Jessie Makohon, from Portland, Ore., and Byll Monahan, from Exton, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb, are two of the three full-time volunteers working at CHM’s campus on Detroit’s near west side.
They and a third volunteer reside in the Sam G. Joseph House of Hope, built in 2009 and officially named in honor of CHM’s founder and executive director at a May 12 dedication ceremony.
“It’s been wonderful, challenging, fun and exciting — the most significant experience I’ve ever had in my life,” said Makohon, 26, of her experience since coming to Covenant House Michigan last September after two weeks of training at Covenant House in New York City.
Makohon earned her bachelor’s degree from Eastern Washington University and a master’s in counseling from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, but encountered a dearth of jobs for counselors without experience, she said.
“I prayed on it, and said, ‘God, I want to do Your will for the next two years,” Makohon recalled, and said she learned about the Covenant House opportunity.
“I figured what better experience could I get than working in a homeless shelter for a year,” Makohon said about her decision to enter the Covenant House Community of Faith program.
“I had always wanted to work with the homeless, and with youth in particular,” she said.
After she completes her year with CHM, she hopes to spend another year in a volunteer program in Latin America.
Monahan, 23, said he wanted to do a year of service somewhere after graduating from Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa., with a bachelor’s degree in English.
“I felt I had been very blessed, and having been blessed, wanted to give something back. I looked into the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen — and Covenant House kept popping up when I searched for alternatives,” Monahan said.
He said he had hoped to work with the homeless, and especially with homeless youth.
For Monahan, who plans to become a teacher — and said he would most like to teach at his old school, Bishop Shanahan High School in Downingtown, Pa. — the work he is doing is right in his field.
“I want to be an English teacher, and these are youth that don’t know how to write, and that don’t know how to read,” he said.
But some of them have a gift for poetry, “and the poetry of the homeless is like nothing you’ve ever heard,” Monahan added.
Both Makohon and Monahan work with the 18- to 23-year-olds in CHM’s Rites of Passage program, where young people who have already been through the intake process of its Crisis program spend up to two years getting prepared for productive, self-supporting independent living.
Those who complete the program emerge with a job, enough money to make their initial deposits on rent and utilities, and the life skills to live successfully on their own.
The full-time volunteers in CHM’s Community of Faith program receive room and board plus a stipend of $20 a week for expenses. While that doesn’t provide them with the financial wherewithal to afford to do very much in their free time, they both said Covenant House supporters had been very generous in seeing to it that they experience Detroit’s ethnic restaurants, sporting events and places of interest.
For both Makohon and Monahan, the experience of working at CHM has had a strong connection to their faith lives.
“Several times a week we intentionally come together for prayer, but the work is such that we are almost in a constant state of prayer, giving our time, talent and treasure in God’s service,” Monahan said.
He said the faith lives of the volunteers are strengthened by “the people we serve, the people we live with, and the God that we love.”
“There’s a lot of faith put into the faith community — that’s for sure,” Monahan added.
Makohon said she has valued the program’s opportunities for prayer and reflection, and added that she considers the experience in the light of Christ’s words in Luke 9-10-11, where He says that if we knock, the door will be opened to us.
“The door opened, and the blessings just poured,” she said.
The Sam G. Joseph House of Hope can accommodate up to eight volunteers, four in the men’s wing and four in the women’s wing, with all sharing common areas such as the living room and kitchen.
