One in 10 adults does not have an official ID. A church of St. Louis is working to change that.

SF. LOUIS — A line goes out the door of a downtown Catholic church every Tuesday morning.

People don’t wait for food or shelter from the weather. They don’t want a sermon. There I am, in a corner of the campus of the University of St. Louis, because otherwise I can’t prove who I am.

“I got a check for $7. That’s how I got my name,” said Tonya Huse of St. Louis on a recent Tuesday. “I need ID to collect it.”

The Awareness at the Church of St. Francis Xavier (College). offers help to anyone without a birth certificate or state ID. Without those pieces of paper, they can’t get a job, enroll in school, or access social safety nets. Basics like housing and healthcare are out of reach.

More than 1 in 10 US adults do not have any form of government-issued ID, according to data from the American National Election Studies. The rate increases for African Americans, the elderly, the homeless, and people with disabilities. A trip to a licensing office or city hall — a minor inconvenience for many — becomes overwhelming when transportation, childcare and finances are tight, advocates say.

And the whole endeavor can feel like a catch-22: A prerequisite for a state ID is a birth certificate; a prerequisite for a birth certificate is a state ID. Legislative attempts to streamline the process have largely stalled.

Huse, 52, had to flee a domestic abuse situation about five years ago. Since then, it has moved a lot.

“I tend to lose my identity,” Huse said. “I’ve had problems with bag theft.”

She sat down at a folding table with Dave and Tina Hilliard of Pacific just after the church doors opened at 9 a.m. The Hilliards are among the two dozen regulars — most of them retired parishioners — who volunteer at Outreach.

Over the next three hours, nearly 60 people would be assisted, including a mother with two young children, a homeless veteran, a teenage girl who was single for the first time and a 70-year-old man who said he couldn’t find anything. at his home after his wife died.

Volunteers look up forms online on iPads and share directions with their cell phones. They write to-do lists on the backs of envelopes and go through lists of documents.

Some cases — especially for people who were born out of state — are more difficult than others.

But Huse had arrived ready. Inside a backpack that matched her fingernails, she pulled out a resource guide scrawled with notes. He had his birth certificate, proof of residence and social security number.

“You’re so incredibly organized,” Tina told her.

Dave filled out a Huse voucher to cover the $18 ID fee. Tina gave her bus passes to get to the license office in the Central West End and back to her friend’s house where she was staying. They mapped out the route Huse would take from the bus station. Tina showed him a picture of which building to look for.

Huse hadn’t received her disability checks from her friend, she said, so Dave called on her behalf. Tina handed Huse a flyer of local food distribution centers and directed her to the back of the room, where sandwiches and snacks were available—some fuel for the trip.

“I’m so grateful you came today,” Tina said.

As soon as Huse stood up, the next person sat down. Slow days don’t happen at Outreach.

About 30 years ago, parishioners at College Church, known for their social justice bent, started what is officially called the Birth Certificate and Identification Program. More than 3,000 customers come every year.

The demand can seem endless.

“We could continue to do this work for another 30 years and things won’t change unless we look at the systemic barriers,” said Christine Dragonette, director of social ministry at College Church. “This is under-researched and not talked about much.”

People who have never been without an ID sometimes take for granted how many hoops they have to jump through to get one, Dragonette said: finding the right documents, getting transportation to the right offices, paying the fees. About 40% of Outreach’s clients live in temporary housing; State IDs are sent by mail, which makes their receipt uncertain.

Nationally, Arizona attorney Kat Calvin has been beating the drum for accessible identification since she founded Project ID action fund in 2016 in response to a growing number of state voter ID laws. In last month’s presidential election, there were 35, compared to 27 four years ago.

But early on, Calvin realized that being able to vote wasn’t the primary motivation for people seeking ID.

“They had a bigger problem,” Calvin said.

This is based on the reasons given by customers at College Church. Last summer, Ebony Woods of Jennings was out of work. In July, Woods, 32, went to Outreach for a birth certificate. Now she is a cashier at McDonald’s.

“It was really good,” Woods said. “It was very easy.”

After employment, home insurance is the next priority. Everything else—banking, medical appointments, legal services, school registration—follows. Then vote.

“All these hard problems are related to the problem of identification,” Dragonette said. “It’s a gateway to other things.”

For years, the Outreach staff has wanted to expand its scope. Several nonprofits offer similar services to specific demographic groups: young adults, the homeless, veterans.

But Outreach welcomes anyone. Their annual budget of approximately $65,000 is funded primarily through grants.

In 2019, the staff formed Missouri State ID Access Coalition to share its model with other agencies.

The coalition lobbied for a law that provides one State Free ID to Missouri residents who wish to vote. The nonprofit worked with the Department of Revenue to create a document that allows people in temporary housing to use address of a homeless service provid to receive Missouri State ID.

The Missouri Coalition is the only statewide organization focused on obtaining identification, according to Calvin, the Project ID Action Fund.

“They’re really leading the charge,” she said.

Two years ago, College Church trained staff from Ashrei Foundation in the north of St. Louis to run a parallel identification program, opened Thursday.

Ashrei doesn’t see as many customers as College Church—yet.

“It’s a steady growth every week,” director Sara Ruiz said. Ashrei is on track to help over a thousand people this year.

“It’s a problem for something that should be so simple,” Ruiz said.

So far, legislative efforts to provide universal IDs have failed. Last year, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, cosponsored a bill called Identity documents for an inclusive democracy which would have created a free federal photo ID card. The bill was not moved out of committee.

In November, the councilor of St. Louis Daniela Velazquez introduced a measure that would provide “Gateway Cards” residents without government-issued ID so they can receive city-administered services.

Lindsey Stewart comes to Outreach at least once a month. She is a youth specialist at Epworth Children and Family Services in Webster Groves. The “vast majority” of young adults who arrive at Epworth lack a birth certificate or ID, Stewart said.

At the Hilliards’ table, she accompanied 18-year-old Na’Riyah Williams. The high school student was born in Pennsylvania and had no birth certificate. Her state ID listed an old address, so she couldn’t apply online — though it took Hilliard a few tries to figure it out.

Williams, who lives in Epworth, is technically homeless, so he needed a form in the mail, a woman told Dave when he arrived at a Pennsylvania license office.

“Okey-doke, we’re in business!” Tina said as she printed the application.

The birth certificate will be mailed to College Church within three weeks. Once Williams gets his hands on it, he plans to look for a driver’s license.

Williams, the Hilliards’ fifth person of the day, lasted as long as the first four combined. That’s just how it goes sometimes, the couple said.

Two and a half hours after the Hilliards began their morning, their last customer sat down. Fredrica Black, who lives in Jennings, has been without an ID “for a while,” she said, and she didn’t know what to do.

As it turned out, Black, 50, didn’t even have a birth certificate. And she had her work cut out for her before the application could be completed and taken to town hall. Black needed to check some spellings with her mother and find out her maiden name.

The Hilliards wrote down every instruction she was to follow after she left the church.

“Don’t worry, I’ll talk to you about it,” Dave said.