Homeless to Home- It's something to celebrate!
January can be a lonely month. The holidays are over, the long winter doldrums are beginning to set in. The New Year turns, and sometimes I wonder, “Was it a good year? Is there anything to celebrate? To look forward to?” This week in the tender first days of a new year, I want to take a moment to celebrate something good.
Philadelphia is a city working diligently to take care of its homeless residents. Did you know that? As you pass a man with a cardboard sign asking for money, see a slight curvature beneath a blanket laying on the sidewalk, or read the reports of opioids death across the country, did you know that we in Philadelphia have a lot to be proud of? This December, I spent a day doing outreach with Pathways staff member Carrie Wagner. I was warmed by my time with her, and I hope the telling of it gives you something to celebrate too.
Carrie and I meet downtown, on a crisp, beautiful fall day. It’s the kind of day where it’s fun to be outside, and easy to forget how grueling the outdoors can be. “It’s a code blue tonight,” Carrie says, snapping me out of my fall reverie. A code blue is a city designation for periods of brutal cold. “It’s lasting all the way into next week. Eight days. That’s a long stretch of temperatures that can kill people outside.” If you’ve never worked in homeless services, maybe you’ve wondered what people do during these cold spells. Philadelphia has a whole network of systems and organizations working together to coordinate safe shelters for our city’s homeless residents every day.
Here’s how it works. The city funds 5 outreach teams, coordinated through a central team at Project Home, that operate all year long. You can call the central team any time of day to help someone get into a shelter at 215-232-1984. These teams will pick up individuals needing a place to stay, and spend most of their time building relationships with people living on the streets. By the time someone gets housed with Pathways to Housing PA, they typically have spoken with an outreach worker between sixty and a few hundred times.
As the Manager of Homeless Services at Pathways, Carrie works with the city’s outreach teams to engage future Pathway’s participants. This winter, Carrie got a call from the team about a man they’d been engaging for 2 ½ years. They’d offered him housing multiple times, and this winter, he told an outreach worker he was finally ready to come inside. “I met with him, and asked him what made it different this year,” Carrie explains. “He told me, ‘I was just cold. This week, I had two showers. Before that I hadn’t showered even once in a couple years.’” Carrie was happy to inform him that his new apartment will come complete with a shower.
Carrie and I spent the day walking beneath 15th street station, where many of Philadelphia’s homeless residents spend their days during the winter months. “It’s warm, it’s safe, and there’s a bathroom. And it’s also a social thing,” she says. We walk past Tom and Ruffin, two of the city’s outreach workers, and Carrie stops to ask about a man she’s been engaging. We also chat with a tired looking woman lugging a cart full of miscellaneous items, and a small Puerto Rican man who alternates fluidly between Spanish and English. Both are on Carrie’s list as people we’d like to house. We end the day back where we started, in the clean, bright light of Market Street.
Looking back over 2016, I’m encouraged by the work our city is doing. Have we done enough? Of course not. But agencies across the city are working together to find creative solutions for homelessness while treating our homeless citizens with compassion and respect. I don’t know about you, but I sure think that’s something to celebrate.
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About the Author
Becca DeWhitt is an MBA candidate at Temple University. She is passionate about creating a world where everyone's experience and perspective is valued, and sees story-telling as a powerful tool to that end.
