“Every town—whether you know it or not—has somebody who’s living outside,” said Mark Boorse, Director of Community Development at Access Services, speaking at Main Line Unitarian Church’s Lecture Lunch on Sept. 10. “So how do we help the community respond to that need? And what’s the role of the faith community in leading that response?”
Boorse has spent more than four decades at Access Services, which began in 1976 as a small nonprofit and now runs programs for people with mental health needs, intellectual disabilities, and substance use disorders. For the last decade, he has focused on housing and homelessness, a shift that he describes as both professional and personal calling. “The Venn diagram of my calling and my career is huge,” he told the audience.
He laid out what he calls the cycle of homelessness: surviving outdoors, finding temporary shelter, and finally securing housing. At every stage, there are gaps. “If you become newly homeless tonight and call for help, we have to tell you there isn’t a way to get you inside,” he said. “So the first question becomes: how do we help people while they’re still outside?”
When Access Services launched its street outreach program in 2017, the team tracked roughly 150 people living outdoors in Montgomery County. Today, the official number is closer to 600, with many more cycling between couches, motels, or other unstable arrangements. Behind the statistics are individuals like Marty, a man in his fifties Boorse met in a Pottstown tent. After years of reluctance, declining health pushed Marty indoors to a subsidized apartment in Norristown. “On paper, it’s a win—he’s inside,” Boorse said. “But it’s only kind of a win, because now he’s disconnected from the people and the things that made his life work. Services don’t create community. That has to come from the community.”
From there, Boorse drew a sharp line between relief and justice. Relief, he said, is helping people survive on the streets and in temporary shelters—“getting a roof overhead, a hot meal, maybe a shower.” Justice means preventing homelessness in the first place: creating genuinely affordable housing, reforming zoning, reducing evictions. “You can’t charity your way to affordable housing,” he said.
Quoting Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Boorse reminded the audience: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Boorse also pressed on affordability. “People need to pay five hundred dollars for a place to live, and that does not exist,” he said. “We talk about ‘affordable housing’ at thirteen or fifteen hundred. If you’re working full time at fifteen dollars an hour, maybe you can pay six hundred. That’s the gap.”
And he warned against what he called “pop-up relief”—food drops or coat drives that appear without coordination. “Find the gap, don’t overlap,” he urged. “Sometimes that means joining what already exists, not starting something new.”
Nearly fifty people attended the talk, which followed a shared lunch of various grilled meats, sauerkraut, and salad. Lecture Lunch is a monthly MLUC tradition that pairs a meal with conversation; this month’s program connected directly to the congregation’s Housing Justice project, an initiative to partner with local organizations, educate members, and develop concrete actions to address housing insecurity.
Boorse closed with a call for proximity and collective action. “Say hi,” he told the audience, describing a simple card his team created to guide brief encounters with people living outside. “Get proximate. Find a tribe. There is something for everybody to do. We can’t all do all things, so choose where you’re best gifted and most passionate.”