John Donahue is a solid, tanklike man who seems to relish combat, verbal or otherwise. One morning last month he addressed a teeming mass of 500 homeless people gathered in the rotunda of the Illinois capitol building in Springfield. There in those august surroundings, Donahue, dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans, said he had just heard a radio report about a Chicago woman who was jailed after allowing her baby to starve to death. “What do you think will happen,” he asked, “when the first child dies after the governor’s budget cuts go into effect? Will Jim Edgar go to jail? Will the legislators who voted for the cuts go to jail?”
And so the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless–an advocacy, lobbying, direct-action organization with some 300 active members (institutions and individuals) and a budget this year of $287,000–is taking on the responsibility of stemming the tide. And John Donahue is the man in charge.
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Doug Dobmeyer, executive director of the Public Welfare Coalition, says, “When Les Brown said he was leaving, everybody wondered how he could be replaced. This isn’t a job for a timid person, someone who’s going to take baby steps, accept partial solutions. And that’s not John Donahue either. He’s a strong, innovative leader, the sort who won’t take no for an answer. He’ll do fine.” It may also be that the board welcomed Donahue’s distance from the squabbles within the coalition. Or perhaps they decided the candidate best suited for the job should have some experience with third-world dictatorships.
To understand Donahue’s single-mindedness in the face of intransigent institutions, it is necessary to consider his activity in Panama back in the 70s. He was a Catholic priest in those days, and he was in Panama as one member of a team of Chicago priests who had established a mission at San Miguelito, a rapidly growing squatters’ community on the outskirts of Panama City. When the first contingent of clergy arrived in 1962, some 2,000 campesinos who had trekked in from the jungles seeking opportunity lived there. By the time Donahue left in 1978, San Miguelito had sprouted into a mini-metropolis of 250,000, with 15 parishes and a life of its own. But the mission became widely known not so much for its rapid growth as for its new ideas. Father Leo Mahon, the Chicago priest who established the parish and oversaw its operation for many years, was a pioneer in forming small groups of the poor to read the Bible and interpret its meaning for their own lives.
Donahue was determined to identify fully with the people of San Miguelito. Instead of living with the other priests in a central location, he built himself a hut of corrugated tin and cinder blocks similar to the ramshackle abodes of most squatters. His house, which lacked plumbing and electricity, was in a neighborhood called Samaria, where the newest and poorest arrivals lived. “You couldn’t help but be impressed with the scenery of the area,” he says, “the mountains and the lush tropical forests. Even the fence posts sprouted. And here in the middle of it all, this awful poverty.”
