I woke up in the tent. Feeling overwhelmed since I haven’t been writing like I should. I was trying to do a housing application for David, a chronically homeless person who sleeps in an automotive garage and hangs out at the church homeless day shelter. What I’m starting to realize is some of the people I work with have been chronically homeless for years and have cycled in and out of housing opportunities, which they seem to always blow up. Having a caseload of about 150 people is really difficult to figure out who I can focus on in a given time. When I tried to help this individual fill out the housing application he couldn’t remember his previous landlords or addresses, which ultimately makes the application useless without that information. There’s so many people living in the street, it’s difficult to be able to provide service to all of them considering that they have a long history of ruining the opportunities that have been provided in the past.
I arrived at work a little early. I stopped by The faith-based homeless day shelter to check with Matt to see if he wanted a bed at the local treatment center’s clinical stabilization floor. Matt said he and his girlfriend will be going to treatment on Monday through the harm reduction center down the street.
I went back to the shelter I work out of and met up with Ryan from the behavioral health clinic. We loaded up the truck with some supplies and we started driving back over to the faith-based homeless day center. We saw two men walking who seemed homeless, and we pulled the truck over and met up with Sean and Craig. We provided Sean and Craig with food. Neither of them wanted further service, but Craig said that he would reach out to me. I got his phone number.
We stopped at the Homeless day shelter and I gave David his housing paperwork. Since this homeless day center is faith-based they began doing a service and prayer at 10:00 a.m.
The staff doesn’t like people talking or disturbing the service so we left.
Ryan and I went to the encampment behind the Riverside Church where we gave out food to Carmen, Stephanie who gave only her first name and did not come out of the tent, Peter, Nora, and Mikey who did not give me his last name. We gave them all food and we gave out socks, bags with supplies, hats, gloves, and blankets.
At 12:00 p.m. Ryan and I came back to the shelter. Ryan went back back to the behavioral health clinic. I left with Kenny and two other shelter guests to get donated furniture to bring to the women’s recovery house that is owned by the same non-profit that I work for. I received a few calls while I was moving furniture. One was about Alli who is at the harm reduction Center. I had been working with Alli. She had been in the shelter. We were trying to find solutions for her addiction and homelessness. Alli said she was willing to go into treatment. When we were finished moving I drove to the harm reduction Center, and I talked to Alli about the importance of going to treatment so that she could get off the streets and stop using the dangerous drugs that were polluting her mind and body. I even bought a pack of cigarettes for Alli, and gave the cigarettes to one of the workers at the harm reduction facility, to give to Allie when she got in an Uber to treatment. I found out later that Alli couldn’t wait the hour or so it took for the ride to get there, she grabbed a crack pipe from the harm reduction clinic, and hit the streets.
At 1:30 I returned back to the shelter and ate lunch. I had a virtual appointment with social service case management team that was local, these are people I can rely on to help some of my clients access further service. I learned that they had an office out of Another re-entry service I had been working with, that deals primarily with people that are justice involved or people involved in the criminal justice system. They primarily help people that are justice involved or have warrants on gaining IDs which includes birth certificates, social security cards, and IDs from the registry. They also can do referrals and get people into programs as well. They also provide phones and work with assurance wireless, these are free government phones sometimes called Obama phones. This is all very useful to my outreach program. They’re going to send me a flier and we’re going to figure out ways that we might be able to utilize their services to help clients.
After my meeting with the social health advocates, I worked on building out a comprehensive service and homeless encampments map that I’ve been working on on Google Earth. When I took a break outside I saw a groundhog hanging out around one of our trailers. I left work around 5:00 p.m.
When I got back to my campsite I jumped on a call with my aunts and uncles on my father’s side. We get together virtually and we do care meetings for my father. My father is in a very unhealthy state and he lives in Arizona where we don’t have a lot of access to him. He fell down and now he has to sit in a wheelchair all day and can’t walk. This has been one of the stressors I’ve been dealing with as I go through this project.
I did some writing, and I scrolled on social media. I went to bed around 9:00 p.m.