Bob Cote

Bob Coté, the homeless man turned homeless shelter pioneer whom I wrote about last month, used to say, “Work works.” By that he meant not only that work brings in money but also that it brings purpose and community. Paul the apostle also spoke about helping others: Do something useful with your hands, he wrote in Ephesians 4:28. Paul’s injunction to church members was strong: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ…we give you this rule: ‘If man will not work, he shall not eat.’ We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they Read More ›

Next month I’ll lay out my upcoming book on homelessness, but the book will only make sense if you understand the process of Step 13 and Springs Rescue Mission that I’ve laid out in this first quarter of the year — so here’s part of an interview I did with Bob Coté 16 years ago. Olasky: Does the step-by-step process to moving upstairs and getting a better room really work? Coté: They want to get up there. I have 12 full-time employees, but really I have 52, because I have 40 people with a year or even two years of residence and they take ownership of Step 13. They’ll say, “Hey, we don’t write on the walls here,” and the Read More ›

This year I’ve written about what I learned in Colorado Springs at the Springs Rescue Mission. But when I stayed there last year, I also thought of the pioneer who, starting in 1983, built a predecessor of SRM just up the highway in Denver. His name: Bob Coté, a six-foot-three-inch ex-amateur boxer who in his forties changed his life by not drinking his usual half gallon of vodka for lunch. Instead, he poured out the bottle’s contents and became in 1983 one of the original residents of a new program, Step 13. Bob became Director of Operation and then Executive Director, pouring what he had learned as a homeless alcoholic into a program that challenged rather than coddled men seen Read More ›