Tag: homeless outreach

Waterfalls

Posted on by Christina

One summer night last year, I was on the streets interviewing some of our clients for a project we were working on to raise awareness about homelessness.

The question I was asking folks was, “What do you want people to know about you?”

One young man reflected for a moment and then responded, “I work, just like everybody else. And rent is too damn high.”

We’ll call him Brad, and he was sitting on a curb, eating the sack dinner our volunteers had given him out of the back of our van.

“I just got finished working eleven and a half hours today,” he continued. He was wearing dirty jeans and muddy steel toed work boots that were laced up tight. I imagined that his feet were hurting and begging to get out of those boots after such a long shift.

Brad’s face is kind and he keeps his hair and beard neatly trimmed. Looking at him, most people would not guess that he was living homeless.

I asked Brad what kind of work he did and he told me he worked with a landscaping business full-time.

“We were building ponds in people’s back yards today. And those little water falls that just keep going,” he told me.

He paused and inwardly, I cringed. I was imagining the massive house and yard likely associated with those ponds, and wondering what it felt like for someone who didn’t have a place to live to be working on such a cosmetic project.

He surprised me by saying, “It was fun.”

His face broke into a huge smile as he continued, “When they turn it on and you can see, wow, I made that.”

Brad and I talked for a while more that evening and I kept thinking about him later. The pride that lit up his face when he was talking about the waterfalls he built in people’s back yards was so beautiful.

His words, “I work, just like everyone else,” echoed back at me and I realized that my assumptions about Brad were wrong. He took pride in his work just like I did in mine. I had assumed that because landscaping was such hard physical labor and his living situation was so tough, he would just be trying to get through the days. But I was wrong and it made me happy that he found joy in his work. He told me that he had originally started as a temporary worker but they kept him on because he worked so hard for them. Passion will do that, and it boded well for Brad’s future.

I haven’t seen Brad in a while. Even though he continued to work full-time, he still didn’t make enough money to afford an apartment. Last time I saw him, he had successfully saved enough money to buy a car and was happy to be able to live in that instead of out on the streets. I hope he is still out there building waterfalls.

The woman in the alley (1 of 2)

Posted on by Christina

A few weeks ago, I mentioned an incident where I ended up in a dark alley with a dead car battery on a frigid night during a street outreach shift. Here is the whole story.

It was November, back in the days when our agency used to drive people to the emergency shelters that opened only when the temperature was below 25 degrees or the snow was falling abundantly.

There was a new client around at this time whom we were just getting to know. We’ll call her Jane, and she was drawing a lot of attention to herself because she had set up a tent in an alley downtown. Not only that, but she was living in said tent right through the beginning of the Colorado winter, and right in the middle of the city where average citizens were not spared the discomfort of having to witness her struggle.

Continue reading “The woman in the alley (1 of 2)” →

Serendipity

Posted on by Christina

It was a chilly Sunday in December, just a few days before Christmas. I spent the day in Denver attending an event in which my good friend was performing. It was a fundraiser, and it was dragging on. I considered leaving at the halfway point, but ultimately decided to stay until the end.

(It may seem like there are an annoying amount of trivial details here at the beginning, but hang in there – they are actually relevant at the end!)

After the show, I drove to Longmont where I was starting a house sitting job, and decided to stop by Safeway to pick up a few groceries.

As I was walking in the door, I saw two of our homeless clients. They were standing under the hot air in the doorway, trying to get warm. I chatted with them for a little bit, offered to drive them to the shelter or buy them something from the store but they declined.

I knew they slept out a lot of the time due to his severe anxiety issues, so I wasn’t surprised. Still, it was cold that night and I worried about them. They turned to leave and the guy took my hand, looked in my eyes with his dark brown ones shining, and said, “thank you.”

As I grabbed a few things in the grocery store, I realized how cold the man’s hands were when he held mine and I thought that I could easily pop over to my office, just a couple blocks from there, and get them some gloves and hand warmers to keep the frostbite away. I decided to do it and looked around to see in which direction they were walking as I left the store.

First I had to stop by the house to check on the cat I was watching, as I was already quite late to feed him dinner. He was fine and as I put the groceries away, I debated whether to bother going back out in the cold to track down the couple and get them some gloves. It was late, I had already taken off my wet shoes and coat, and it was nice and warm inside the house.

Logic and past experience told me that it would probably be hard to find the couple again; I thought about just sitting down with a glass of wine to watch TV.

Something was telling me to try anyway and so I got back in my car and drove to my office in search of gloves.

When I pulled up next to the door, it was close to 11pm. My headlights shined onto some donations sitting out front (pretty typical sight). But then a tarp that was covering them started moving as if blowing in the wind (there was no wind that night).

Suddenly, the tarp popped up and I could see a person frantically waving at me from underneath.

A little startled, I got out of my car and started talking to the person from a distance.

“Hi, this is Christina, I work here. What are you doing?”

I found out his name was Tom, he was a client of ours who I had only met a couple of times. He told me that he usually sleeps out, even in the winter.

But his sleeping bag had been stolen earlier that evening and he wasn’t equipped for the weather. He wanted to get in touch with our outreach team but didn’t have a phone and didn’t know where the shelter was, so he plopped himself on the pavement in front of the office under that tarp and hoped someone would show up.

I don’t know how long he was under that tarp before I got there. What I do know is that when I pulled out my phone to check the temperature, it was 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

We loaded his bags in my back seat and I drove him to the shelter while he warmed his stiff hands in front of the heating vents.

“Well, I’m sure glad you came along,” he said.

It kept me up that night – thinking about how many things had to happen for me to be there to find him. Even our latest-working volunteers and staff had left for the night at that point and no one casually driving by would have likely noticed the man under the tarp, camouflaged next to the bags of donations.

He might have been OK there overnight. He said he had slept out in worse conditions.

“Yes ma’am, I’m 58 years old and this is not my first rodeo.”

He said that your breath eventually warms up the inside of a tarp if you keep the edges sealed.

But then again, 0 degrees is pretty darn cold to sleep outside without a sleeping bag, no matter what.

I never did end up finding the couple to give them the gloves, but it turned out they weren’t the ones who needed help that night.

Street outreach

Posted on by Christina

I first got started working with folks experiencing homelessness while I was in college. My classes were teaching me all about poverty, inequality, and privilege. At the same time, my extracurricular education was teaching me about activism and how to make change in the world as one person.

Home on break, I was itching to do something more meaningful than working retail to pay the bills. I learned about an amazing organization in my community and signed up to volunteer.

At the orientation, I realized that these people were putting into action so many of the things I was learning about in school.

My favorite community health professor said, “The key to making change is to meet people where they are.”

This organization was literally doing that – meeting people out on the streets of the community to provide them with food, water, blankets and clothing to ensure they made it through the night.

My professor said, “If you want to help people, you have to build trust and wait until they are ready for help. And then you need to be there.”

I saw that in action night after night after night as volunteers provided necessary items and words of encouragement to people who were having some of the worst days of their lives.

After my return from the Peace Corps, I landed back in this community and immediately wanted to start volunteering again. I was even lucky enough to be hired very part-time, which eventually evolved into a full-time position.

My job was to coordinate volunteers to make and deliver 60-80 meals every single night, 365 nights of the year, to folks on the streets. As a small agency with a shoestring budget, we also had to get donations of all the items we needed to preserve life on the streets – sleeping bags, blankets, coats, gloves, water, etc.

It was a fun challenge, kind of like putting together an elaborate puzzle.

I also personally hit the streets a few evenings a month to work with our clients and deliver food, gear, etc., which was an amazing experience. I learned so much and had so many interesting encounters.

Some things that happened during street outreach shifts:

  • We helped a gentleman jump the battery on the car that he was living in on a sub-zero night in the Walmart parking lot (pictured above);
  • I drove a full SUV of people to the emergency shelter one day just before Christmas while everyone sang along to Christmas music on the radio;
  • We encountered families with children who had just lost their housing and helped get them into temporary shelter for the night;
  • I drained the battery on our own vehicle one frigid night by leaving the lights on while trying to convince a woman living in a tent in an alley to come to the shelter because it was going to be below zero that evening. We had to rely on the kindness of a neighbor to jump our vehicle when we finally left the woman with her tent in the alley;
  • I met a lot of very interesting people and was honored to be let into their lives as we encountered each other month after month for several years.

The stories that follow are written in their honor and are testaments to the human spirit and to the importance of human kindness, which can mean so much.