Posted on June 28, 2011
This blog was written by VSH’s summer PR intern, James Denison.
In the last few years, America’s economic recession has put the squeeze on everyone. However, for homeless shelters and housing services, the recession has been a double-edged sword. With more people out of work and a drop in federal and corporate funding, many non-profit services are struggling to stay afloat.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national unemployment percentage is 9%. 6% of Virginians are out of a job, as compared to less than 4% in 2008. Since the recession, the Virginia General Assembly has cut its health and human services funding by $360 million. And according to the Giving USA Foundation, national charitable giving fell by 6% in 2008, which was the first drop in giving in more than 20 years. Put these facts together, and you can easily see why many soup kitchens and homeless shelters are facing hard choices. As Chuck Bean, executive director of the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington, says, “A downturn in funding accompanied by a surge in demand means a homeless shelter, food pantry, or job-training program is going to feel it first. Then you get into the tough decisions: Do you thin the soup, or shorten the line?”
Numerous homeless shelters and soup kitchens have been forced to shut down because they couldn’t cover their costs, leaving impoverished people out of aid. Some shelters have begun charging residents to stay there in an attempt to save money and remain in operation. Yet even in these unsteady financial times, many communities have rallied around their local non-profits. In Danville, Virginia, after the House of Hope, which had been in operation for 15 years, closed due to a lack of funding, city citizens held a drive to raise money. After an anonymous donor gave $20,000, residents reached into their hearts and wallets and doled out $23,000 to more than match it. Now the House of Hope and its 20 beds is open again to serve homeless folks in Danville.
For more than 20 years, Virginia Supportive Housing has cared for the most underprivileged individuals in the Richmond and Hampton Roads areas. We’ve worked to provide housing and support services to folks dealing with chronic homelessness, substance abuse problems, and mental illness. But we need your help to keep doing it! Whether you donate resources or take a weekend to help move a client into his new apartment, you are giving specific care and attention where it may never have been felt before. You are saying to a formerly forgotten person, ‘I’m investing in you because I see the person you can be, not who you are now. Your life has value to me.’
To learn how you can donate to VSH, click here. To learn about volunteer opportunities at VSH, click here. To learn about our upcoming project 1000 Homes for 1000 Virginians and how you can get involved, click here.
Posted on June 21, 2011
This blog was written by VSH’s summer PR intern, James Denison.
According to a 2009 study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20-25% of America’s homeless population suffers from some sort of severe mental illness. That means one out of every four homeless individuals is struggling with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or another paralyzing mental instability. Statistically speaking, one out of every four homeless persons may be hearing voices, having hallucinations, or suffering from mood swings.
For some of these individuals, their mental illness is severe enough to warrant a temporary detention order to a psychiatric hospital. Because of the “danger of imminent harm to themselves or others”, they could legally be committed for inpatient treatment. Yet all over Virginia, psychiatric hospitals are turning hundreds of patients away each year, simply because they don’t have room for them. If they don’t have family to stay with, these individuals end up trying to fend for themselves on the streets. Without the care and treatment they need, they exist in constant danger of harming themselves or being victimized by others.
How did things end up this way? Mental institutes are downsizing, but that is not the heart of the problem. Smaller, community-based facilities were supposed to pick up the slack as a more humane way to treat patients with mental illness. However, that hasn’t happened, and persons with mental illness are paying the price. At Virginia Supportive Housing, though, we’re striving to ensure that individuals experiencing homelessness are properly cared for before they reach a point where they need to be committed.
At VSH, we believe it is unacceptable for anyone to be homeless, especially someone suffering from mental illness. Our program, A Place To Start, provides stable housing and comprehensive mental health services to chronically homeless individuals in the Richmond area. Thanks to a committed team of clinicians, case managers, a nurse, and a psychiatrist, APTS has housed 62 clients since December 2007. All but one of APTS’s clients have not returned to homelessness.
APTS has shown how compassion, empathy, and determination can bring people off the streets and save Richmond money to boot. In addition, the greatest benefit of APTS comes from watching our clients move from instability and fear to security and peace. As our psychiatrist Jeannette Schoonmaker put it in last week’s blog: “The thing that makes my day is when I’ve seen people come into the program who are really desperately depressed, hopeless, and don’t know where to turn. And in a few months, I can ask them how they’re doing, and they say, ‘I’m happy. Life is good.’ That’s flat-out amazing.”
Posted on June 14, 2011
This week’s blog was written by Dr. Jeannette Schoonmaker, a psychiatrist with Virginia Supportive Housing’s program A Place To Start.
I’ve worked in many places. I have a good deal of experience with mental health services in many different forms. So my coming to A Place To Start was because I saw it as being more efficient, more comprehensive, and a better program than others. The major difference we have is the piece where we provide housing at the outset of the program.
Providing housing up-front as quickly as we can brings us the opportunity to have people where we can find them, hopefully day after day. We can start to access what their needs are and start to build a relationship with them. If you don’t have housing, so many obstacles pop up. For instance, if you’re trying to make an appointment with social services, odds are they’re going to ask for your address, and you’re not going to have one. So you need a place to get mail, and transportation too. It’s amazing, the basic needs that can’t be met without an address, an ID card, and a birth certificate. If you don’t have a birth certificate, you can’t get an ID card. If you don’t have an ID card, you might not be able to go to the Daily Planet and get clothes or a shower. So many basic services rely on these three essentials, plus transportation. We come in at the ground level and start with basics. Once we’ve got those established, we focus on the things clients have not been able to access or may need, like medical or psychiatric services.
Bad luck is an equal-opportunity handicap. And if you talk to our clients, they’ve had bad luck at every different stage of their lives. But nobody chooses to be homeless. If you’re in a shelter, you’re out at 5 or 6 walking around all day and trying not to be noticed. It’s a long day to walk around and try to be invisible. Homeless people try not to be noticed because other people are often not comfortable around them, and often policemen will arrest them for “trespassing”. When you’re on the street you’re not safe. And you certainly aren’t feeling secure when you’re wandering trying to stay out of everyone’s way all day long and hoping you can find somewhere to sleep.
In this program, it takes a lot of contact with clients. We need to convince them, for one thing, that this program isn’t like all the others, where you get dropped for missing one appointment, or when you give your info and they say, “We’ll call you”. What homeless person has a phone with minutes on it? That’s one of the advantages of our program, we have enough manpower to truly take care of and service people’s needs. We can stay with them, make things happen for them, and build that sense of trust, that trust that there is something better to be had.
Some of the people we see have been not treated effectively, and we have to try to get in there and make that better. And if they’re reluctant to take their medication, we’ll go to their apartments and help them take it there. We all become family pretty quickly. A lot of these patients, they do not have a lot of family support left, so we tend to fill in and help them learn to use community resources. So there’s a lot of educating, a lot of walking with people to help them find resources.
One thing that’s different about our program, again, is that we stay with the person, we don’t give up. We are very persistent and very sincere in saying we will not give up, we will stay here with you. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has bad luck, everyone makes poor choices, and there are consequences. But we’ll be with you through that. We don’t walk away when things get tough. And I think that constancy of availability of someone to be with you and listen and try to be helpful is crucially important. And that’s something I’ve seen more in VSH than in other places I’ve worked.
It’s probably because we have that access at the housing level to get them set up, with furniture, with groceries, with medication. So it becomes more comprehensive and more effective. Case managers are out every day picking up clients, bringing them here and to social services, to the food bank, wherever. Whatever it takes. A while back, one of our clients became interested in computers. So our clinician spent a day with him going to Best Buy, picking out a computer, and helping set it up. And that’s the ultimate goal, that we can get them out there, teach them, and watch them fly off. After 3 years, we’ve got 2-3 in school, probably 6 working part time, and others who are volunteering and want to work. Folks just want to get back in the mainstream.
The thing that makes my day, is when I’ve seen people come into the program who are really desperately depressed, hopeless, and don’t know where to turn. And in a few months, I can ask them how they’re doing, and they say, “I’m happy. Life is good.” That’s flat-out amazing.
APTS is a good program, and it works, and I hope we can have more and more people come into it. Hopefully, there will be more and more people in the area not having to look forward to another day on the park bench, wondering where they’re going to be tomorrow.
To learn more about how A Place To Start helps its clients and its community, click here
Posted on June 8, 2011
Heron's Landing
Today Virginia Housing Development Authority (VHDA) announced the final 2011 rankings for reservations of Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and we are thrilled that Heron’s Landing in Chesapeake will be receiving a reservation of tax credits.
The sale of the tax credits will generate between $4.5 and $5 million in capital for the new construction of sixty supportive studios apartments with a preference for homeless veterans.
On May 10th, the Chesapeake City Council voted unanimously to allocate $1.7 million in federal HOME and CDBG funds for Heron’s Landing. The cities of Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, and Suffolk have also committed federal dollars.
Hampton Roads Community Foundation has awarded Heron’s Landing a grant of $400,000, and the Chesapeake Redevelopment and Housing Authority is leading the project basing of sixty vouchers including porting some vouchers from neighboring housing authorities.
Heron’s Landing is VSH’s fourth regional collaboration in South Hampton Roads, following Gosnold in Norfolk, Cloverleaf in Virginia Beach, and South Bay in Portsmouth. VSH has over a 98% success rate in clients not returning to homelessness.
Designed to maximize energy efficiency and achieve EarthCraft Virginia-certification, Heron’s Landing will have photovoltaic solar panels on the roof to offset the building’s electrical load by 20% and a solar thermal hot water system.
