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T H R O U G H  T H E  L E N S  O F 
A N  A C T I V I S T

Mary Provence, Assistant Teaching Professor of Social 
Work at Ball State University, shares in this interview 
her early years of living and working in the city. As 
part of her graduate studies at IUI, she worked closely 
with residents who in turn invited her to join their 
community. Early in her career, she called herself a 
“street outreach social worker.” Provence currently lives 
in that same community where she met her husband and 
volunteered to support youth. After sharing the reasons 
for launching the ENGAGE! journal, we began our 
discussion about homelessness and her commitment to 
effecting change. 
 
Tell us about yourself and how you became 
interested in (homelessness and unsheltered) 
concerns?  

In 8th grade, I distinctly remember it at the end of every 
chapter in our health book, it had a highlight of a career, 
a health-related career, and the the National Association 
of Social Workers (NASW) had a summary of what 
social workers do, and I read that. And of course, this 
was way before the Internet, so I literally wrote a letter 
and asked them to send me more information on what it 
meant to be a social worker.

I grew up in rural and small-town Indiana, and I knew 
that I lived in a place that didn't know these issues and 
I wanted to know people. And I cared. I cared deeply. I 
cared deeply about the people that I read about, and it 

touched my soul in a great way. 

I had my school library, public library, and home 
bookshelf. Those were the resources that I had, and so 
I learned the best that I could. The other thing was that 
my dad supported the Edna Martin Christian Center [in 
Indianapolis].

We would drive to Indianapolis for different reasons 
as a family. And I remember being on the interstate 
and looking down into the urban environment and 
wondering how do you get there? I don't understand 
because here I am, a child on the interstate, I'm seeing a 
place I want to go, that I want to learn about.

My undergraduate was at Taylor University.  Taylor had 
many wonderful leaders that came and spoke to us. Are 
you familiar with Doctor John Perkins? John Perkins 
is, oh, he's probably 90 years old by now. But John was 
a founder of the Christian Community Development 
Association, and he did a vast amount of community 
organizing work in Mississippi. He's inspired people 
around the world to do this type of work. I met him. 
I've read his books. He's come to my community and 
multiple leaders like that. I began hearing them at Taylor 
and the more I heard them speak, I bought their books 
and read their stories. I'm like, this is exactly what I 
want to do.

Through the lens of an activist  
social work professor: Concerns  
for the rights of people who are  
experiencing homelessness  

INTERVIEW WITH MARY PROVENCE CONDUCTED BY ANDREA COPELAND



ENGAGE!  |  h o m e l e s s n e s s  &  h o u s i n g  i n s ec u r i t y 18

I N T E R V I E W :  C O N C E R N S  O F  P E O P L E  
E X P E R I E N C I N G  H O M E L E S S N E S S

How have you worked with issues facing people who 
are experiencing homelessness?

My husband and I, along with other community 
residents, started a community development 
organization in 2001 that for over a decade worked on 
the issue of affordable housing. In addition, I, along with 
other neighborhood women, worked to help women that 
were experiencing addiction and prostitution.

To back up a bit, in 1998, I became the first social 
worker on staff of Outreach Inc. In places that most 
people are afraid to go, and as a team, we worked 
critically on the issue of youth homelessness. I provided 
case management and crisis intervention to help youth 
get off the streets. I helped Outreach’s founder open 
their very first drop-in center. Now Outreach Inc. has 
a beautiful, gorgeous new building here in the city, 
and they have lots more funding. They're a very large 
organization, but back then, we were some renegades, 
we really were. 

And then in 2017 [at IU], I started my PhD program 
and was told ‘Mary, you're going to be working with 
Dr. Beth Wahler, and you're going to be doing a needs 
assessment of the Indianapolis Public Library.’ And 
I just grinned from ear to ear because I recognized 
that it encompassed everything that was important 
to me.  When I was younger, I used to take my kids 
to the central public library, and I would see people 
experiencing homelessness. In fact, that was one of 
my stops years before when I was an outreach worker. 
I would meet kids down at the public library. So I had 
been there for years. And I'm like, ‘the library needs a 
social worker.’

But even before I began the PhD program, I was 
teaching as an adjunct.  One semester, I taught the very 
last case management class of the certificate program 
that no longer exists in the [IUI School of Social Work].

Provence discussed placements in the community with 
organizations and individuals as part of this class. One 
person that she worked with was Maurice Young who 
was not affiliated with a formal agency; however, the 
school allowed her to place a student with him. 

Mr. Young, a longtime advocate for the homeless 
community in Indianapolis, described himself as 
‘homeless by design.’ 

They [Mr. Young and the student] met at the public 
library. So again, this is pre any of the research that I 
did.  This was all in the background of my life when I 
walked into the PhD program and was told I would be 
helping conduct a needs assessment at the Indianapolis 
Public Library. 
 
What have you learned that may be applicable for 
advocates who want to effect change in the systems 
that are impacting homelessness?

First of all, we need to decrease the barriers to service. 
Sometimes agencies will have a rule that you have to 
prove that you're experiencing homelessness. So that's a 
barrier, you have to show up, maybe at a certain time or 
follow a certain protocol in order to get services or you 
have to have an ID.  There are all these rules that you 
have to follow and a lot of times people experiencing 
homelessness simply can't follow: ‘Well, my phone 
ran out of charge. I didn't know what time it was. I 
don't have money for a bus fare to get there on time. 
The police raided the camp and they took my birth 
certificate. I don't have the paperwork to get an ID.’ 

Honestly, as a social work profession generally, we 
haven't always done a good job about keeping those 
barriers low, but social work at the library is very 
organic. It's new, and I hope that as we formalize it in 
the profession, I hope we don't damage it.  I really want 
to protect and preserve that organic nature of library 
social work because people can literally just walk in and 
ask for what they need.

As I have interviewed library social workers in my 
research, they tell me that when the client comes in and 
says, ‘I need XY and Z.’ OK, well, that's what they do. 
If they haven't done it before, they figure it out. There 
are almost no limitations to what a library social worker 
can assist with to break down those barriers (Provence, 
2022). The library is so accessible because it's already 
in a place where people experiencing homelessness are 
naturally.



19 VO L .  5,  I S S U E  2

I N T E R V I E W :  C O N C E R N S  O F  P E O P L E  
E X P E R I E N C I N G  H O M E L E S S N E S S

We also need to decrease barriers to increase 
accessibility. We really desperately need more daytime 
full-service drop-in centers. There are almost no drop-in 
centers in most places. That's one of many reasons why 
the libraries have so many daily patrons experiencing 
homelessness.

We need more daytime drop-in centers with full 
services and no need to prove that you're experiencing 
homelessness. But just ‘hey, I'm walking in. I need to 
use the shower. I need to use the bathroom. I'd like to 
have a place to get my mail. I'd like to have a storage 
place. I'd like to meet with the social worker. I need 
to see the doctor. I need some legal help.’ Very, very 
few cities have them, and the ones that do, there aren't 
enough of them. I'd say what the general public does not 
understand about homeless shelters is that they are often 
closed down during the day. You almost always cannot 
stay at the shelter during the day, so now you're back 
out on the street. Where are you supposed to go? Well, 
with the criminalization of homelessness and no daytime 
shelters, of course, they're going to end up at the library. 
You can sit in Steak and Shake only so long, or White 
Castle. They're not going to let you sit there all day long, 
even if you do buy a cup of coffee. At some point, their 
hospitality is going to run out.

We also need a statewide bill for persons experiencing 
homelessness. And in fact, this has been done before. 
Puerto Rico in 1998 was the first territory to enact a Bill 
of Rights. And then Rhode Island was the first state that 
did it (Rankin, 2015).

Typically, they're called a Homeless Bill of Rights, but 
Homeless Bill of Rights does not reflect person first 
language, so I'd love to see it renamed a Bill of Rights 
for People Experiencing Homelessness or some other 
kind of life-giving name. A statewide Bill of Rights 
would do several things, one, it would hopefully deter 
localities from continuing to criminalize homelessness. 
It would also need to have teeth in it for legal 
enforcement. It also would need to affirm the existing 
rights that people have (Rankin, 2015). 

For example, it would prevent police harassment in 
public spaces, and also protect the privacy of the person 
experiencing homelessness from search and seizure. Just 

because your stuff is in a public place doesn't mean the 
police should have the right to automatically grab your 
stuff, throw it away or search. 
 
Related to advocacy, how can community members 
who are experiencing homelessness advocate for 
themselves and others?  

The whole idea of thinking about people who are 
experiencing homelessness and being advocates for 
themselves is challenging. If people are in survival 
mode, they can't spend a whole lot of time being an 
advocate for change. 
 
Criminalization is at issue for many who are 
experiencing homelessness how might we safeguard 
the agency of individuals who are experiencing 
homelessness?     

Criminalizing homelessness is incredibly expensive. It's 
also very dangerous because what it does is it pushes 
people farther and farther out to more and more remote 
places where they can't access services. 

If you look up what happened with Maurice’s camp 
when it was destroyed. All that stuff was dumped. 
Literally dumped. Yes, I know we now have an 
ordinance here in Indianapolis, but if you read the 
language carefully there are loopholes in it that it's pretty 
easy for peoples’ stuff to get destroyed. It says they 
have to store it for 60 days. Well, if you're experiencing 
homelessness, you may face many obstacles to getting it 
back. What are you going to do after 60 days? It's most 
likely going to be destroyed.

Now your insulin is gone. Let's say you had your birth 
certificate in your tent. Now it's gone.  If you were to 
lose your housing today, what would be the items you 
would take? The things you could just not live without. 
You take your birth certificate, you take your Social 
Security card, you would take your medications, your 
toothbrush, your underwear. 

When you think about the criminalization of 
homelessness and the destroying of camps, those are the 
things that go missing.



ENGAGE!  |  h o m e l e s s n e s s  &  h o u s i n g  i n s ec u r i t y 20

I N T E R V I E W :  C O N C E R N S  O F  P E O P L E  
E X P E R I E N C I N G  H O M E L E S S N E S S

There is an economic vulnerability that impacts 
so many people and the high costs and substantial 
increase in the cost of housing. Is economics the 
biggest problem? What else is at issue? 

The underlying issue of why we don't have enough 
affordable housing, why we have the criminalization 
of homelessness, all of it, is dehumanization. We don't 
view people that are in extreme poverty as human as 
much as we view ourselves as human. We don't look 
at their feelings, their emotions, their values, their life 
story, their experiences.

Instead, we other them into the label, ‘the homeless.’ 
You're now ‘homeless,’ and in that moment, they 
lose their face. They lose their agency; they lose their 
feelings. We can then justify treating them in ways that 
are less than how we would want to be treated.

If we really care about people in the United States, we 
can eradicate homelessness. According to the National 
Low Income Housing Coalition, the U.S. is short 7.4 
million units of affordable housing (Aurand et al., 2022). 
We need to build that affordable housing —and not 
for 60% of the area median income. I think instead of 
basing affordable housing on the area median income, 
we need to base it on the federal poverty guideline.

We really need to build affordable housing for the lowest 
of the low-income folks. We need to have low-income 
housing that a person on Social Security can afford 
without having to live in squalor. We have some of that 
housing, but there's not enough.  If anybody's paid any 
attention at the library, much of the population of people 
experiencing homelessness are our grandmothers and 
our grandfathers. It is a travesty and an insult to the 
United States that we are letting our older adults live on 
the street.

You can build tiny homes; you can do mixed-income 
housing. You can do more Section 8 vouchers. There are 
so many things that you can do that are a better use of 
our money than criminalization.

Then next comes economics. We don't have a living 
wage. You can look at the MIT living wage (https://
livingwage.mit.edu/states/18) calculator and for a family 
of four, two working adults and two kids in Indianapolis, 

you need to have both working parents each earning 
$22.40 an hour to make it. 

We don't have a living wage. We need to get a living 
wage. We need more affordable housing, more Section 
8 vouchers. We need to understand that SNAP and 
TANF do not meet the gap between minimum wage 
and a living wage. Still, you cannot reach the cost 
of affordable housing. We need a lot more mental 
health treatment. We need a lot more substance abuse 
treatment.

This is my own personal bent, but there's a lot of 
research evidence to back it up.

Aurand, A. et al. (2022). The Gap: A shortage of 
affordable homes. National Low Income Housing 
Coalition. https://nlihc.org/gap

Rankin, S. K. (2015). A homeless bill of rights 
(revolution). Seton Hall L. Rev., 45, 383.

Provence, M. A. (2023). Changing how libraries respond 
to patrons experiencing homelessness in crisis: How 
library social workers are perceived to reduce reliance 
on law enforcement. Journal of the Australian Library 
and Information Association, 72(4), 376-399.

References




