Bob Marchant uses every bit of his life experience — as a hotel executive, a college instructor, a pastor and time in the military — in his work as executive director of the River of Life Mission, abiding by its promise to be "a friend to the friendless."

Marchant, 75, holds master’s degrees in business and in theology, and it’s his Christian faith that drives his tireless work to help people turn their lives around.

The Chinatown mission is known for the meals, clothing, toileting and bathing facilities it provides homeless people, and it also operates two residential programs with strict protocols intended to help participants gain the life skills, education and job training they need to stay out of prison and off the streets.

With Marchant at the helm, it has started a small business — a chocolate shop — to provide job-training and paid employment on site, a successful model he hopes to expand.

The mission also partners with other agencies and nonprofits to extend the reach of limited resources for the needy.

The work is challenging but also deeply rewarding, on a personal and spiritual level, for both Marchant and his wife, Merrie-Susan, the mission’s general manager. Married 51 years, they’ve raised five sons together, including three they adopted to save from neglect and abuse. Two struggled with drug problems, but with help turned their lives around. Marchant sees their faces in every guest served at River of Life.

"Everybody I deal with is somebody’s brother or sister, or father or mother, or son or daughter," Marchant said. "There was somebody there to help my sons, so I’m here trying to help somebody else’s."

QUESTION: How long have you been here?

ANSWER: I’ve been here 15 years. The mission has been here since 1986. The founders started out feeding people sandwiches out of their car. …

Q: What’s the scope of services? How many meals do you serve?

A: Here in the Chinatown location, we’re feeding 15,000 meals a month. That’s meals, not people. Breakfast, lunch and dinner five days a week. We’re closed weekends. And then we also do a food box program for low-income and the elderly. They pick up food boxes on a Thursday or Friday; that usually feeds a family of four for the weekend. We’re doing about 5,000 or 6,000 meals a month in that program.

Q: On top of the 15,000?

A: Yes. The 15,000 are served downstairs in the dining room.

Q: Are those mostly for homeless people?

A: Mostly all of them are homeless. But a number of senior citizens come here and eat, too. We don’t put anybody through a third degree about whether they are homeless or not. All you have to do is get in line.

Q: And it’s free to them?

A: Yes, we don’t sell anything here. We have clothing available twice a week; we don’t charge for clothing. We have showers. We have a social worker. We’re a faith-based organization. We have Bible studies. But we don’t require anything religious for anybody to get a meal or anything else. … Sometimes people hear "faith-based" and think it’s all about religion. But it’s not like that. …

Q: In your time here has the need grown?

A: Yes, it’s grown quite a bit. It’s probably gone from 10,000 meals a month to 15,000 in the time I’ve been here … In 2013, we did 172,000 meals for the year. In 2014, we did 179,000 meals for the year. So 7,000 more in just one year. …

Q: For the food, do you rely on donations of food, or money to buy the food?

A: We get food donated, plus we buy some at the Foodbank, and we get a lot of people who will donate rice to us. Some hotels donate food. We get pastries and breads from Safeway and things like that. … We depend on donations for our operations. … We have 22 employees, some part-time. Of all the money that I raise to run the mission, 80 percent comes from individuals.

Q: And the other 20 percent?

A: Churches, businesses, foundations.

Q: This is a daytime operation, right? Nobody sleeps overnight here?

A: Right. We do have two nine-bedroom houses in Kalihi, for our residential programs. One is for women, one is for men. Those are structured programs, not just overnight sleeping. I’m personally more concerned with providing a structured program, something that can change people’s lives. Nobody’s going to freeze to death overnight here in Hawaii, which you have to worry about in places like New York or Chicago. Here, we have IHS and other shelters, Next Step, for emergency shelter. So my concern, besides the meals, showers, clothing, all that, is to offer a program that can really change people’s lives. …

Q: What are the programs like?

A: Most of the women in the women’s program come to us from prison. Most of the men come off the street. … Oh, the horror stories, especially with the women. Most every one of them has suffered some kind of abuse. … I get nasty notes sometimes, you know, that homeless people should just get a job. Well, that’s what I thought before I started to work with homeless people. If it was a job that would cure the problem, we could cure it pretty quickly. But it’s more involved than that. It’s life skills. It’s education. It’s job skills. So many of these people, especially the women, their self-esteem is non-existent. (Marchant went on to describe numerous former clients who arrived "damaged, hurting, hopeless they could ever do anything" and with support and training have gone on to graduate from college and hold steady jobs, including in key positions at the mission.) …

Q: The public perception so often is that these people are just lazy.

A: Yes, that they’re lazy, they’re drug addicts, whatever. In reality, there’s basically three groups on the street.

Maybe one-third has mental-health issues. Because of the cutbacks years ago, they’re on the streets. If they don’t take their medication, they’re out there in the middle of the street, yelling or whatever. They need (medical) treatment. About the best we can do is help with basic needs: food, clothing.

Then there’s maybe a third who are satisfied living like there are. They do whatever they want whenever they want. They’re not going to freeze. They got places to eat, ways to survive.

And the last group, about a third, they want to change, but they need help. Because once you get on the street, it’s not easy to get off.

Q: Some of them are working?

A: Yes. There’s hardly any affordable housing. We have a lot of people who come here for showers and food and clean clothes because they’ve got a job, but they can’t find a place to live. Like, right up here on Smith Street, they rent rooms, a dumpy little room, for $450 a month and you share a bathroom with 15 people. …

Q: What about all the government initiatives? …

A: Part of the problem that I see, in my opinion, is the government approach is that we have to get them from here (the street) to here (into a building), and that’s fine as far as it goes. But if you don’t deal with why they’re on the street to start with, all you’ve changed is where they sleep. … The problem is not just where they sleep. The problem is their lack of life skills, job skills, education. So if we get them into a building, what are they going to do to maintain that, and not, six months from now, be back out on the street?

Q: That’s why you prefer the structured programs, to build those other skills?

A: Right. They take classes, get counseling, go to (sobriety) meetings, that sort of thing. The people who live in our houses work here 40 hours a week. It’s a work-therapy program. So they have to come to work, be on time, get along with people, do their jobs. They learn to be reliable. …

Q: What do you think of the city’s approach? Housing First, compassionate disruption, all that?

A: Look, (homelessness) is a complicated problem and it can’t be solved by government alone. That’s why it takes a collaborative effort with a lot of different groups. … Education and job training are two things I think we need a lot more of. On the shelter question, you’re limited here with buildings. My (mission) friends on the mainland, they buy 15 acres for $350,000, and we have a 100-year old building of 12,000 square feet that cost $1.4 million. So we’re never going to get more land, and that’s one of the problems. Also, you can’t force people to do these things. You can’t put people in a building and then force them to do a program. They have to want to change.

Q: You see that in your programs?

A: Yes, if they leave before we think they should, they wind up back in prison, or back with the same kind of guy that got them in the position they are in now.

Q: How do you provide job training?

A: That’s a constant challenge. I’m always trying to drum up job placements, skills training, all that. … So three years ago I started a chocolate factory upstairs. And it’s provided training for people, plus four permanent jobs for people who have gone through our program. …

Q: You created the jobs right here?

A: Right. It’s working out great. It’s called Chocolate On a Mission. … If I’m able to raise the money, I’d like to start more small businesses so that we can offer more direct training, and more permanent jobs. Because once they develop enough skills to be able to hold a job, they need to be able to find one that pays enough for a decent life …

Q: It’s challenging, though. I know River of Life doesn’t always have the support of the neighbors.

A: … We’re not very well liked here by a lot of the business people. They think that if we weren’t here, then the homeless people would not be in this area, which I don’t believe is true. I tell people, look, this isn’t "Field of Dreams." We didn’t build it and they came. They were here and we came. I’m sympathetic to the concerns. I was a businessman. … We try to do the best we can. We say, "Look guys … don’t block the sidewalk, work with us here." If you talk to people in the street, most will tell you that we treat people with respect. We refer to them as our guests. Except for breakfast, all of our meals are served to them at the table. They don’t go through a line. They sit at a table, somebody brings their plate, somebody pours their drink.

Q: It’s about human dignity?

A: Yes. We are all worthy.

Q: You mentioned getting nasty notes sometimes, from people who don’t sign their names. What would you say to those people if you could?

A: I would say that first of all they don’t understand the depth of the problem. … We hear it said, ‘By the grace of God there go I.’ It’s true. I would say: Open your heart. And if you just won’t, OK, don’t help, don’t give. But don’t write a nasty note. Especially when you don’t know anything about these people.