On Sheltering The Homeless

In response to Sarah's comment on the "Sleeping Giant Wakes Up":

thejanet has left a new comment on your post ""Sleeping Giant Wakes Up"":

What Sarah describes as her experience is not the same as my experience. That might possibly be explained by different regions, or the passage of several years, I don't know. But I can tell about my experience, because I think that my experience, expanded exponentially, would work at the federal level.

Oh cool. I get to be the hope in this conversation!

I sat on the board of the only homeless shelter in this county. Unbelievable but true, my city drives its homeless up to the shelter 25 miles away, the result of its NIMBY attitude. The shelter was an outgrowth of a need the local ministerial alliance saw and did something about. Our ministerial alliance includes most clergy, except for the Catholics and the Baptists, and yes, represents less than half of the churched Christians. Anyway...

I started on the board during the Reagan administration, and so initially I saw a preponderance of families, the ones on the cusp that, when their assistance dried up, they couldn't make it so ended up at the shelter. We also got a lot of recent prison releases, a spattering of Vietnam vets, and a few of the mentally damaged. Over the time I stayed involved with the shelter, our demographics changed, with fewer families, way more veterans, and about the same percentage of prison releases and mentally ill.

At first the shelter was only a night shelter, open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. The evening meal was supplied by whatever church was on the schedule, each coming around approximately every six weeks. Breakfast was another volunteer making the rounds and picking up all the day-old doughnuts (which were free for us). Rules for the shelter were few and simple: no drugs, alcohol or weapons allowed inside the door, and everyone must take a shower every evening. And that was it, if someone didn't want to leave his/her stash of drugs/alcohol/weapons out on the porch, they could sleep in the front yard and come no closer. Oh yeah, and that a person could only stay 45 days in total in any one year. That one we broke as often as it was kept, as long as the family (it was always the families) would not show up for a week's time so we could document them as in the midst of a new crisis, not the old one they'd used the 45 days on.

We saw the clear need for expanding our hours (just watching the families trying to get their kids moving and out by 7 was painful) and we had no family spaces, just a room for men and a room for women. Parents decided if their children were separated by gender, or if they slept in the women's room with mom. But there were no funds for that, we were just managing to pay our one employee (the director).

(this is already getting too long, so just pretend that about 14 years passed between last paragraph and this one.) With all the new space (possible from a grant from the county and state, paying us a price per head served) we had 10 family bedrooms, four classrooms and a workshop out back. We were now a 24 hour shelter, also housing the food pantry, the clothes closet and the furniture warehouse (all charitable organizations serving our population once they were out of the shelter in their own place) and we had expanded payroll to include a grant writer, a social worker (who mainly helped shelter residents apply for what benefits they could qualify for) and oh I forget what we called him, but two someones who split the night sheltersitting duties),

Here's the part I think could be expanded or at least built upon to make up a national program... in our classrooms we ran classes all through the days and evenings, classes such as how to manage a bank account, basic computer skills, how to budget, how to parent, you know, basic life skills plus literacy skills and a series of classes to help earn their GED. These were mostly taught by the different kinds of social workers out of the various county agencies. And in the shop area, those not going on job interviews were either working on bicycles or computers.

Last paragraph, I promise, but I've got to explain that... I'm particularly proud of this because it was my project. We put out the word that we'd love to get donations of old bicycles and old computers. Didn't have to be working, we were going to strip the usable parts out of them anyway. And that's what they did, they broke down the bicycle/computer and sorted the parts into our "parts graveyard," then those who had been trained (by us volunteers) were building new working bicycles and computers, which we either sold or used.

This came out of a need for computers for our basic computer skills classes (which have now expanded into various software training to improve a residents "hire-ability" like Excel classes, etc. And we'd already identified a huge problem with our residents finding a job, actually two problems, one was no residence or phone to be contacted at, and the other was no transportation to interviews or jobs. So that's why we started canabalizing bicycle parts to make whole bicycles. But it turned out that we were building way more computers and bikes than we needed, so we sold a lot of them, too. The residents who worked that week (doing anything in the shop) got credit for their share of the split. This resulted in them able to save that almost impossible first and last month's rent required to get a place.

It was like magic, everything worked. And the intangible worked, too. I saw residents turn into different people the first time they got their script to be cashed in the day they moved out for good. More than once someone would turn to me and brag "I'm now worth x amount of dollars." This was a real accomplishment, and the pride and self worth was way more than the dollar amount (usually between $50-150 a week per shop worker).

I have more, but Chere Mimi doesn't need a novel in her comments. But see? Can't you see the way forward? We didn't help all the homeless in the county, we didn't have the space. I hated having to keep a wait list. But we'd call all the police departments in the county with how many openings we had each day and I don't know for sure what they did for those we didn't have room for. I strongly suspect several of them were in the habit of taking these people home for short periods of time, in fact I know that was true.

And that's my story of hope for today. I can see how to adapt this to work on a larger level, and there are sooo many federal agencies that should cut into their budget for us, like the defence department, the justice department (rep for the VA), etc. Now our population is mostly ex-military young ones with PTSD. I know the VA doesn't get the funds it needs to take care of our veterans, but it should!!

Janet, don't worry about running long in the comments. The comments belong to my readers. Plus, you gave me a post on a wonderful story of hope.