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By ROBERT GOLDBERG

Mary is a 30-year-old single parent of three children. She left high school before graduating.  Over the years, Mary has worked as a housekeeper in hotels, as a nurse’s aide, and as a temp. Mary and her kids sleep in a shelter.

Joe is a professional-looking man in his 40s whose wife’s illnesses depleted their family’s savings. When she died, he fell into depression, lost his job and then his home. He had been a bookkeeper and office manager. Joe sleeps in his car.

Like millions of people, Mary and Joe have experienced terrible hardship, and both are determined to turn their lives around. Both are clients of Greensboro’s Interactive Resource Center, where they are participants in IRC’s Employment Skills program, taught over the past year by volunteer Fred Werstlein, and more recently, by me.

The IRC provides 17 different services to about 200 people per day who are experiencing homelessness. These services include meals, showers, clothes, laundry room, onsite nurse, counseling, a computer lab and the Employment Skills program. The staff is laser-focused on helping their clients attain stable housing and re-enter the mainstream.

The Employment Skills program teaches skills such as completing applications and conducting interviews. But the true lessons of the program are not about interview questions. The program is about reclaiming your life.

What does this mean? When I conduct “rehearsal” interviews as part of the training, participants rarely disclose anything significant; they provide either one-word answers or cliché responses they learned by rote long ago.

But when we simply engage them in conversation and learn about their backgrounds, I am so moved I am forced to choke back tears. Mary volunteers in her children’s school every week, teaching her own kids’ classmates how to read. She talks about how she disciplines the children while promoting their feelings of self-esteem. Joe worked for two decades in the advertising business as an accounting manager. Their stories are unique. They have something to contribute that is valuable and productive.

But our clients are so beaten down by their circumstances that they often buy in to the notion that they have little or nothing to contribute. The tapes in their heads play over and over, “You should be ashamed, you are not worthy.” We simply help them tell their stories in a way employers would welcome, to convince them that, as Fred Werstlein says, “your situation is not your destination.”

And what about the costs of homelessness? If you are a financially oriented person, contemplate who pays.

If Mary continues on her current path, the likelihood of her children not finishing high school and ending up dependent on public support is enormously high. Calculate those costs. And what of Joe? Who paid for his wife’s health care after they lost their insurance? The answer is we all pay. We pay financially, and we pay even more significantly through a corrosion of our moral integrity.

Many of us have stopped for a red light at an intersection, perhaps on Holden or on Battleground. There, a woman holds up a cardboard sign soliciting for money, perhaps asking for work. What do you do? If you are like most, you nod carefully, hoping the light will quickly turn green. That had been me: comfortable in my leather-seated sedan, but uncomfortable being confronted with the hard edge of someone else’s desolation. Like most, I was accustomed to seeing the homeless as “nonpersons,” or blamed them for their own weakness. I looked away.

I cannot speak for anyone else’s transformation but my own. Since my experience volunteering at the IRC, I appreciate people experiencing homelessness as individuals, not as “street people.” I carry  nonperishable bags of food in my car to distribute at street corners. I grasp the importance of housing for people experiencing homelessness and feel obligated to help. When I now see “those people,” I see me, or the possibility of me. And when you experience yourself in others’ despair, you can’t help but be transformed.

It is easy to talk about mercy while we casually cut programs and funds that support those most in need. This is the essence of moral corrosion — an intentional lack of compassion. But if we do not support the neediest among us, helping them find gainful employment, live in stable housing and make enough money to contribute to the greater good by paying their own taxes, we bankrupt our society, not only financially but morally as well.

And in case you are curious about the people in this article, they are composites of clients I’ve met at the IRC. Composites, but their names might be familiar — Mary and Joe. Where have you seen those names before?

Robert Goldberg is president of Organization Insight, a consulting firm that helps organizations become more competitive by developing their leaders and teams. Email: rgoldberg@orginsight.com