Walking around Barbara Bennett Park in Reno on a Saturday anytime before noon or around the downtown area on Sundays in the afternoon you will often spot a guy in a t-shirt and shorts wearing his sports shoes, carrying a drawstring bag on his back and donning colorful head caps and shades.
If you look closer, you will notice he’s handing out food to members of the houseless community or carrying clothes to be given to a particular person on the street. Spencer Banda, 23, does not only do community outreach but often personally engages the unhoused to understand why the person has reached the situation they are in.
“We are often very unwilling to look at it as a human issue,” he told Our Town Reno during a recent interview, speaking about general conceptions of the unhoused. “And instead we look at it as an economic issue, we look at it like a property damage issue, we look at it as a crime issue instead of imagining ourselves in these people's shoes, because we've kind of internalized this narrative that it's impossible to get into a situation of houselessness if you didn't do something wrong. I think that is incredibly toxic and it just makes people blame some of the most vulnerable people for their condition, regardless of what they know about this person and it also takes away a lot of our humanity in talking about them.”
He says he is shocked by how people react to the unhoused on social media. “Whenever the topic shifts to things that have to do with houselessness, everybody on the political spectrum suddenly becomes a fascist and they're totally okay with whatever treatment these people receive with the idea that they are somehow dirty, they're forfeited their basic human rights by virtue of whatever they have allegedly done to find themselves in this situation.”
Banda is in charge of one of the Sierra Kids before and after school programs at a local elementary school. However, since he has graduated from university and has time on weekends and in-between his work shifts, he volunteers with different groups around town that are committed to working for the houseless in terms of outreach and mutual aid. He is actively participating in multiple aid initiatives.
He gets together with the Washoe Food not Bombs on Saturdays. “We try to cook homemade meals and serve them down at one of the parks by the river as well as different food donations that we get from community members or organizations, businesses that are able to spare some extra food,” he explained of that group’s outreach. “And we just go for two hours every Saturday and hand out stuff and just talk with the people who are there. By this point a lot of us know by first name and they know us and they enjoy being there even just for the conversations. Oftentimes they don't, a lot of people don't get people to talk to. Most of them have friends and maybe significant others or who are kind of out there with them, but some people don't and so that is something valuable that we try to provide as well.”
On Sundays, Banda dedicates about five to seven hours to the Reno Burrito Project. “We meet at a central location every Sunday. We receive donations of meat and beans and rice, and we cook our own sometimes too, as well as the tortillas,” he said. “And we usually, in the last year or so rolled 400 to 600 burritos every Sunday. We take it out in a bunch of coolers and wagons with other kinds of stuff like snacks whether it's like cliff bars or fresh fruit, we always bring out water. And then if we have maybe clothing, socks, shoes, just literally any kind of thing that we can imagine, somebody who's living on the streets could use, we put it in a wagon and take it out, every Sunday.”
He is also a part of the group called Family Soup Mutual Aid which donates food and hygiene products or other basic necessities near the Believe Plaza in Reno on Tuesday evenings.
“I've never actually been able to participate in distribution because I work,” he said of his help for that relatively new group. “But I always try to go for the sorting which is on Monday nights just to help them and figure out like okay this box is like sweaters. This box is pants or whatever…”
Banda also actively helps out at the Northern Nevada International Center (NNIC), in terms of helping newly arrived refugees.
“Last year around the time that Kabul in Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, [I] realized like, oh, there's gonna be a lot of people, like who need to leave that country and come here. And I have a lot of privileges. I have a working car, for example. I have a little bit of extra money, I have time. So I was like, anything I can give to people to get situated in a situation that is really terrible in so many different and unique ways for each person and each family,” he said of helping with the resettlement process. “So for them, I am just a part of a bunch of just group chats, where they send out a message and say, ‘Hey, such and such a family needs to go grocery shopping, such and such a family to go get clothes such and such a family needs somebody to help them walk their kids to school.’ Just any conceivable thing that you could imagine, somebody who came here for the first time, often doesn't speak much English could need that NNIC tries to have volunteers help out with that, even, even to the point of like English tutoring and stuff which I'm signed up for, but hasn't quite started because there's a lot of logistics in that involved in that that haven't been sorted out yet.”
Born in South Dakota to an American mother and a father of Zambian origin, Banda has a unique perspective of the problems that are existing in today’s society, including what’s helping and what’s compounding struggles.
“There's a kind of commitment to not solving the problem, but mitigating the negative effects, which ends up in a lot of times being very dehumanizing toward a lot of people in all sorts of areas and again, this is something that is not unique at all to the way that we treat houselessness and extreme poverty,” he said.
“I think it's similar to the way we treat things like immigration from Central America where there's a lot of issues that American demand for drugs is causing in some of these countries that is causing people to flee. And we only care about making sure that people from Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala don't get over the border. We don't care about making or reversing some of the damage that our policies have done to their home countries so that they don't ever have to leave if they don't want to. So yeah, again, I think that's just something that we have made a normal part of our political discourse is just an aversion to talking about root causes. And instead, just focusing on whatever we can do to stop whatever negative effects that have the same with the way we do policing.”
Banda realizes that there are various reasons which can lead a person into the situation of becoming houseless, but he points to a broken health care system and high costs as a leading cause of bankruptcy.
“There's people who have written books about these topics,” he said. “I think addressing a lot of the underlying issues these material conditions that people are living in, what causes them to react in the way they do, whether that's by committing quote unquote crime or ending up on the street or ending up abusing substances. It doesn't come out of a vacuum. There's not just a type of human that just wants to be constantly impoverished. It's a situation that you find yourself in, and maybe you get to the point where you're okay with it and you get to the point where you're like, yeah, I'm fine living on the streets.”
The instant solution according to Banda is to take part in giving and helping inside the immediate community through mutual aid and activism by utilizing the different kinds of strengths people have.
“Just write down a day that you want to do something, find out who's doing something that day and then just join them,” he said to inspire others. “They always like to see new faces. I can say that from personal experience, we always love to see new people. We love to see old people who we saw 10 months ago, but who haven't been able to show up for that much time, but who show up again. So much of this space I think is very appreciative of anybody who's able to give any of their time. And there won't be at least I haven't seen a case where people are being shamed for not doing enough, because we all understand that we're all living under the same system. A lot of us are not necessarily too far from being houseless ourselves or in, just in abject poverty, whether it's houseless or not. So we're understanding, we know that it's hard and that you can't always show up, but when you can and when you want to, I think just do it.”