Last week, I received a call that once again altered my perceptions on homelessness. Like all leaders in the fight against homelessness, I constantly tell civic clubs and government leaders and anyone else I come in contact with that anyone can become homeless.
But in my heart of hearts, I have never thought that people "like me" were in danger. Tuesday changed all that. A friend reminded me of someone we had known years ago, a woman who had been my co-leader in a Girl Scout troop, who had a high-powered job, membership in several civic organizations, a lovely house down the street maintained in perfect order. She was very conscious of her appearance, and she and her children were always beautifully decked out. To say I was shocked when my friend told me that "Mary" has been homeless almost since the last time I saw her 11 years ago would be putting it mildly indeed.
A few days later I saw Mary for myself. She is covered in open sores, dressed in rags, and had pulled out most of her hair. Colleagues told me she was first found cowering in fear in a tree, following an attack by a group of men who found it amusing to terrorize the homeless woman. My colleagues were unable to get her down, so one of them went up with some breakfast, and spent two hours talking to her. Mary has no idea how she came to be homeless, but she remembers she has children. She hasn't seen her children in 10 years, when the youngest was 14.
Although Mary is no longer coherent enough to tell her story, it isn't hard to guess that it is rooted in mental illness, probably exacerbated by substance abuse, used as a form of self-medication. The tie between mental illness and homelessness is a strong one, and is particularly sad because it can almost always be prevented. The fact that isn't prevented is a sad tribute to the strong stigma still attached to mental disease, and the treatment thereof. And despite the consequences of blaming the victim for the disease, including the ability of government and insurance companies to demand 50% co-pays for therapy as opposed to a 20% co-pay for physical disease, we do it anyway.
Of course, homelessness itself carries an extraordinary stigma, and the shame people feel when they find themselves nearly homeless prevents them from receiving timely and effective help. Even people in "nice" neighborhoods can find themselves falling behind on medical bills, and house payments. They attempt to hide their situation, and juggle debt, to the point that homelessness is no longer out of the question.
Christ said, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Judging others, when we can never know the whole story, is not just a character flaw within us, but can have virtually criminal effects on those who are judged unfairly.
This May we will be launching a campaign, "Homeless: It's Not Just Who You Think." Help us carry the message that indeed, people like us can and do become homeless. We are all vulnerable and in need of help. Perhaps it is time to learn to love one another, before it is too late for another homeless mother, child, or brother.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Rush to Judgment
Of all the things that may be learned from interactive media: letters to the editor, blog sites, talk radio; one that is most striking is the fact that there are huge numbers of people ready and willing to tell everyone else how to live their lives.
Can't sell your house? "There is no reason a house won't sell if owners stop being so greedy." Someone doesn't make a left turn into oncoming traffic quickly enough, or goes too slow? "They should learn how to drive or get off the road." Gas prices are so high that people working for minimum wage can't get to work? "It's the law of supply and demand. Oil companies have to make a profit, so suck it up and get a job close to home."
Basically, the take-home message is that bad things can only happen to people who lead flawed lives.
This simplistic (and mean-spirited) point of view is nowhere as prevelant as it is regarding the homeless, who hear a constant refrain, generally spoken in a tone of disgust: "Get a job! Get off the street! Clean up! Get a shave! Wash your clothes! Lay off the booze! Go away!"
Unfortunately, the very people who are most vehement in their instructions do not find it necessary to explain how the homeless are to carry them out. While most of the homeless work, they do need better-paying, more stable jobs, but just how exactly are they supposed to make this happen? They are very often dirty, but where are they supposed to take a shower, or wash their clothes, or shave? Yes, they should stop drinking, but who will give them the tools to blunt the pain of a marginalized life?
And, of course, homeless persons are not clones of each other. There are men, women and children of varying levels of health, training and education. There are a hundred paths to homelessness, and they can be easy to find. With the looming recession, they will be easier yet.
The constant struggle for those of us working with the homeless is how to balance compassion and pragmatism; faith and skepticism. If we are to help, we need to be clear-sighted as to the capabilities and motivation of those who come to us in pain. But we also need to retain our hope, lest we find ourselves of no use whatsoever.
It is one of the joys of my life that I have found so many mentors in my search to find the right approach in making lives better whenever and wherever I can. The people who surround me have vision and faith that illumines the way for not just the homeless, but our sheltered neighbors.
The light the first few of these women and men lit six years ago with the first cold night program flares more brightly each day. It has found its way to Crestview and Destin, and in homes and churches scattered throughout Walton County.
Individually, our volunteers are strong, capable, and caring. Collectively, they produce miracles. This year, the number of our chronic homeless fell by over 600: from 1100 in 2007 to 582 in 2008. At least 200 have found shelter, homes and purpose through the work of our faith-based and community-based organizations. We work without much in the way of financial resources, without a shelter, and without the support of many of our fellow citizens.
But, we work with love. And that's how we make the difference.
Can't sell your house? "There is no reason a house won't sell if owners stop being so greedy." Someone doesn't make a left turn into oncoming traffic quickly enough, or goes too slow? "They should learn how to drive or get off the road." Gas prices are so high that people working for minimum wage can't get to work? "It's the law of supply and demand. Oil companies have to make a profit, so suck it up and get a job close to home."
Basically, the take-home message is that bad things can only happen to people who lead flawed lives.
This simplistic (and mean-spirited) point of view is nowhere as prevelant as it is regarding the homeless, who hear a constant refrain, generally spoken in a tone of disgust: "Get a job! Get off the street! Clean up! Get a shave! Wash your clothes! Lay off the booze! Go away!"
Unfortunately, the very people who are most vehement in their instructions do not find it necessary to explain how the homeless are to carry them out. While most of the homeless work, they do need better-paying, more stable jobs, but just how exactly are they supposed to make this happen? They are very often dirty, but where are they supposed to take a shower, or wash their clothes, or shave? Yes, they should stop drinking, but who will give them the tools to blunt the pain of a marginalized life?
And, of course, homeless persons are not clones of each other. There are men, women and children of varying levels of health, training and education. There are a hundred paths to homelessness, and they can be easy to find. With the looming recession, they will be easier yet.
The constant struggle for those of us working with the homeless is how to balance compassion and pragmatism; faith and skepticism. If we are to help, we need to be clear-sighted as to the capabilities and motivation of those who come to us in pain. But we also need to retain our hope, lest we find ourselves of no use whatsoever.
It is one of the joys of my life that I have found so many mentors in my search to find the right approach in making lives better whenever and wherever I can. The people who surround me have vision and faith that illumines the way for not just the homeless, but our sheltered neighbors.
The light the first few of these women and men lit six years ago with the first cold night program flares more brightly each day. It has found its way to Crestview and Destin, and in homes and churches scattered throughout Walton County.
Individually, our volunteers are strong, capable, and caring. Collectively, they produce miracles. This year, the number of our chronic homeless fell by over 600: from 1100 in 2007 to 582 in 2008. At least 200 have found shelter, homes and purpose through the work of our faith-based and community-based organizations. We work without much in the way of financial resources, without a shelter, and without the support of many of our fellow citizens.
But, we work with love. And that's how we make the difference.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
A Point in Time
Every family, organization, government has its rituals: the Fourth of July fireworks; the Christmas Eve service; the Pledge of Allegiance opening each City Council meeting. For us at Opportunity, Inc., it's the annual point-in-time census, held during the last week of January.
The purpose of the census is to get an accurate count of the homeless in our two-county region, and to discover a bit about what kinds of people are without shelter. We base our strategic planning on what the survey reveals: Are there more chronically homeless individuals, or families suffering a loss of employment or housing? Are the homeless we have with us young, old, veterans, employed, disabled, working, or literate?
We get a fairly good idea of the extent of homelessness, though we can never capture it all given the vast wooded expanses studded throughout the counties, and the deep reluctance of anyone to tell a stranger that they are homeless.
Still, we pull together a fairly definitive collection of numbers, statistics and maps of homelessness in our area, and that is worth a great deal.
What is worth more, though, is a snapshot in time of how our community's most challenged citizens struggle to survive, and how strong is the will to live. Coming across a homeless encampment can be heart-breaking, when you find a hand-made shack in a desolated area, plastic lounge chair for a bed, and tiny clothes on a clothesline stretched over a sputtering fire. But it can be humbling as well, as you note the incredible ingenuity with which people with few material resources create a facsimile of a home for themselves and sometimes their children.
This year, Keli Cummings, a student at the University of West Florida, led the way in helping us understand the scope of homelessness in our area, beyond the populace that finds its way to the cold night shelters and meal programs. Keli went out Friday, January 25, with a deputy from the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, and Saturday, January 26, with a police officer from Crestview (big thanks to our law enforcement officers!).
Keli has a unique quality to recognize what she is seeing. When other team members and law enforcement would walk into an empty space and start to head back to the cars, Keli would note a broken branch and some leaves pressed too hard into the sand. She would track the signs back to an encampment of tents and bedrolls and lounge chairs and the remains of a recent campfire (and sometimes even the people who inhabit these bleak areas). She would watch people as they went into and out of grocery stores and Wal-marts, and know instantly who was homeless and who was not.
Her results rocked me, and I imagine many others. For instance, she and her group found 50 encampments along the beaches and in Destin, most all of which were home to several people. She identified hundreds of homeless persons north of I-10, living in the woods, in cars, and in abandoned buildings. She even documented that there are homeless people in Niceville, something that has long been debatable.
What Keli, and Malva, and Linda, and Donna, and Corey and a host of other awesome individuals learned is that there is no area in our region that is not home to both the unfortunate and the fortunate. The poor are with us, whether we choose to see them or not.
Sometime in the next few weeks, I will pull together all the reports from all over the area, and get our newest round of numbers on the homelessness in our area. The numbers will provide the basis for our strategic planning, grant applications, reports to local, state and federal government, and in our community awareness efforts. But it is the people behind the numbers who tell the real stories: stories of heartbreak, and of hope.
The purpose of the census is to get an accurate count of the homeless in our two-county region, and to discover a bit about what kinds of people are without shelter. We base our strategic planning on what the survey reveals: Are there more chronically homeless individuals, or families suffering a loss of employment or housing? Are the homeless we have with us young, old, veterans, employed, disabled, working, or literate?
We get a fairly good idea of the extent of homelessness, though we can never capture it all given the vast wooded expanses studded throughout the counties, and the deep reluctance of anyone to tell a stranger that they are homeless.
Still, we pull together a fairly definitive collection of numbers, statistics and maps of homelessness in our area, and that is worth a great deal.
What is worth more, though, is a snapshot in time of how our community's most challenged citizens struggle to survive, and how strong is the will to live. Coming across a homeless encampment can be heart-breaking, when you find a hand-made shack in a desolated area, plastic lounge chair for a bed, and tiny clothes on a clothesline stretched over a sputtering fire. But it can be humbling as well, as you note the incredible ingenuity with which people with few material resources create a facsimile of a home for themselves and sometimes their children.
This year, Keli Cummings, a student at the University of West Florida, led the way in helping us understand the scope of homelessness in our area, beyond the populace that finds its way to the cold night shelters and meal programs. Keli went out Friday, January 25, with a deputy from the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, and Saturday, January 26, with a police officer from Crestview (big thanks to our law enforcement officers!).
Keli has a unique quality to recognize what she is seeing. When other team members and law enforcement would walk into an empty space and start to head back to the cars, Keli would note a broken branch and some leaves pressed too hard into the sand. She would track the signs back to an encampment of tents and bedrolls and lounge chairs and the remains of a recent campfire (and sometimes even the people who inhabit these bleak areas). She would watch people as they went into and out of grocery stores and Wal-marts, and know instantly who was homeless and who was not.
Her results rocked me, and I imagine many others. For instance, she and her group found 50 encampments along the beaches and in Destin, most all of which were home to several people. She identified hundreds of homeless persons north of I-10, living in the woods, in cars, and in abandoned buildings. She even documented that there are homeless people in Niceville, something that has long been debatable.
What Keli, and Malva, and Linda, and Donna, and Corey and a host of other awesome individuals learned is that there is no area in our region that is not home to both the unfortunate and the fortunate. The poor are with us, whether we choose to see them or not.
Sometime in the next few weeks, I will pull together all the reports from all over the area, and get our newest round of numbers on the homelessness in our area. The numbers will provide the basis for our strategic planning, grant applications, reports to local, state and federal government, and in our community awareness efforts. But it is the people behind the numbers who tell the real stories: stories of heartbreak, and of hope.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Marching Home
A recent edition of ABC's Good Morning Show focused on a study indicating that as many as 60% of military men and women are coming home with more than the usual duffel bag full of uniforms, soap and medals. They are bringing home memories of horror, and the drug addictions that they use to blot it out.
These are the future homeless of America.
Already, one in four homeless adults is a veteran of war. By contrast, the percentage of veterans in the general population is only 11%. Last January, the Okaloosa Walton Homeless Continuum of Care/ Opportunity, Inc. undertook a survey of homeless people in our area, and counted 327 veterans, or 22% of our adult homeless population. This January, we expect to find more, in keeping with who we are serving in our meal and cold night shelter programs.
Our veterans are not fighting substance abuse and homelessness because they lack strength and discipline. They have that in abundance, as they proved every day they were overseas. In almost all cases, they did a terrific job for their country.
But while they were doing this terrific work, many of them were experiencing severe trauma routinely. Every time a bomb went off, or a sniper shot whistled down the street, they suffered overwhelming terror. Often they lost the ability to differentiate between friend and foe, and began regarding everyone around them as the possible agent of their death.
Each time a soldier tensed in fear and anticipation, he or she was manufacturing adrenalin for survival. Adrenalin is a terrific bodily defense, in that in heightens awareness, increases reaction time, and provides extra strength and energy for what needs to be done. It is also the TNT of human hormones, designed to be used very rarely. The side effects of large doses of adrenalin are so toxic that adrenalin would be banned by the FDA if it were the product of a commercial lab. And our soldiers' brains are bathed in this stuff over and over again.
The result is that the brains of a significant number of those soldiers become permanently altered. The clinical term is "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," and the symptoms are frightening. Flashbacks take the soldier back to the worst moments, over and over. Nightmares keep him or her awake. Soldiers startle wildly and easily. They suffer from depression, anxiety, and a host of other destroyers of mental health.
If this wasn't bad enough, the Veterans Administration has just announced results of a study measuring the outcomes of the most common PTSD treatment, and discovered that none of them are effective.
Alcohol and illicit substances don't cure PTSD either, but they can block out the pain for a while. They can dull you to the triggers that might set off flashbacks, or quiet the screams you hear in nightmares.
Of course, alcohol abuse and heavy drug use bring a lot more than transitory bliss. They bring an inability to make personal connections, keep a job, a spouse, or a house. Eventually, they can bring life on the streets, and total despair.
This is not news to the Veterans Administration, which is set to open a local clinic in March, staffed with six social workers to address mental health and substance abuse issues.
This is a wonderful beginning, but if we are to support our troops, we need to do more. We need veterans store front clinics, where veterans can get drop in help or on-going therapy, referral to community resources, PTSD support groups, and other services.
And we need a shelter, where veterans can have access to hygiene, meals, transportation, job training and support while they work through mental health and substance abuse issues. All too often we use our jail as a shelter, which is ineffective, costly, and creates barriers to employment and assistance.
It's a great thing to wave our troops good-bye, and send them letters and cookies from home, supporting them while they are in the field. Supporting the troops when they come home, often damaged in ways we cannot begin to imagine, is much harder. Still, we owe it to some of the finest men and women of their generation.
Commemorate Pearl Harbor Day (Dec. 7) by attending the Opportunity, Inc. auction at the Breakers on Okaloosa Island at 6 p.m. Proceeds will be used to help veterans, families, and others needing assistance to get off the streets and back into life.
These are the future homeless of America.
Already, one in four homeless adults is a veteran of war. By contrast, the percentage of veterans in the general population is only 11%. Last January, the Okaloosa Walton Homeless Continuum of Care/ Opportunity, Inc. undertook a survey of homeless people in our area, and counted 327 veterans, or 22% of our adult homeless population. This January, we expect to find more, in keeping with who we are serving in our meal and cold night shelter programs.
Our veterans are not fighting substance abuse and homelessness because they lack strength and discipline. They have that in abundance, as they proved every day they were overseas. In almost all cases, they did a terrific job for their country.
But while they were doing this terrific work, many of them were experiencing severe trauma routinely. Every time a bomb went off, or a sniper shot whistled down the street, they suffered overwhelming terror. Often they lost the ability to differentiate between friend and foe, and began regarding everyone around them as the possible agent of their death.
Each time a soldier tensed in fear and anticipation, he or she was manufacturing adrenalin for survival. Adrenalin is a terrific bodily defense, in that in heightens awareness, increases reaction time, and provides extra strength and energy for what needs to be done. It is also the TNT of human hormones, designed to be used very rarely. The side effects of large doses of adrenalin are so toxic that adrenalin would be banned by the FDA if it were the product of a commercial lab. And our soldiers' brains are bathed in this stuff over and over again.
The result is that the brains of a significant number of those soldiers become permanently altered. The clinical term is "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," and the symptoms are frightening. Flashbacks take the soldier back to the worst moments, over and over. Nightmares keep him or her awake. Soldiers startle wildly and easily. They suffer from depression, anxiety, and a host of other destroyers of mental health.
If this wasn't bad enough, the Veterans Administration has just announced results of a study measuring the outcomes of the most common PTSD treatment, and discovered that none of them are effective.
Alcohol and illicit substances don't cure PTSD either, but they can block out the pain for a while. They can dull you to the triggers that might set off flashbacks, or quiet the screams you hear in nightmares.
Of course, alcohol abuse and heavy drug use bring a lot more than transitory bliss. They bring an inability to make personal connections, keep a job, a spouse, or a house. Eventually, they can bring life on the streets, and total despair.
This is not news to the Veterans Administration, which is set to open a local clinic in March, staffed with six social workers to address mental health and substance abuse issues.
This is a wonderful beginning, but if we are to support our troops, we need to do more. We need veterans store front clinics, where veterans can get drop in help or on-going therapy, referral to community resources, PTSD support groups, and other services.
And we need a shelter, where veterans can have access to hygiene, meals, transportation, job training and support while they work through mental health and substance abuse issues. All too often we use our jail as a shelter, which is ineffective, costly, and creates barriers to employment and assistance.
It's a great thing to wave our troops good-bye, and send them letters and cookies from home, supporting them while they are in the field. Supporting the troops when they come home, often damaged in ways we cannot begin to imagine, is much harder. Still, we owe it to some of the finest men and women of their generation.
Commemorate Pearl Harbor Day (Dec. 7) by attending the Opportunity, Inc. auction at the Breakers on Okaloosa Island at 6 p.m. Proceeds will be used to help veterans, families, and others needing assistance to get off the streets and back into life.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Finding the Opportunities for Success
Working with unsheltered men, women and children provides many opportunities for despair. Very few people become homeless for a single, easily correctable reason. Homelessness is usually the result of a chain of multiple events, some of which could have been averted, and some not.
For instance, I once worked with a teenage girl who had been physically abused by her father since early childhood, and was desperate for a way out of her home. She was of about average intelligence, but years of abuse had robbed her of focus, concentration and concern about her education. When an older man offered to let her have the spare bedroom in his apartment, she leaped at the chance.
It turned out that she had moved in with her father's clone. Within a month, she was pregnant, and within three months she had dropped out of school. By the time she was 19, she was a mother of two small children. She had no parental support, no high school degree, no job experience, and no marketable skills. Her options were limited to submitting to physical abuse, or living on the streets with an infant and toddler. She chose homelessness when her partner began abusing the children.
If there was ever a happy ending to that story, I don't know it. I tried every possible resource I knew, and came up empty. I was able to cobble together a few nights at a cheap hotel, courtesy of a church, but couldn't make it sustainable. I couldn't find emergency child care, or a job, or affordable housing, or funds for deposits. One day I went to the hotel, and she wasn't there.
That was my first experience with a homeless family, but it wasn't my last. Each family comes with a host of problems: mental illness, sexual abuse, lack of education, children born to children, generational poverty, medical needs (lots of childhood asthma). It's easy to start thinking that there is no hope for anyone.
Except, that there is.
I was reminded of this last winter, when COPE Center in Walton County took in a couple who had been homeless for over a year. COPE was receiving funds through the Okaloosa Walton Homeless Continuum of Care/ Opportunity, Inc., which we in turn had received through the state. Since I was monitoring expenditures, I was well aware of all the money being poured into aid for this couple. There were motel bills, restaurant vouchers, prescription medication, doctor's visits. Pretty soon the 7th Day Adventist Church and the Mental Health Association of Okaloosa and Walton Counties were all pitching in.
I did not approve. I kept saying, "What are we achieving? When this money finally disappears, this couple is going to be back on the streets." Charity Parker, who assisted Carolyn Hammond in working with this couple at COPE Center, told me to share her faith. This couple was going to make it.
On the day COPE discharged this couple from their oversight, the husband got his trucker's license and a job driving a rig. He and his wife hopped in the cab of the truck, and drove off. Today, the two of them are doing very well. His wife is well on her way to a trucker's license, and they have driven 18-wheelers all over the country. They drop off postcards every so often to let us know where they are, and what they are doing. Sometimes they send envelopes, with money sent to the church so that other homeless people can get a hand up.
There is enormous joy in working with the homeless, because you never know where a miracle is waiting to happen. Over the years I have seen children reunited with parents, fathers reunited with sons. I have watched as individuals have gotten sober and families have established homes. Some of our most prominent citizens have been homeless at one time in their lives, and some of them even consider themselves spiritually richer for the experience.
This blog will be dedicated to the miracles of healing, both for the homeless, and for the volunteers who work with them. Sometimes I will be exploring challenges for which solutions are still waiting to be discovered; sometimes I will be relating successful approaches other towns have used to help homeless people transition to self-sufficiency. But no matter what, I will be sharing the faith of all those who work with the least of these, our brethren - that everyone deserves an opportunity to make a better life.
For instance, I once worked with a teenage girl who had been physically abused by her father since early childhood, and was desperate for a way out of her home. She was of about average intelligence, but years of abuse had robbed her of focus, concentration and concern about her education. When an older man offered to let her have the spare bedroom in his apartment, she leaped at the chance.
It turned out that she had moved in with her father's clone. Within a month, she was pregnant, and within three months she had dropped out of school. By the time she was 19, she was a mother of two small children. She had no parental support, no high school degree, no job experience, and no marketable skills. Her options were limited to submitting to physical abuse, or living on the streets with an infant and toddler. She chose homelessness when her partner began abusing the children.
If there was ever a happy ending to that story, I don't know it. I tried every possible resource I knew, and came up empty. I was able to cobble together a few nights at a cheap hotel, courtesy of a church, but couldn't make it sustainable. I couldn't find emergency child care, or a job, or affordable housing, or funds for deposits. One day I went to the hotel, and she wasn't there.
That was my first experience with a homeless family, but it wasn't my last. Each family comes with a host of problems: mental illness, sexual abuse, lack of education, children born to children, generational poverty, medical needs (lots of childhood asthma). It's easy to start thinking that there is no hope for anyone.
Except, that there is.
I was reminded of this last winter, when COPE Center in Walton County took in a couple who had been homeless for over a year. COPE was receiving funds through the Okaloosa Walton Homeless Continuum of Care/ Opportunity, Inc., which we in turn had received through the state. Since I was monitoring expenditures, I was well aware of all the money being poured into aid for this couple. There were motel bills, restaurant vouchers, prescription medication, doctor's visits. Pretty soon the 7th Day Adventist Church and the Mental Health Association of Okaloosa and Walton Counties were all pitching in.
I did not approve. I kept saying, "What are we achieving? When this money finally disappears, this couple is going to be back on the streets." Charity Parker, who assisted Carolyn Hammond in working with this couple at COPE Center, told me to share her faith. This couple was going to make it.
On the day COPE discharged this couple from their oversight, the husband got his trucker's license and a job driving a rig. He and his wife hopped in the cab of the truck, and drove off. Today, the two of them are doing very well. His wife is well on her way to a trucker's license, and they have driven 18-wheelers all over the country. They drop off postcards every so often to let us know where they are, and what they are doing. Sometimes they send envelopes, with money sent to the church so that other homeless people can get a hand up.
There is enormous joy in working with the homeless, because you never know where a miracle is waiting to happen. Over the years I have seen children reunited with parents, fathers reunited with sons. I have watched as individuals have gotten sober and families have established homes. Some of our most prominent citizens have been homeless at one time in their lives, and some of them even consider themselves spiritually richer for the experience.
This blog will be dedicated to the miracles of healing, both for the homeless, and for the volunteers who work with them. Sometimes I will be exploring challenges for which solutions are still waiting to be discovered; sometimes I will be relating successful approaches other towns have used to help homeless people transition to self-sufficiency. But no matter what, I will be sharing the faith of all those who work with the least of these, our brethren - that everyone deserves an opportunity to make a better life.
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