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“Helping the Helpless Help Themselves”

Volunteering and working in a homeless shelter is often seen as a key way in which individuals can ameliorate class differences through intergroup contact and help those being served. However, I argue that these same environments can also serve to reinforce and reproduce class boundaries. Volunteers and employees are provided a unique space in which they can feel generous and virtuous, while also maintaining cultural stereotypes of the homeless as immoral. In this article, I show how the affluent staff at a suburban homeless shelter engage in borderwork and construct moral identities for themselves in opposition to the clients. Based on 125 hours of participant observation and fourteen semistructured interviews with staff, I argue that the identity work of the staff can reinforce the very class boundaries they purport to resist. In their attempts to provide services to the homeless, they use rhetorical and physical strategies to reinforce class boundaries and create an othered status for those they served. The staff then feel good by “helping the homeless help themselves” while maintaining a safe distance from them.