Tag Archive for Project Homeless Connect

“Project Homeless Connect” Provides Many Services in 220 Communities, Including Wealthy Santa Cruz, CA and Morristown, NJ, Where Homelessness is Increasing

Project Homeless Connect 2009

Project Homeless Connect 2009 (Photo credit: University of Denver)

Although homelessness is declining nationally, it is still increasing in many communities, including wealthy Santa Cruz, CA and Morristown, NJ. One reason the situation is improving in many communities is due to the Project Homeless Connect program, which Mayor Gavin Newsome created in San Francisco in 2004 and which now is providing needed services for people without homes in 220 communities and three countries. The federal government’s Interagency Council on Homelessness has declared Project Homeless Connect a national best practice model.

Project Homeless Connect holds large annual events at which homeless people can take advantage of numerous offered services, including dental care, eyeglasses, family support, food, HIV testing, housing, hygiene products, medical care, mental health services, substance abuse treatment, SSI benefits, legal advice, state identification cards, voice mail, employment counseling, job placement, wheelchair repair and veterinary services. Hundreds of individuals, corporations, nonprofits and government agencies provide these services.

Recently, more than 40 groups offered services at the fourth annual Project Homeless Connect event at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. More than 700 people attended and took advantage of services including medical care, legal help, food and haircuts.
Kymberly Lacrosse, community organizer for United Way of Santa Cruz County, one of the organizers of the event, said:

It was a great turnout for clients. It was 700 people that didn’t get served yesterday or the day before. Even if it had only been 100, it’ would still be amazing.

According to a recent countywide survey, Santa Cruz County now has 3,536 homeless, up 41% from 2,265 in 2009. The City of Santa Cruz has 892 persons without habitation, or 31% of that total. Forty-four percent of the county’s homeless live on the street, 28% reside in cars or vans, 11% are in emergency shelters, 8% are in encampment areas, 7% are in emergency transitional housing and 2% sleep in abandoned buildings.

Thirty-eight percent of those experiencing homelessness for the first time had been homeless for a year or more. Thirty-one percent of survey respondents reported not receiving any government benefits. Twenty eight people spent one or more nights in jail or prison in the past year.

Three hundred and ninety-five of the county homeless were veterans, and 87% of those lived on the street. Five hundred and forty-four homeless people were in families. There were 128 unaccompanied children, and 97% of them were on the street.

Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents reported a disabling condition. Such conditions included mental illness (55%), substance abuse (26%), chronic physical illness (17%), physical disability (20%) and developmental disability (3%).Thirty-nine percent used emergency room services one to three times in the previous 12 months, and 21% did so four or times.

Affluent Morris County, NJ has seen homelessness rise by 13% over the past four years. Project Homeless Connect recently held an event in downtown Morristown where more than 200 people took advantage of services from haircuts to healthcare offered by 35 entities.
Why does such a rich area see homelessness increasing? Because modest gains in the economic recovery mean rents are rising high enough to disqualify people who depend on federal housing vouchers to subsidize their rents.

Lisa Falcone, director of Project HOMI (Homeless Outreach to People with Mental Illness) said:

When I started placing people in rooming houses five years ago, the rents per month for a room were about $200 less than they are now. Now you can rent a room for anywhere from $600 to $700 a month, and it’s hard to get a $500 room. The cost of utilities and overall living expenses has gone up, too. It’s difficult for people to make ends meet, and there’s a lack of jobs.

Some of the few affordable rental options are barely habitable. To make matters worse, the Congressional sequestration has reduced by 5% to 8% the number of HUD vouchers available in communities. Steve Berg, vice president of programs and policy for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says:

At a time when there’s a lot of people in a lot of need, the program should be going up to meet the need, but instead, it’s going down.

The national alliance reports that sequestration puts at risk 125,000 individuals and families using vouchers nationwide, as well as another 100,000 in emergency shelters.

The 2013 Morris County Point in Time Count of the Homeless tallied 346 people, including 88 children, this past Jan. 30, an increase of 9% from 2011. Some estimate that the number of people who are homeless over the course of this year could be two to four times larger.

The Morris County Point in Time Count also revealed that 18% were unsheltered; 24 %were in their 40s; 31%had been homeless for more than a year; 60% were Caucasian and 60% suffered from a mental illness.
Project HOMI started the year with a caseload of 80 and is ending it with approximately 180, according to Falcone, whose mental health association also was involved with another 700 people.

Exacerbating the problem, Falcone said, is the reality that rooms with rents affordable enough to meet HUD voucher requirements are less likely to be in hub towns like Dover, Morristown or Parsippany, where there are services. Instead, they tend to be in outlying areas of the county, not close to public transportation, so these people can’t get to jobs or the treatments they need.

The recently updated Morris County Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness calls for several measures, including the creation of a centralized homeless management information system as well as permanent housing solutions for specialized populations.

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Margaret Miles Brings The Faces and Voices of the Homeless to Minneapolis Gallery

logoPhotography is a powerful tool for getting across the humanity behind the major issues of the day. Of course, at HUMANE EXPOSURES, we’re well familiar with that thanks to our own Susan Madden Lankford’s work presented in downTownUSA and Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to introduce our readers to the works of other artists who address similar issues.

Margaret Miles in one of those artists, even though she herself is not a photographer. Miles is the development director for St. Stephens Shelter in Minneapolis. Back in 2008, she began collecting personal narratives from the homeless, joining forces with photographers Larry Levante and Kris Drake in the process. It all started at the annual Project Homeless Connect, an event designed to provide a one-stop shop for the homeless where they can meet and work with a wide variety of service providers.

This month, the Burnet Gallery in the Le Meridien Chambers Hotel in downtown Minneapolis hosted the show titled “Homeless is my address, not my name.” Roughly 70 portraits of homeless people line the chic gallery’s walls. Beneath almost a third of them appear the phone numbers. If a patron calls the number under a photo, he or she can hear the voice of the photo’s subject tell his or her own story. (It’s reminiscent of the photo-and-audio approach used by Robert Gumpert — we’ve written about on this blog.)

Euan Kerr of the Minnesota Public Radio interviewed Miles about the show. This exchange in particular is worth listening to:

The point is to show the breadth and depth of the homeless population and the myriad of reasons which can lead to someone being on the streets.

Miles points to a picture of Nathan, from Liberia. He worked his way through the immigration system to get to the U.S. legally. The trouble was once he got here, he never learned he needed to get a drivers license. He got a car, a driving job and soon after a whole bunch of tickets.

‘Try as he might try and figure out what he needed to do, he was put in prison for driving without a license,’ Miles says.

Out of prison, he found himself without a home. Nathan smiles broadly in the his picture but Miles says he wanted to make a serious point.

‘He’s very clear in saying, ‘I’ve never been addicted to anything. It’s not the stereotype you that you think,” Miles says.

We advise listening to the MPR piece — that way, you can experience for yourself the fact that hearing these stories in the original voice is both a powerful and moving experience. It rehumanizes people who have been reduced to naughts or ciphers by being removed from the main flow of society.

Miles is currently lining up shows at corporate galleries, as well as at the Hennepin County Government Center. Long-range plans include bringing the show to our nation’s capital. In the meantime, she has received a grant from the Minnesota Legacy Amendment to begin collecting narratives in the more rural parts of the state. Let us all wish her luck with reaching out to the larger and larger audiences with this material!

Source: “Voices of the homeless featured in Mpls. photography show,” MPR News, 09/15/10
Logo Image courtesy of Margaret Miles, used with permission.

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