Helping others a commitment she’s happy to fulfill

HOUSE BECOMES A HOME: Eileen Hayes, president and CEO of Amos House, speaks with case manager Sonny Ramsey. She oversees a staff of 55. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
HOUSE BECOMES A HOME: Eileen Hayes, president and CEO of Amos House, speaks with case manager Sonny Ramsey. She oversees a staff of 55. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

She’s a slim wisp of a woman quite at home at this place where she is employed, although Eileen Hayes would never call what she does every day “work” because she is so deeply committed to it. Helping others has long been her way of life.
Hayes, president and CEO of Amos House, maneuvers through the crowded waiting room of the South Providence social-service agency on a recent Monday afternoon. Every one of the dozen chairs is taken, while more needy people mill about the corridor near the doorway. They wait for assistance with life problems of both an acute and chronic nature, from homelessness to joblessness, from overdue heating bills to a lack of employable skills.
“The majority of folks here at Amos House were homeless,” Hayes tells a visitor. “What we’re seeing, too, is a large increase in the number of people on the brink of homelessness. There are a lot of people who are not necessarily homeless but are struggling financially.”
The people in the waiting room that day – whom Hayes and other staffers call “guests” rather than clients – were among approximately 15,000 that Amos House, with a $4 million operating budget and staff of 55 employees, helped this past year.
Hayes has a greeting and smile for each, a hug for some and a chiding word of warning to others (such as the man with a pet rabbit, forbidden at Amos House, half-hidden in the hood of his coat). She makes sure, Hayes says, that everyone is treated with dignity and respect. “You have to believe in the inherent ability of people to do the right thing given the opportunity,” she said.
A native New Yorker with seven brothers and sisters, whose parents came to this country from Ireland with little education, Hayes has a master’s degree in social work from New York University and worked for 15 years running programs for teenage mothers and fathers at the New York City YWCA. The mother of four children, she came to Rhode Island when her husband undertook graduate work at the University of Rhode Island. For a while, she ran her own private counseling practice and, because she had done a lot of program-development work for the YWCA, she was asked to join the board of directors of Amos House in Providence. At the time, the agency had but a $500,000 annual operating budget and its main mission was to help the homeless.
Founded in 1976 by the late Sister Eileen Murphy, a Catholic Religious Sister of Mercy, Amos House at the time was perhaps best known for its soup kitchen, which today remains the largest in the state serving 500 to 800 meals every day, Hayes said. The agency was named for the Old Testament prophet Amos, who stood for social justice.
Hayes had not been on the Amos board very long when she was asked to take over the operation “for a few months,” she said, as former director Deborah Brayton departed for a job in Washington, D.C. That was 11 years ago, Jan. 2, 2001, and Hayes has never left.
Under Hayes’ leadership, Amos House has become more than a shelter where the homeless can find a bed and a meal. She initiated the 90-day program, where guests commit to sobriety and to working on personal issues, such as unemployment, for three months.
With 143 residential beds, the agency comprises 14 separate buildings in the Broad Street area, housing the residence halls, the dining hall, job-training programs in culinary arts and carpentry, educational classes in literacy and financial literacy, and three separate businesses that Hayes started.
The businesses – Amos House Builds, a construction company; More Than A Meal, a catering company; and the Friendship Café, serving breakfast and lunch – generate about $650,000 a year for the agency, Hayes said, while providing 25 formerly homeless people with job-training skills and work experience as employees of the three enterprises. The agency also provides the needy with help paying utility bills, obtaining prescriptions, finding a job, learning how to read and achieving financial literacy.
About 18 months ago, Hayes added a new venture for Amos House and for the state: the Mother-Child Reunification Program, located in a nearby tenement house for mothers newly reunited with their children after extended separation for reasons ranging from addiction to incarceration and state intervention. The supportive housing and parenting program for up to 13 families is, the agency said, the only one of its kind in the state.
Hayes takes pride in the fact that most Amos House employees are former clients because she said this kind of personal success on the part of their peers provides other guests with approachable role models they can follow.
“We are living proof that people can change,” she said. “What I see here that has been an inspiration to me is the resiliency of people. I spend my day with people who have survived all kinds of trauma, things you cannot imagine.”
Well aware that people come to her in their weakest moments, Hayes routinely asks new guests to recollect a time when they were strong and life was better. “I ask them to tell me what’s good in their lives,” she said.
She spoke of a former client who after 20 years in prison was “so grateful” to be out, he wept as he spoke to her. She was careful when first interviewing him to ask not what crime he had committed but how he managed to survive prison. Recidivism among ex-convicts at the agency is about 1 percent, Hayes said.
Amos House is not a religious organization, “but we are a very spiritual one,” Hayes said. “There’s a miracle every single day and a tragedy here every day,” she said. &#8226

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