His job, his mission in life, was to connect with the homeless people of Providence. Just to connect with them. After food, water and warmth connection is the most important human need and John Joyce figured if we couldn’t provide the first three he would provide the fourth.

Also today, I saw this short article in the New York Times. It’s about Providence resident and art curator Cade Tomkins. Like Joyce, Tompkins also caters to a specific demographic in Providence. But it isn’t the homeless…

Ms. Tompkins has upholstered a chaise longue with fabric by Serena Perrone, who makes silk-screened photolithographs that meld images recalling Japanese Edo woodcuts with domestic Western objects and architecture. The fabric is called Biwa, after a lake in Japan, and it is hand-printed to order by Ryan Parker and Shelby Donnelly, technicians for the artists, for $495 a yard with a 12-yard minimum.

That’s almost $6,000 for the material alone for a chair that will probably not be sat in all that much. Such a sum could easily provide food, water and warmth for many of Joyce’s constituents.

I don’t know Cade Tomkins, and I definitely do not mean to imply she is doing anything wrong by making an expensive chair. My honest guess is that she is a wonderful person and it surely a beautiful chair.

Whether you want to sit in it or not, that super expensive chair is a really important component of Rhode Island’s economy. So are the homeless, like them or not.

If you can afford to buy this chair, please support a modest income tax increase so Rhode Island can keep John Joyce’s work alive now that he isn’t. What good is it anyways to look at a super beautiful chair at home if you have to see people freezing to death on the way to the Capital Grille?

“So you overcame inner demons and homelessness to become a 24-hour-a-day advocate and activist for the most downtrodden people in all of society,” St. Peter would have noted approvingly while perusing Joyce’s impressive karmic resume.

And if the Almighty’s criteria is anything like mine, then John Joyce gets the fluffiest corner cloud on the heavenly block. “We’ve reserved a special suite for you, Mr. Joyce,” St. Peter would say with a smile as he shakes Joyce’s hand with a respect reserved for only the most deserving residents. “Your new neighbors Gandhi and Mother Teresa will show you the way.”

I didn’t know John Joyce all that well but I knew him well enough to know that he exemplified almost everything that, to my mind, makes someone good – from the meta to the micro. His life was dedicated to social justice and he never, ever missed an opportunity to let someone know that he cared.

His famous farewell – “be safe” – spoke to both his intentions and his experiences. I don’t believe he cared if anyone was happy until everyone was safe. And damn near every time he delivered that line to me I was forced to remember that there are people out there who can’t afford to take even their personal safety for granted. It was more than a pleasantry, it was a powerful political statement.

My guess is younger John Joyce would never imagine maturing into an activist, but he’s probably among the most noteworthy progressive crusaders Rhode Island has known in a long time. He cut his chops political chops during the Tent City movement in Providence, when a group of homeless people set up their own attempt at utopia on a vacant city lot. He was an influential figure behind the scenes with Occupy Providence. He’s a co-founder of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project. He authored and ushered-through the nation’s first ever Homeless Bill of Rights.

He spent his days both mingling with the least fortunate and fighting the most powerful. There were times I’d see him taking care of a dirty drunk on Westminster Street in the morning, then in the afternoon I’d see him giving hell to a stuffed suit at the State House. He had all the wrong friends and all the right enemies.

Yet, I can’t recall ever not seeing that signature smile on his face. He lived through and worked every day with the most impoverished situations in Rhode Island and he seemingly never stopped smiling. Even when he told me he had terminal cancer, he still wore that same fuck-you smile. It takes a special kind of soul to wear a shit-eating grin when discussing your own impending death.

That was his gift. He looked even death in the face and smiled. No wonder he was able to beat the streets.

Whether there’s a heaven or not, I don’t worry at all for my friend John Joyce. He’s a survivor and he’ll be just fine where ever he is now. Rhode Island, on the other hand, lost an irreplaceable activist last week and one of our all-time great progressive heroes.

It is with great sadness that the Coalition for the Homeless and our constituents say goodbye to a dear friend and an incomparable advocate, John Joyce. John was the co-founder of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP), a grassroots organization that works to engage homeless and formerly homeless individuals in outreach and advocacy efforts to end homelessness.

John was the author of the Rhode Island Homeless Bill of Rights, a landmark law that ensures no Rhode Islander without a home will be discriminated against based on his or her housing status. Prior to this legislative victory, John collaborated with RIHAP to introduce and pass the Homeless Hate Crime bill. In addition to his advocacy work, John served as an outreach worker for the Home Base program at the Providence Center, assisting countless constituents.

John helped to organize the first tent city in Providence in January 2009 in response to a lack of shelter beds for homeless constituents. John continued to fight to ensure there is adequate space in the emergency shelter system but wholeheartedly believed in affordable housing as the solution to homelessness. As someone who had experienced homelessness himself, John was not afraid to speak truth to power and recognized that homelessness in Rhode Island will only end if those who are homeless have a voice in the process.

We will join the community in celebrating John’s life on Thursday, February 21, with a memorial with visitation beginning at 9 am at Beneficent Congregational Church, 300 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI. The memorial service will be at 11 am, in the church, with a reception and luncheon to follow. All are welcome.

John Joyce, a tireless activist for and loyal friend to the homeless community in Rhode Island, passed away last night. He was 50 years old.

“We are all better for knowing him,” said Jim Ryczek, his good friend and colleague at the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless.

He passed away at home last night with his partner Megan Smith by his side. She sang to him his favorite song as he left this life. He had lung cancer that had spread into his bones.

Joyce became an accomplished political activist; he was the author and driving force behind the passage of the nation’s first Homeless Bill of Rights last year and he was a strong presence at the State House, incessantly lobbying legislators to take action to end homelessness in Rhode Island. His greatest political asset was his ability to speak frankly with people.

His greatest accomplishment may have been beating the streets themselves. He was a laborer by trade earlier in life but a couple bad breaks left him homeless in Providence. He spent many a winter night sleeping outside near Rhode Island Hospital. Always a fighter, Joyce was able to find transitional housing, and then a job.

Whatever his job title happened to be in what he often called the “homeless industrial complex” his role was to serve as a liaison between the system and the homeless. He spent all day, and often long nights, hanging out in downtown Providence, helping people find services or trading in political gossip. He was equally adept at both.

For those of us fortunate to have known him, we will always remember his signature good-bye and wish it to him in whatever comes after this life: “Be safe, brother.”

And while Rhode Islanders should be proud of the law we passed, we should also take a moment to be grateful to the person most responsible for its passage: John Joyce.

Formerly homeless himself, Joyce now advocates for those in the position he once found himself in. And no one does it any better than he does. He not only wrote the first draft of the bill, he could be found at the State House almost every day of the legislative session lobbying for its passage.

At one point, near the end of the legislative session when the bill was seeming like a long shot, he even made handouts depicting House Speaker Gordon Fox and Nicholas Mattiello as old west outlaws with the words “wanted” over their mugshots because the two were seen as impediments to the bill.

So congratulations, Rhode Island, on being the first state in the country to pass a Homeless Bill of Rights. And congratulations to John Joyce for successfully shepherding it through the legislative process  … I for one am very glad my community has both this law in particular and John Joyce in general.

Be safe, John.

Come celebrate today at the State House an area of public policy in which Rhode Island is leading the nation: protecting the rights of homeless people. That’s right, as the rest of the nation moves toward outlawing homelessness and sleeping in public places, the Ocean State is the first in the country to pass a homeless bill of rights.

“On the one hand it is a shame that we need a law like this to stop bigotry and discrimination,” said the law’s author, John Joyce, co-founder of the Homeless Advocacy Project who once lived on the streets himself. “But on the other hand it is wonderful that Rhode Island passed this law and took a stand against such discrimination.”

The celebration is at 1:30, and Gov. Chafee will be there.

Speaking of being homeless, a new luxury condo development proposed for a rural area of Barrington could leave the endangered diamondback terrapins that leave nearby without a place to live … it’s high time we decide as a culture that human profit cannot trump the rights of other living things to simply exist.

In North Kingstown, its the school janitors who may end being on the streets, as the School Committee has fired 26 custodial workers and plans to replace them by outsourcing the work to a private company, which says it will hire back the laid-off employees at “the company’s ‘enhanced wage,'” according to North Kingstown Patch. By the way, “enhanced wage” = less health benefits and no collective bargaining rights. This is nothing more union-busting, and the NK School Committee should be ashamed to employ such a tactic.

The MaddowBlog reacts to conservative Woonsocket Rep Jon Brien’s assertion that he didn’t support the supplemental tax bill because it would be easier to win concessions if the situation was more dire. “What the ALEC lawmaker is describing is government by fear. The policy choice is between trying to fix a city by starving it or reinvesting in it.”

Congrats to Rhode Island for finally updating its public records law, and thanks to Common Cause RI for working so hard on its passage … that said, it is patently ridiculous that elected officials emails and other written communications are exempt from the law. This is the exact stuff that should be covered, and we trust that John Marion of Common Cause will be back in the halls of the State House next year fighting for further reform.