When state police evicted the residents of the Wagner Rd. homeless encampment known as “Camp Take Notice” in 2012, Peggy Lynch says opening her home to the campers felt like the “authentically Christian” thing to do.

Lynch, an attorney by day, has been volunteering for nonprofits since 2000–most notably the Ukrainian Children’s Aid and Relief Effort (UCARE), with whom Lynch traveled to Ukraine thirteen times in twelve years. She says she “fell in love” with the way UCARE enabled her to “make an enormous difference in many, many lives with minimal resources.” Then her friend Dan Reim, a priest at St. Mary Student Parish, introduced her to Camp Take Notice, and she found a new cause. “Although I had witnessed poverty in Detroit and Ukraine, I was not prepared for the destitution I witnessed so close to my own home,” Lynch says.

In 2010 Lynch helped found MISSION A2–the “Michigan Itinerant Shelter System–Interdependent Out of Necessity.” The nonprofit provided support services to the camp and connected it to Ann Arbor’s faith community. After the camp was evicted from its site along I-94, Lynch began hosting meals and meetings for its former residents at her Burns Park home. She’s since moved to W. Huron, just west of the Delonis Center.

Her new home, dubbed “Mercy House,” is one of two “houses of hospitality” the group now offers for Ann Arbor’s homeless. The idea was inspired by Lynch’s “hero,” Dorothy Day, a candidate for sainthood for her lifelong advocacy for the poor.

“The overall concept is that these are both just homes,” Lynch says. “They’re homes, and we offer hospitality in the millennia-old concept of offering hospitality to friends and strangers both.”

During a Monday night visit, Mercy House bustles with visitors. A huge tray of bread and pastries is laid out on the table, and MISSION vice president and Mercy House resident Sheri Wander sets out slices of watermelon. Homeless visitors stop by to shower, use laundry facilities, and eat or prepare food. Lynch says the organization’s main role is “gap filling,” noting that there are plenty of existing social services it doesn’t try to duplicate.

“We try to do those things that we can to put our fingers in the dike here and there,” she says. “If somebody’s starting a job tomorrow but they don’t have the right clothes or shoes to do that, or if they’re sleeping outside tonight and they don’t have a sleeping bag and haven’t been able to get one from anyone else, they would call us.”

For many of the homeless individuals who stop by this evening and sit around the long dining room table to chat, the most important gap that the houses fill is a sense of community. Seth Best, who coined the name Camp Take Notice, speaks with particular passion about the fellowship he’s found. Best, a trans man, says his sexual identity has made relations with his biological family “very strained.”

“I’ve lost that bond with family that I had before,” Best says. “Now, with Camp Take Notice and MISSION, I have that again. I have family that will celebrate my birthday, will celebrate Christmas with [me], and will celebrate other milestones that are coming up in my life.”

For Best and others, that community has a strong political element. Best describes Camp Take Notice’s eviction as “union busting,” a term echoed by another former resident, Tracy Williams. Williams is tall and long-haired, with intense eyes and deliberate speech. He waits patiently at the end of the table before telling his story. He says he repeatedly slept on the street in front of the Delonis Center when the shelter was full before discovering Camp Take Notice.

“They thought that we were going to go away,” Williams says. “We’re not going away. We’re here. We’ve been here since the dawn of time. Whether they have affordable housing, which would be awesome because it would help, there will still be people living outside. And it would be better if they lived in a community like Camp Take Notice, because you’re not just taken care of, you have people to talk to. It’s family.”

Although he does odd jobs for money, Williams says having his own place isn’t his “cup of tea.” He currently sleeps in his truck or on friends’ couches. But he says the group helps those who wish to make the transition out of homelessness.

“It actually gives people a chance to find that little bit of soul within themselves, to get a job, to get an apartment, or start a business, or whatever,” he says. “It gets them to open up little by little.”

Brandy Hill is one Mercy House regular who recently made that transition back to permanent housing. Hill and her boyfriend were living in a tent when they discovered MISSION through its second “house of hospitality” on Stone School Rd. She says Lynch and Wander allowed her and her boyfriend to stay at Mercy House this winter, and engaged her in work at the Delonis Center’s warming center. The couple recently obtained a lifetime voucher for Section 8 housing, but Hill says she intends to stay involved with the group and the friends she made here.

“Before, everybody’s like, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?'” Hill says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know. I still ain’t grown up.’ Well, I’ve figured out what I want to do. I want to keep helping out with the people here, and, if we don’t stay in Ann Arbor, I want to find an organization anywhere that does this.”

Lynch says her group’s organizers “go overboard to be good neighbors,” a statement backed up by her next-door neighbor. David Porteous has lived in an apartment at adjacent 725 W. Huron for forty years. Porteous says Lynch is “beyond reproach” when it comes to maintaining the property and that he has “no complaints” about the regular stream of visitors.

“A lot of the people are a bit on the rough side and loud, but on the whole they keep to themselves,” Porteous says. “They’re respectful of their neighbors, even though they don’t live there.”

The group’s political agenda comes more to the fore during a visit one month later to the house on Stone School Rd., commonly referred to as the “Purple House” for its lavender-and-teal paint job. MISSION purchased the house in 2013, partially supported by a $100,000 anonymous donation. Despite the color scheme, Purple House is still easy to miss from the street because it’s tucked back on a 3.5-acre piece of property. Only the constant noise from I-94, which abuts the property’s northern boundary, mars the pastoral setting.

The house has a long, inviting front porch–a collaborative construction project between several local Presbyterian churches–and the large backyard is well kept and inviting on this warm summer evening. Across a makeshift wooden bridge that crosses Malletts Creek, the rest of the property is considerably more overgrown and not currently in use–although organizers are out to change that.

The group has been advocating for special permission to create a “tiny house” community on that eastern section of the property. Tiny houses, generally defined as homes of fewer than 400 square feet, have gained national exposure since the 2008 financial crisis as an affordable way for the financially disadvantaged to attain housing. MISSION is seeking a zoning variance to allow for up to eighty tiny houses on the Stone School property, waiving city requirements that new homes must have parking, sewer, water, and electricity. Instead, a communal building would provide utilities for all.

The tiny house community concept has gained traction with Ann Arbor’s city council, although not necessarily on the Stone School property. Councilman Stephen Kunselman, who has repeatedly clashed with MISSION to the point that several members initiated a recall campaign against him in January, brought forth a resolution in June to create a downtown tiny house community on the former city maintenance yard across from the YMCA (see Inside Ann Arbor, p. 13, for another possible plan for that site). After the location raised eyebrows from Kunselman’s fellow council members and Mayor Taylor, council passed an amended version of the resolution ordering a legal review of the tiny house concept without reference to a particular site.

Kunselman, who was defeated in August’s primary and declined comment for this story, has expressed concerns that placing tiny houses on Stone School Rd. would lower property values on the south side of town, where lower-income housing is already concentrated. MISSION board member Brian Durrance describes Kunselman’s motivations as “laudable” but says the group is most interested in preserving the preexisting network at Purple House instead of relocating it to a new site.

“We don’t want people to be isolated in small houses,” Durrance says. “We want them to be living together in a large community. It’s all about community.”

That community is on full display this evening, as a crowd of sixty gathers at Purple House for a memorial service for MISSION president Jimmy Hill, who died of esophageal cancer in June. After struggling with alcoholism and crack addiction, Hill lived at Camp Take Notice. Durrance was leading a volunteer effort to transport garbage out of the camp when he first met Hill, who he remembers immediately “wanted to jump in my truck and help.” Hill went through rehab, got sober, and found full-time employment but remained heavily involved with MISSION: he managed the Purple House from the time the group purchased it until he moved to Mercy House to live out his final months early this year.

Organizers, homeless friends of Hill’s, and local religious leaders offer tributes, but the most emotional comes from Tiffany Hurd, mother of three of Hill’s children. The two met in 1993 and were together for nine years. Speaking tearfully, Hurd says she was “devastated” to learn at one point that Hill was living under a bridge on Packard.

“I was always worried how he was going to leave this world,” she says. “God had a plan for him. This was God’s plan. I’m so glad that he had the opportunity to take what he went through in his life and make a difference in other people’s lives.”

Durrance describes Hill as a “role model.”

“He’s someone who rose up from the ranks and became the leader of our organization,” he says. “He’s our president, and we haven’t replaced him. He really stood as a testament to the truth that through community you can rejuvenate and take control of your life.”

MISSION board member Caleb Poirier lauds Hill’s continuing willingness to speak publicly, at city council meetings and elsewhere, about his experience with homelessness even after leaving behind darker chapters of his life. Poirier, thirty-eight, struggled with depression in his mid-twenties, leading to his firing from his job as a paramedic at U-M after he missed too much work. Ashamed to impose on his family and “not able to be responsible enough to show up for work,” Poirier moved to Seattle to live in tent cities there, which he says “fascinated and impressed” him. Poirier brought the concept of a tent city back to Michigan and is widely credited with starting Camp Take Notice about ten years ago.

Poirier is no longer homeless and says he’s never been “thrilled” to speak publicly about his own experience. But he, like Hill, has continued to advocate for homeless people. Poirier says he found Seattle’s tent cities inspiring as a way for the homeless to collaborate in changing their own lives. But he says longer-term solutions, like permanent supportive services and low-income housing, are needed.

“I don’t believe that tent cities are the solution,” Poirier says. “I think they’re a very small piece of the bigger solution. Oftentimes the role that they play is making a problem that was present, but not visible, visible to the larger city. People coalesce around solutions when they start to see the problem that they didn’t see before.”

Lynch echoes Poirier’s observation. The houses of hospitality, she says, aren’t a solution to homelessness, but they are a way to “uphold basic human dignity and mitigate the isolation and pain” of the homeless. In a way, Camp Take Notice and other tent cities Lynch visited have galvanized her in exactly the way Poirier describes.

“My single most powerful experience was the generous, creative, compassionate, funny, and sometimes broken humanity of tent city residents,” Lynch says. “That experience catalyzes many ordinary people, including me, to find ways to help.”

This article has been edited since it was published in the September 2015 Ann Arbor Observer. The attempted recall of Steve Kunselman was organized by MISSION members, but not by the organization itself.