that anyone can have insight and should have an opportunity to
speak what they know."
The Friends committee was then starting to review the community
investment practices of banks that were moving into New Hampshire
at a time when credit was tight (due to the financial collapse
of the early 1990s) and the housing market was expensive, squeezing
out affordable developers. In 1993, Yager became the part-time
economic justice program coordinator.
Still pinned to the wall of her office is a genealogy of merging
banks in the 1990s, all of which have since been bought out by
major national banks. Yager's institutional memory extends far
beyond the page to the lending practices of each bank and the
details of the mergers.
There was the time in 1993 when she helped to stall a merger in
which the buying bank was being investigated by the federal government
for discriminatory lending. Or the summer that she earned herself
the reputation for "roasting bankers."
She invited the higher ups in Citizens Bank to talk about the
bank's low rate of lending to minorities. The meetings were in
community buildings instead of air-conditioned bank offices. By
the end of the process, the bank officials were sweating in their
white, collared shirts, she said. They'd also agreed to hire a
community reinvestment director for New Hampshire whose outreach
has been "incredible."
Yager took on the role as chairwoman of the Housing Forum in 1998,
and her job became full-time. In both roles, particularly when
they've brought her to the State House, she said, she hasn't forgotten
her roots as a minister. She said they remind her to think about
how a particular policy matter fits into the lives of legislators
and to honor the "wholeness" of the other person. The
approach has helped her to be part of securing $4.5 million for
building affordable housing.
'It grounds me'
Several years ago, Yager became involved in celebrating Homeless
Memorial Day. She got to know many of the people who lived on
Concord's streets.
"Then I started flipping out when it got cold in the winter,"
she said. "When we have a flood, and middle class people
are affected, we open shelters. When it's cold, we don't do anything."
When she had to perform the funeral for an acquaintance who had
died of exposure, her anger grew. On one particularly cold day
in December 2002, Keller stopped by Yager's office to say hello
and found her in "a snit," she said.
Keller went back to talk to his church leaders about doing something
to help and a few weeks later he and Yager opened a temperature-based
shelter, taking guests in the church wing anytime the temperature
dropped below about 10 degrees. The shelter's been open since
and has expanded to a nightly winter shelter. Yager said the experience
has helped her in her lobbying work.
"It grounds me in what the real need is," she said.
"This isn't playing games for me."
As her children, now in their 20s, have grown into adults, she's
felt the urge to try something new, but hasn't always felt like
she could leave legislative issues that she was involved in or
the shelter. Now, she thinks there are other people who can do
the work here.
"Stuff is going to happen whether I'm here or not,"
she said.
Meanwhile, she'll likely be heading to Israel and the Palestinian
territories in October to take part in the olive harvest there.
"I've got a lot to learn," she said. "Which is
fine."
Friends Program Coordinator Arnie Alpert said the search to find
someone to take Yager's job, which started this week, will take
awhile. He said Yager has been a strong support in a job that
is often frustrating.
"When I had doubts . . . there was someone who's judgment
I treasured," Alpert said.
(A going away party for Yager will be held at New Hampshire
Audubon's Silk Farm location on May 20 at 4 p.m. For more information,
call the American Friends Service Committee at 224-2407.)
Download Flyer for Celebration of Martha Yager (PDF 2.74 MB)
------ End of article
By CHELSEA CONABOY , Monitor staff
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070329/REPOSITORY/703290336
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