Between Two Cities Pt. I
The Land of Promise
My commitment to public service was shaped by experiencing two very different socioeconomic versions of the same society. In one, I worked within the government, advising elected officials, managing public institutions, and helping transform ambitious ideas into measurable results. In the other, I faced homelessness, stigma, exclusion, and the quiet violence of systems that too often determine whose talent is recognized, whose pain is believed, and whose contributions are allowed to endure.
These experiences did not leave me cynical; instead, they made me exacting.
I understand what a competent, courageous, and accountable government can achieve because I, C. Michael Robinson, have played a role in making it work. I also recognize the costs of institutional failure, having lived on the other side of its decisions. Each hardship deepened my sense of purpose, while every triumph confirmed that those who have been underestimated can still lead, reform institutions, and create pathways for community empowerment.
That is why I do this work. I want to help create communities where dignity is not reserved for the connected, opportunity is not rationed by status, and government accountability remains intact for the people it was designed to serve.
Between Two Cities Pt. I (Continued...)
The First City (1992 - 2008)
I did not grow up imagining that I would experience homelessness.
My early life in Southern California was shaped by an upper-middle-class understanding of the world. Adults went to work, maintained careers, paid bills, and expected their children to do something meaningful with the opportunities available to them. Education mattered. Presentation mattered. Achievement mattered. There was an assumption that preparation and hard work could produce a stable life.
I was curious, articulate, and ambitious. I understood early that I could make an impression in a room. I was encouraged to think seriously about the future and to imagine myself participating in the institutions that shaped public life.
Government and professional service were not distant abstractions. They were familiar parts of the world around me. Institutions appeared orderly, permanent, and dependable. From the outside, there seemed to be a recognizable path from education to work, from work to security, and from security to influence.
I expected to follow that path.
For a time, I did.
But stability is not always as permanent as it appears when one is standing inside it. The life I had known did not disappear in a single dramatic moment. It receded through a series of disruptions, losses, and changing circumstances that made the next step less certain than the one before it.
Eventually, the future I had been taught to plan for was replaced by the immediate work of getting through the day.
Grit: Testing My Resilience
The Descent (2008 - 2010)
Poverty is often described from a distance, as though it were a permanent condition belonging to a recognizable category of people. That was not how I encountered it.
For me, poverty was a descent.
It was the gradual disappearance of choices.
It was learning that a temporary setback could become a prolonged crisis when there was no longer a financial cushion, stable address, or dependable support system beneath it. It was watching the ordinary mechanics of life become increasingly difficult: keeping documents safe, maintaining communication, traveling to appointments, presenting yourself professionally, and making decisions while exhausted.
The change in circumstance also changed the way people encountered me.
The qualities that had once been interpreted as confidence could be read as defiance. Questions could be treated as ingratitude. Frustration could be interpreted as instability. The less security I possessed, the more carefully I had to manage how others perceived me.
There is a particular disorientation in remembering the life you came from while living in conditions that offer little evidence it ever existed. I knew how to move through professional spaces. I understood ambition, language, etiquette, and expectation.
Yet none of those things guaranteed shelter, privacy, or control over what happened next.
I had not become a different person.
I had entered a different city.
Between Two Cities Pt. II
The Other City (2011 - 2017)
Over the course of that period, I experienced more than twenty shelters.
Each had its own routines, rules, personalities, and small negotiations. There were intake processes, searches, curfews, shared spaces, assigned beds, changing staff, and the repeated requirement to explain parts of your life to strangers who held some measure of authority over what happened to you next.
A shelter is not simply a place where someone sleeps.
It affects how a person moves through the entire day. Everything must be carried, stored, remembered, guarded, or replaced. Transportation becomes a logistical problem. Privacy becomes scarce. Rest is inconsistent. A missed call, lost document, delayed train, or misunderstood instruction can carry consequences far greater than the mistake itself.
You learn to keep important papers close. You learn which public places will allow you to remain without purchasing anything. You learn how to look composed after a night without meaningful sleep. You learn to answer ordinary questions without revealing more than you are prepared to explain.
“What is your address?”
“Where are you staying?”
“What is the best number to reach you?”
Questions that seem administrative to one person can expose an entire life to another.
I encountered people whose circumstances concealed extraordinary intelligence, humor, discipline, and imagination. I also encountered systems that had difficulty seeing beyond the condition in which a person arrived. Once someone was categorized as homeless, poor, difficult, sick, or unstable, every part of their personality risked being interpreted through that category.
I understood how easily a person could disappear inside the language used to describe them.
There were days when the goal was simply to remain organized enough to continue. To arrive at the next appointment. To preserve the next opportunity. To keep one difficult experience from becoming the reason another door closed.
The world I had known had taught me to prepare for advancement. This one taught me to prepare for interruption.
Still, the person I had been before poverty remained present. My circumstances had narrowed, but my mind had not. I continued to observe how systems functioned, how authority was exercised, how people responded to pressure, and how quickly institutions could lose sight of the person standing in front of them.
Even before I possessed formal authority, I was studying power.
Survival Without Mythology
The Second Act (2018 - 2026)
Rebuilding did not occur through one opportunity, one benefactor, or one miraculous turn of events.
It happened incrementally.
A completed application. A restored document. A course finished despite instability. A professional relationship built carefully. A position that created access to another position. A moment when someone evaluated my ability rather than my circumstances. A decision to continue when stopping would have been understandable.
Progress was rarely dramatic enough to announce itself. Often, it looked like consistency: returning, following through, learning, working, and preserving a sense of direction when the final destination remained unclear.
Gradually, the life organized around immediate survival began to make room for a future again.
I pursued my education. I developed experience in advocacy and organizational leadership. I entered government and learned its formal language, internal processes, political pressures, and administrative responsibilities. With each role, I assumed more responsibility and gained a clearer understanding of how decisions move from an idea to a policy, from a policy to an institution, and from an institution into someone’s daily life.
The return was not a restoration of the person I had been before poverty.
I carried the second city with me.
By the time I began moving into positions of influence, I understood that my story could be presented as evidence of individual perseverance. But I also knew that the familiar language of personal triumph could flatten what the experience had actually required and obscure the people, systems, failures, and interventions that shaped the journey.
I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and sword in my hands.
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road