In The News

Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era
Local/Business
Saturday, May 2, 2009, Lancaster, PA

Homes, sweet homes

Photos: Vinny Tennis / Intelligencer Journal
Above, Jakari Brown eats candy and wears a bit of icing from the gingerbread houses at Tabor Community Services during a gingerbread house decorating party Friday. Below, Trish Karter, CEO of Dancing Deer Baking Co., talks about homelessness at Tabor.

Icing is added to a gingerbread house at a party held by Trish Karter, CEO of Dancing Deer Baking Co., at Tabor Community
Services on Friday. Karter is on a 1,500-mile bike journey, stopping at various homeless shelters.

By SUSAN E. LINDT, Intelligencer Journal Staff

Any child would like a house made of candy, but for homeless children, a gingerbread house must appear even more magical.

On Friday at downtown Lancaster's Transitional Living Center, sugar-hopped youngsters buzzed about carrying gingerbread houses on precariously balanced cardboard squares.

But, with peppermint chimneys, gumdrop shrubs and raisins standing in for cobblestone sidewalks, these weren't just any gingerbread houses.

And Trish Karter wasn't just any visitor to TLC — after all, she'd spent the day riding her bicycle from a Baltimore homeless shelter to TLC at 105 E. King St.

On top of that, Karter — a sort of modern-day Willy Wonka — shipped all the fixings for those gingerbread houses from her Boston-based bakery, Dancing Deer Baking Co., to 15 homeless shelters from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., to New York City.

Karter, 52, wanted to bring attention to the 600,000 American families and their 1.35 million children without housing in any given year.

The entrepreneur and mother left home April 22 for a 15-day, 1,500-mile bike ride stopping at no less than 15 of the country's best-run homeless shelters. Today she heads to Philadelphia, then Trenton and on to New York City.

Karter couldn't have picked a better year for her inaugural ride from Atlanta to Boston.

"It's a tough year for everyone, including the shelters," she said. "Everybody's struggling. But it's great stopping at all these shelters because it helps them get attention."

Friday marked Day 10 on the road for Karter, whose company is in its 15th year of hiring down-on-their-luck employees who might not get jobs at more traditional companies.

It was those employees, some whom she later learned were homeless, who brought this issue to her attention. Now she donates 35 percent of her Sweet Home product sales to fight homelessness.

Karter's stop was a boost for TLC, where 51 rooms and a host of programs are available to people bridging from homelessness to stable, consistent housing. Like most programs for people who have hit hard times, TLC's business is booming in this economy.

TLC program coordinator Doug Hopwood said 40 families a month attend seminars about getting into TLC housing and related programs - a 20 percent increase from typical numbers. The seminars are often a first step before families face eviction or foreclosure and must find alternate housing in a hurry.

"The big thing is employment," Hopwood said. "There aren't as many jobs as there used to be. Middle-class workers who lost their jobs are looking for work and taking jobs from our folks. And minimum wage has never been a living wage."

Tabor Community Services, which operates TLC and scores of other programs related to housing and homelessness, is also seeing a dip in corporate and business gift-giving.

"But individual donors are still coming through for us," said Phyllis Stacks, Tabor's vice president for development. "We're still doing OK, but it is getting harder. We have waiting lists for all our programs now."