Welcome Ri’

Ri’ Witer, Bob Wehrly and Scott Metzel during street outreach - June 2022.

Ri' Witer joined Bob and Scott as part of HOPES' street outreach team in May. He is also working part time with the Racine Interfaith Coalition. Street outreach teams are small (2 - 3 people) so as not to overwhelm the people we serve or compromise their location with a large number of staff and volunteers arriving in the night.

HOPES "street outreach team" is usually composed of several small teams that go out on different nights to meet people who are unsheltered. Our overall team size was reduced to just a few people during the pandemic, but we expect to integrate a few more volunteers in July. We are glad to have Ri' out with us as a street outreach specialist. He will be leading two teams of street outreach volunteers and be part of a late night team with Scott that has extra time to explore some of the lesser-reached areas after meeting with people who are known to be unsheltered.

Thanks FCPF!

HOPES Center's street outreach team is out several nights per week, serving people who live outside. Last night our team visited with several people in tents, one in his vehicle, and a few sleeping along side of a vacant building. They all have declined to enter shelter, so HOPES provides blankets, hand warmers, something warm to eat, conversation, and looks for ways to make a connection to housing and end their homeless situations.

We are thankful for the support of the Forest County Potawatomi Foundation, which has been a regular supporter of HOPES' street outreach work. We recently received a $10,000 grant from FCPF to assist us in our work on the street. This goes a long way in meeting people where they are on the streets of Racine.

A Quiet Man

Fred Phillips (with Mboyo Metzel) on winter outreach a few years back.

Fred Phillips was a quiet man who originally hailed from Marked Tree, Arkansas. He was thoughtful and soft spoken. A few years ago he was a human services student at Gateway Technical College and did his field service at HOPES Center. He met with people as they came into the HOPES Center lobby to help find out what their needs were and how they could be met. He also served on our street outreach team.

While on street outreach together, Fred spoke about having been homeless himself and his own struggles. HALO, our local shelter, had helped him turn his life around and he was still in a permanent supportive housing program as he was going to school at Gateway. He was part of a three-person outreach team that went out on Sunday nights through one cold and snowy winter, locating and engaging with people who were living outside. We was a great listener and man of few words while conducting outreach. But when he spoke to someone who was homeless he always had the right words of encouragement. We were looking forward to a second field placement with Fred, but he was struggling with a health condition and had to take a break from school for a while. He continued t to serve the community though and was a member of HALO’s board of directors.

Only July 6th Fred passed away. He will be laid to rest today and will be missed by so many of us in the community. It was a pleasure having served with him in the field and watch him at work serving others.

- scott metzel

Fred Phillips on street outreach: Winter 2018

Warren Williams Talks About Outreach

Warren Williams is a HOPES Center board member who also served as a street outreach volunteer from May 2018 - May 2021. Warren served on different teams before leading his own team of street outreach volunteers on Wednesday nights. He is moving out of the Racine area, but stopped by the HOPES Center office to share his outreach experience and perspectives in this video.

Moving into Summer

Back in December 2020, we made a post called “What’s the Temperature?” that highlighted the correlation between the temperature outside and the number of people living on the streets in Racine. Sure enough, the temperature is up and the number of contacts made by street outreach teams at night has started increasing over the last week or two. In the winter, most people with whom we had contact were sleeping in their cars or trucks. Now the teams are starting to have more contact with people who are sleeping outside on the ground.

As we move into summer, our thermal socks and cold weather sleeping bags are going into storage until the first chills of autumn. We have already started using lighter blankets and crew socks. Hand warmers are no longer a standard items in out kit and we’ll start carrying insect repellant soon. Some things are the same though: water, burritos and noodles, coffee, hygiene supplies, and especially conversation and linkages to housing opportunities for people experiencing homelessness.

Last summer we were at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. HOPES continued doing street outreach with a reduced number of people on our street outreach teams. We hope that as we go through the summer of 2021 we are also moving into a post-pandemic period. We are not sure what that will look like on the streets, but this summer we will continue conducting outreach with a small team. We don’t plan on having our usual summer expansion with new teams and new street outreach volunteers. If we see the need for additional teams based on the numbers on the streets, we will likely “activate” some of our experienced volunteers to come back out and fill the gap. Whatever the summer brings in terms of street outreach, we will be ready.

CE - Ending Homelessness

Housing ends homelessness. Someone becomes homeless when they lose their place to stay and have no other place to go than the streets or an emergency homeless shelter. The person’s homelessness ends when they become housed again. In Racine we have something called Coordinated Entry (CE), which brings together agencies that work with people experiencing homelessness to help move them out of homelessness and into housing. HOPES Center is proud to be an active participant in Racine’s CE system.

As Racine’s street outreach program, HOPES serves people who are literally homeless and living on the streets. Street outreach is one of the inflows into Racine’s Coordinated Entry System. Other inflows agencies include our local shelters for adults (HALO, Women’s Resource Center, Burlington Transitional Living Center) and the veterans’ programs in Union Grove. All of us work with people who are considered literally homeless and are able to refer them to the coordinated entry housing prioritization list.

CE’s housing prioritization list is managed by our colleagues at the Institute of Community Alliance. It is actually two lists that are used simultaneously. One is in Racine’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). HMIS helps manage information, facilitate services, referrals, and connections. The other list is for people who are fleeing domestic violence and people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to be entered into HMIS. CE’s housing list prioritizes households based on needs and the length of time homeless, as well as making note of special populations, such as veterans, families with children, youth, victims of domestic violence, and people who are chronically homeless. During the pandemic, factors related to risk of COVID-19 infection were also added.

HOPES is also an outflow agency in the Coordinated Entry system, because it has one of Racine’s housing programs for people experiencing homelessness. Our rapid rehousing program houses individuals and families with children. When we have an opening in one of our rapid rehousing projects, André Batts, our housing case manager, contacts the CE administrator. He tells her what type of opening we have and asks for the next household prioritized for that type of housing. The CE administrator consults the lists, assigns a household to the project and gives André contact information so that they can get connected and start working together to look for an apartment. The household might be coming from any of the inflow agencies (HALO. Women’s Resource Center. Burlington Transitional Living Center, Union Grove, or our own Street Outreach program).

Our CE work doesn’t end there. Racine has a team that meets twice a week with representatives from all of the inflow and outflow agencies involved in CE. (It used to meet here at HOPES until we switched to zoom meetings during the pandemic.) We review all of the pending cases of households who have been prioritized for housing. Case managers give any updates on progress, we collaborate in looking for housing solutions in challenging cases, and we celebrate together when someone has moved into their unit and is no longer homeless. Outside of these meetings, André also coordinates with the shelter case managers for people who are in shelter and our street outreach team helps facilitate connections between people on the streets who have been prioritized for housing with one of the other agencies.

We say that HOPES helps people end their homelessness. The emphasis is on helps. We work hand and hand with people experiencing homelessness and we collaborate closely with our coordinated entry colleagues. Together we change a lot of lives for the better and CE is a major strength in our community’s efforts to so.

Preparing New Team Members

Yesterday we had orientation for a new team member. We discussed homelessness, particularly unsheltered homelessness, to help get a better understanding of many factors that can lead to someone becoming homeless, different ways that people experience homeless, and ways that people get out of homelessness.

During orientation we look at the guiding principles for street outreach. For HOPES Center, this includes recognizing the worth and dignity of each person - a core piece of our mission. Like other outreach teams across the country, we also focus on meeting people where they are, geographically and philosophically. When engaging with someone who is living outside, key principles include being non-judgmental, following the person’s lead, confidentiality, trustworthiness, empowerment, and choice. Those are not unique to HOPES, but typical to good street outreach work.

Then we get into the specifics of what we do as a team:

• Locate: To meet people where they are, you have to find them. Our team is pretty good at this and we discuss how we do that and different strategies for finding and meeting with people who are unsheltered.

• Make Contact: Making contact with someone you don’t know on the streets in the middle of the night is not easy. We often only have a few moments to make sure that the person feels safe and comfortable with our approach, understands who we are and what we are doing, and doesn’t feel threatened any way. Then we hope to open the door to further conversation and engagement. During orientation, we discuss approaches, what to say, what not to say, what to do and what not to do. We also talk about mistakes we have made in the past to help people learn from our years of experience without having to repeat some of it.

• Provide Services: We carry a kit of items to meet basic needs and we have some services we provide in the field. When HOPES first started, we carried a random assortment things that changed from night to night. As time went by and we gained experience, we honed the kit down to specific items that we always have available and can consistently offer day after day and month after month. We train new team members on what the items are, how we use them, and who the team works together to serve someone we meet during outreach.

• Provide Information: We can help people connect to services that help them meet there needs and get out of homelessness. We talk about the services that are available in our community and how to pass that information on to people.

• Linking to Housing: One of the great things about Racine is our coordinated entry system (CE) that links people who are literally homeless (living on the streets or in shelter) to housing opportunities. HOPES is an inflow agency that can put people who live on the streets onto CE’s housing prioritization list. We talk about how CE works during orientation. This is follow-up training to be able to make a referral from the field to the CE prioritization list for housing.

We cover safety, coverage strategies (how we conduct outreach across the county) and other topics. It is a lot to take in. We give the best foundation we can, but the real learning that comes on the street from the people we engage with night after night. The good news is that and continually get better at street outreach as individuals and as a team.

How do you keep finding me?

“How do you keep finding me?” That’s what one person asked when we met him at a 24-hour laundromat at 1:00 a.m. the other night. It wasn’t the first time he has asked us that question. Our paths had crossed many times in different locations as the street outreach team made its rounds over the winter and early spring. Each time we explained that we didn’t know we would find him in whatever location he was sleeping that night, but we checked the area because we thought we might find somebody.  On that night, it happened to be him. Other nights it might be someone else, or nobody at all.

There are a lot of misperceptions about street outreach, what we do, and how we do it. Some of these come from the people we serve at night. Many are surprised to learn the scope of our outreach work. We are frequently asked: “What have you guys been up to tonight?” We don’t give any details about contacts with other people or specific locations, but we might tell them something about our rounds that night, like “We are just getting in from Burlington” (west end of the county). They are often surprised to find out that we do outreach in places other than the area where they stay at night.

As in the case of the person we met the other night, some people are astounded that we are able to find them. What seems like a secret or hidden location to them, may be what we call a “known location” in street outreach parlance. Most of the time, we don’t find anyone in a known location, but we keep checking periodically. Eventually we run into someone. To us, the surprise is not so much that we found someone in a known location, just who it might be on that specific night.

While some people we serve during street outreach overestimate the number of people who are also on the streets, many under-estimate. They see street outreach as a service that is uniquely focused on them. Certainly this isn’t the case. We cover a lot of ground and see a lot of people. It is encouraging though, that people feel like our service is not just person-centered, but directly specifically to them. It is an indicator that we must be doing something right.

A few years ago, two people who were homeless and unsheltered met. They had been staying not too far from each other, neither knowing that the other was also homeless. As they started talking to each other, they were shocked to discover that they both had been receiving regular visits from the street outreach team. The next time we saw one of them, he said, “So you knew that so-and-so was homeless all this time and didn’t tell me?” “Yes,” we said, “and we didn’t tell him about you either.” “Oh,” he said, “I get it. It’s the whole confidentiality thing.” Indeed it was.

Confidentiality is a key component of our ministry on the streets, but is also limits how much we can share with people (or in a blog). This can have the effect of shrouding street outreach in a cloud of mystery. The answer to the question, “How did you find me,” however, might not be as amazing as people think. It is all part of normal street outreach activity and service.  

-        Scott

Caring Community

Photo from the Racine County Eye: April 28, 2016: Ask me why I love Racine

Ask me why I love Racine - The People

There are so many ways that the Racine community supports our ministry to people experiencing homelessness, especially to those who are unsheltered and living on the streets. We receive many generous donations, both financial and in-kind. We collaborate with great organizations like HALO, Racine Vocational Ministry, the Hospitality Center, Lutheran Social Services, Center for Veterans Issues, Women’s Resource Center, SAFE Haven of Racine, and more. We also have interactions with compassionate community members who are concerned about people they have seen on the streets who might be homeless.

We have a contact form on our website where people can send a message to us. The message could be about anything. Sometimes people want to donate. Sometimes people want to learn more about what we do. Sometimes we get unsolicited offers of service for hire or products for purchase. We were surprised, however, to have people start using it to report where they have seen someone they think might be homeless and need assistance.

Some recent leads coming through our website have helped the street outreach team make contact with people who were unsheltered on the north side of town. These came from people who said they had seen a person they thought might be homeless. They provided descriptions of the people and where they had seen them. This was enough for the street outreach to locate and engage with those people. In one case, it was someone we already knew but hadn’t seen in a while. In another case it was someone we had never met before. Neither wanted to go to shelter, but each of them accepted some help in looking at housing options and we will continue engaging with them. Going from the streets to housing usually takes longer to get off the streets than going to shelter, but can still ultimately end their homelessness.

We are very thankful to caring members of our community who have given us tips that helped us make contacts like these and start the process of helping someone out of homelessness. It is one of the reasons we love Racine!

Remembering Karen

I still remember the first night we saw Karen (not her real name). It was late May 2016 and we were in the Walmart parking lot. We saw a car with the seat tilted back and some clothes hanging the window, so we decided to take a closer look. Derrick, one of our street outreach volunteers, took the lead as I stood back and waited with our other team member. We watched Derrick go up and stand by the car for a while and then return. He said, “There is a little lady with white hair sleeping in the back and I didn’t feel like I should wake her up.” We went up, agreed with his assessment, left a street outreach brochure on the windshield, and moved on.

The next day we received a message at the HOPES Center office that a woman had called because she had found a brochure on her car. We were excited. We had just started using street outreach informational brochures and it was our first response. I asked Jerry to call her back. A few hours later, Jerry came and told me that the call hadn’t gone as expected. The woman had called to say we were disturbing her and to leave her alone. Jerry had tried to explain what street outreach was and what it does, but to no avail. A few days later, the woman came to the office and wanted to speak to “the manager.” I invited her into my office, where she announced that she had come to lodge a complaint against the street outreach team, which I had been part of when it, without waking or speaking a word to her, left the brochure on her car. That was the first time I met Karen face to face.

Karen and I had a very long discussion that day. She talked about an eviction from a HUD-funded unit and many traumatic events in her life. The fact that the street outreach team left a brochure on her windshield seemed very trivial compared to the other things she related. She was also much more interested in talking about her recent eviction than the alleged “harassment” by street outreach. Several hours later, we agreed that street outreach would not approach her vehicle. I made sure that she understood that we were often in the area at night, but it is what we do and that we weren’t there specifically for her. We left it at a sort of informal “no contact” order, but I told her that if she saw us and wanted us to come over and talk to her or help her with anything, she could just wave us over or flash her lights or something. We continued to go about street outreach at night, but didn’t go anywhere near her car. Two weeks later we got another call from Karen with a simple message, “I need help.” That started our long history of street outreach contacts with Karen at her car, through the heat of summers and the bitter cold of winter nights. She parked at a few different spots over the years, but we knew her car and were always able to find her.

At first, Karen mostly told the team about her difficult and traumatic past. Eventually, she talked less about that and more about the books she was reading and things she was observing in the world around her, from people to chipmunks. She had gone from telling street outreach to leave her alone to asking us to wake her up if we found her sleeping so that she could talk to us. In the winters she enjoyed rich hot chocolate. In the summers, she often wasn’t hungry on Friday nights because that was her “pizza night.” She would go get pizza from Kwik Trip, which she gave high ratings. Karen knew and liked everyone on the HOPES outreach teams and she was a regular stop on our rounds at night.

Street outreach provides hot chocolate, coffee, blankets, socks and other items. Karen liked gray blankets and socks that matched her car. The ultimate goal of outreach, however, is to help get people off the streets. If someone is unable to, or (as in Karen’s case) declines to go to shelter, street outreach tries to connect people directly to housing opportunities. Those who live outside (unsheltered) are eligible for housing programs for people experiencing homelessness. The street outreach team can place them on Racine’s coordinated entry prioritization list for that type of housing. Many people who are homeless are also eligible for various other types of subsidized housing. The outreach team and HOPES Center’s office staff are familiar with those as well and can help make housing connections to help end someone’s homelessness.

When we first started to talk to Karen about housing, it was clear that the wounds from her eviction were still raw. She was content staying in her car, where she felt safe (for the most part) and in control. Over the months that followed our initial contact in 2016, her car started filling up with belongings and she went from sleeping in the back seat to sleeping in the driver’s seat. She put together some curtains and other privacy blinds on the windows around her and had clearly settled in for a long stay. We discussed housing with her periodically, but it was many months before she allowed us to refer her to the coordinated entry list.

It wasn’t too long after her referral that Karen was prioritized for housing and assigned to a housing project run by Lutheran Social Services (LSS). She told us that she had spoken to someone from LSS, decided that she couldn’t afford it, and declined the assistance. It was clear that Karen had misinterpreted something, so we asked her to at least meet with the project case manager in person before declining. She agreed and we contacted LSS and asked them not to remove her from the project yet. They met and Karen received information on the project, which we thought was a great opportunity. Unfortunately, there was a name on one of the documents that she received and it triggered something from her past. We could hear her reliving a traumatic event as she talked about something that had happened many years ago. We explained that the name she saw had nothing to do with LSS and nothing to do with the project.  She agreed to continue, but she just wasn’t ready for housing. In the end, she declined all of the opportunities that were available and eventually left the project without being housed. Some of us on the street outreach team believed that it may have been related to the trauma experienced from her eviction and not wanting to risk repeating that. Although she didn’t accept housing, she did tell us that she was seeing a professional to talk about her past trauma and how it affected her.

So the years went by and Karen remained a “regular” as our teams would go out at night. One of the challenges we experience in street outreach is related to people who live outside during cold winters. Once someone has made it through a harsh winter outside, it becomes very difficult for them to accept shelter or housing. This is especially true for people who live in their cars. Karen was one of those people. Whenever we would bring up housing, she had all kinds of “reasons” why she couldn’t apply for housing yet. We would talk through those reasons and she would come up with more. One time she said that there are rules that she didn’t like, such as not being able to smoke in your apartment. She said it wasn’t fair to make people smoke outside. I quietly said, “Well, you smoke outside now… all the time.”  She laughed and said, “That’s true, but I just am not ready.”

Karen went to stay with some friends and we didn’t see her outside at night for about a year. In street outreach, we usually consider it a good thing if we are not seeing someone, because it probably means that they have found a better place to stay inside somewhere. We would see her car parked at a local church (with their permission), because she was afraid to keep it in the parking lot at her friends’ nearby apartment complex. We still checked her empty car periodically, until late one night in December 2020 we found her sitting in the driver’s seat. It was almost Christmas. Things had gone bad with her friends and she was outside again. We discussed shelter and housing, but she was not interested. We told her to let us know any time and we could take her into shelter is she wanted to go. A mild December turned to January 2021 and then the snow and cold spell came.

The snow storms of 2021 always seemed to fall on nights when Ben and I had street outreach. During one of those winter storms, we found Karen in her car and she asked if we could put gas in it. She said she had money, but she was afraid to get out and pump the gas in the horrific weather. We said we would do that for her, but first we grabbed some snow brushes and quickly cleaned off her car. Smiling, she rolled down the window and yelled, “You’re hired!” We followed her to Speedway, where I went in with her card and paid for the gas while Ben worked the pump. During another storm we did the same, but she went into the store while I pumped the gas. Ben came out with her, holding her arm as he guided her back to her car through the wind and snow. She looked small and frail.

After the snow came a prolonged period of bitter cold and the outreach team went into “emergency weather outreach” mode. When it is below 10 degrees we go out on the nights between our normal shifts to conduct welfare checks. During about 10 days of frigid and often below zero temperatures, no one who was sleeping outside in their vehicles or tent accepted shelter.  We went through a lot of hand warmers, sleeping bags, and blankets. Karen especially liked a type of warmer that goes in your shoe. She was the only person that specifically requested those, because she said she hated getting cold feet. During one of those sub-zero nights, I was out with Warren and Karen’s car wasn’t in its spot. We decided to keep looking in likely locations until we finally caught up with her at a KwikTrip. She told us that she had been having chest pain for several days. We pleaded with her to go to the emergency room, telling her to look after her health and that it would also keep her warm and inside for a while. She agreed and the next night Ben and I located her car, unoccupied, in the emergency room parking lot. We were happy to know she had gone there and was warm, safe, and taking care of her health.

We gave her a call the next day and she told us that she had pneumonia. She said she had been tempted to let her stubborn side take over and stay in her car anyway after seeing Warren and I that night, but she decided we were right and went to the ER. Later she told us that she had also been diagnosed with a serious (non-COVID) illness and was receiving treatment that she didn’t like. She also didn’t like the hospital food and she thought that the TV shows were stupid, although she admitted that she did watch a show called Ridiculousness that that it was kind of funny. Karen was more of a reader and one of her main concerns while in the hospital was a library book that she thought was somewhere in her packed car and might be overdue. We told her not to worry about the book and talked about housing. She agreed to go back onto the coordinated entry list and try again.

Karen received her mail via HOPES Center, so we would drop it off to her and kept in contact with her. While she was in the hospital, she was accepted into a permanent supportive housing project through coordinated entry. We acted as a liaison between Karen and HALO, which runs the housing project. When it came time for Karen to move to from the hospital a rehabilitation and care facility, she couldn’t drive and was afraid she would lose her car. She called and asked if Street Outreach could move her car, so it didn’t’ get towed.  She still considered the car to be her home that held all of her important belongings. It isn’t something street outreach would normally do, but we understood and agreed to help.

Karen made arrangements for us to get her keys and Ben and I tried to move the car from the hospital one night. We couldn’t get it started. We had seen her use some special technique of turning the key on and off for designated periods before starting, but couldn’t remember how she did it.  After consulting with Karen and her mechanic the next day, we finally got it moved on another night. She wanted her car parked at the local church where she had friends instead of the care facility where she was staying. She knew it would be safe at the church and we guessed it was also a symbol of hope for her that she would move out of the care facility and back into her car, or perhaps housing. Sadly, that never happened. One night the Wednesday outreach team (A-Team) noticed that her car was not where it had been parked. The next morning we received a message for our mutual friends at “the Spaceship Church” that Karen had passed away.  Everyone agreed that at least it was in a warm place where she was being cared for, but that didn’t alieve our sorrow at the loss.

We have often had people leave the streets, enter housing, and the pass away in their own beds. We remain sad at the loss of someone with whom we had walked through a challenging part of their life, but we are happy that they had moved out of homelessness and experienced another, fuller level of life after the streets. With Karen, that was not the case. I remain with many memories of Karen from our hundreds and hundreds of contacts over the years. In my mind, she remains the lady rolling down the window in the middle of a snow storm, smiling and laughing as she told Ben and I that we’re hired as her official snow brushers.

-        Scott, HOPES Center Street Outreach

Housing Choice

The Housing Authority of Racine County (HARC) has opened up Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher applications this week. They will take online applications through March 24 and then randomly select 1,500 applications to go onto the Racine Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher waiting list. HOPES Center has been providing access to computers and assistance to people who need some help in the application process.

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher is a subsidized housing program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Once approved for the voucher, a person is able to select their own apartment as long as the landlord agrees to accept rental assistance through the Section 8 program, it falls within fair market rental prices, and the unit passes a housing quality standards inspection. Program participants pay 30% of their income towards their units.

One Rapid Rehousing participant recently had a previous Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher application come to the top of the waiting list and was very excited. He came into the office to show us his letter from the Housing Authority and said, “I think this is a golden ticket to housing stability.” He had lived in shelter and then was unsheltered (living outside) when he had contact with our street outreach team. Street outreach helped him enter into Racine’s Coordinated Entry System, and he was eventually prioritized for one of HOPES Center’s Rapid Rehousing projects. As he prepares to leave Rapid Rehousing, he hopes to use the Section 8 Voucher and stay in the same apartment.

The street outreach team also has assisted a number of people to complete Section 8 Housing Voucher applications who went directly from the streets into a Section 8 supported unit. Two of them who had been chronically homeless entered their housing just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to be felt in Wisconsin in March 2020 and are still safely housed in their apartments. We always strongly encourage people who are experiencing homelessness, who are in short-medium term housing programs, or who have low incomes and are not stably housed to apply for the Housing Choice Voucher when applications are being taken. We are always there to help make it happen if someone needs assistance.

Housing First

Some of us are attending a virtual conference put on by the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH)this week. One of the first sessions was on Housing First, something that we practice as an approach to homelessness here in Racine. NAEH vice president, Steve Berg, introduced the concept of housing first:

"This is what we mean by Housing First: that homelessness is a problem with a solution, and that the solution is housing. For everyone. Whether you follow the rules or not. Whether you are “compliant” with treatment or not. Whether you have a criminal record or not. Whether you have been on the streets for one day or ten years. Permanent housing is what ends homelessness. It is the platform from which people can continue to grow and thrive in their communities."

HOPES remains committed to the housing first approach to homelessness in Racine.

Positive Exits

Randy went directly from the streets to his own apartment in 2020 and was a “positive exit” from street outreach as he ended his homelessness. (photo used with permission)

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) put together Systems Performance Measures to help communities gauge their progress in preventing and ending homelessness. The measures are “system wide,” meaning that they focus on the community efforts as a whole, rather than a single project or organization. The measures include things like changes in the number of people experiencing homeless, people who are homeless for the first time, people who return to homelessness, people who leave homelessness into permanent housing, etc. HOPES Center is a co-chair on the a Racine Continuum of Care committee that regularly looks at Racine’s performance according to the Systems Performance Measures.

There are several different shelter and housing programs in Racine, HOPES Center’s two Rapid Rehousing projects being among them. HOPES has the only street outreach program in Racine, so it is directly responsible for one the System Performance Measure that looks out outreach performance. The specific measure is exits to permanent housing. An “exit” means that someone had been homeless according to the HEARTH Act definition (living in a shelter or on the streets), was part of a program or project to help end their homelessness, and left the program (and homelessness) into permanently housing.

Because of the nature of how street outreach works, it doesn’t collect the information on program participants that shelters or housing programs do. Street outreach teams often don’t even know someone’s name when they start meeting them. Because of this, outreach isn’t included in a lot of the Systems Performance Measures. But under the measure for exits to permanent housing, there is a special sub-measure for street outreach that looks at “positive exits.” A positive exit in the street outreach context means that someone has ended their contact with the street outreach team and is no longer living on the streets in a place not meant for human habitation (unsheltered). This includes moving into permanent housing, but could also include entering a shelter, entering a long-term rehabilitation program, or even moving in with families or friends.

Most of the people who the street outreach team meets are only on the streets for a very short period and the team only sees them a few times. If we haven’t built a relationship yet or connected them to services, we simply don’t know where they went. This would not count as a “positive exit,.” In the last two fiscal years (HUD fiscal years run from October to September), positive exits from street outreach in Racine were at 44%. The other 56% were people who we simply no longer saw on the streets any more, but had no idea where they were.

While reviewing 1st Quarter data (October - December 2020) with Racine’s Systems Performance committee this week, “positive exits” from street outreach were 80%. That is a great, but it is admittedly an unusually high, rate of positive exits. We think there may be a few factors behind this:

1. Autumn Outreach: The first quarter falls when the weather starts changing and the cold motivates many of the people who are unsheltered to leave the streets if they can. Most go into “doubled up situations (staying with friends or family), but the outreach team took a number of people into shelter in November and December.

2. The COVID Factor: One of the features of the COVID-19 pandemic is that there have been significantly fewer people on the streets and in shelter in Racine and across Wisconsin. The street outreach team had the same kind of coverage as it did before the pandemic, but had far fewer contacts with people who were only on the streets for very short periods of times. During the pandemic, we have known most of the people with whom we had contact and where went if they left the streets.

3. Coordination with Shelter: During the winter, many people mistaken considered street outreach a sort of gateway to shelter. Almost none of the people who called wanting street outreach to take them to shelter were actually unsheltered and llving on the streets. However, the team has close collaboration with the HALO shelter and was able to take people in to shelter when they actually were sleeping outside with nowhere to stay and wanted to enter shelter. (Ironically, most of the people calling about shelter are not unsheltered and most of the people who are unsheltered decline shelter.) We continue close coordination with HALO.

4. Housing Focus: We have gotten better at street outreach and have a housing focus. We were able to help two people move from the streets directly into apartments during the quarter.

5. Chronic Homelessness: There have been fewer people on the streets and many of those that were on the streets in October entered shelter or were housed by December. Most of those who did not enter shelter by December 31st have been chronically homeless and are still on the streets in March. They are strongly independent, have declined shelter and housing, and have successfully navigated through the cold of several winters. We still meet them on the streets at night, provide outreach supplies, talk, and have an open offer of shelter and housing opportunities.

80% positive exits was only from one quarter’s data and may be very closely related to the season and unusual operating environment during the pandemic. It is unlikely that we will be able to maintain it through the summer season of outreach and over the course of an entire year. It is, however, always great to see a positive performance indicator and take some time to think about what factors help us work towards more “positive exits” from street outreach.

Getting Ready to Lead

Ben gets his first set street outreach supplies.

Ben Cornell joined the street outreach team in December and has been on the streets through the winter as he has been learning street outreach techniques. In March, he will be taking on the role of street outreach team leader. This means that he will be responsible for:

• Organizing the supplies and making sure everything is read before the shift

• Preparing the burritos, hot water and coffee

• Preparing the outreach plan (where are we going to go, who do we want to try to meet, where do we start)

• Coordinating street outreach contacts during the night (who takes the lead)

• Driving the team and monitoring safety issues

• Completing a shift report at the end of the night.

• Updating the next team that will be going out.

The “B-Team” (Scott and Ben) will continue through the early part of spring, but with Ben taking on the team leader role. Later in the spring we expect to split up the team, with Ben leading a new team and Scott leading another on a different night or covering a different area.

Cold Weather Outreach

Over the years, we have learned that the number of people who are living on the streets (unsheltered) in Racine on any given night is closely related to the temperature. When it is warm, there are more people who sleep outside. Although public awareness and concern for people who are unsheltered is heightened during periods of extreme cold, there are actually very few people still on the streets in Racine. But… there are still some, even when the temperatures dip below zero degrees. Because of this, HOPES Center’s street outreach teams don’t take the night off due to cold weather or winter storms. In fact, when the temperatures are in single digits or below, HOPES has an team out every night until the temperature breaks. The people are fewer, but conditions are more urgent.

Typically, we view relationship building as the key component of street outreach; developing trust and eventually helping people get connected to housing and services that will end their homelessness. During extreme cold, the focus is on safety; either getting people to a safer and warmer location or helping them stay as warms as possible where they are if they decline other options. Contacts are generally short and to the point as we look for any symptoms of hypothermia, check if the person wants to go to shelter, and provide supplies to help stay warm if they don’t. We pull out our zero degree sleeping bags and go through a lot of hand warmers and thermal socks. What may be surprising is that we also go through a lot of water, as people often report dehydration as a problem.

A typical extreme weather outreach shift usually includes the following:

1. Welfare checks on people we know to be outside and with whom we have had recent contact. Do they show symptoms of hypothermia? Do they want to go to shelter? What can we give them to help them stay warm?

2. Searches for people who report being outside. People call and say that they are staying outside. By night time they almost always find an indoor place stay (friends or family) rather sleep outside, but we check any locations reported.

3. Searches of places where people might go to stay warm. There are places in Racine that have at least some kind of heat source and are accessible to people who are outside. We check those, as well as places where people might try to get out of the wind.

4. General searches by driving around and keeping our eyes open, talking to people we see walking outside, and doubling back to check spots we had checked earlier. (Just because someone was not there at 10 p.m. doesn’t mean that no one will be there at 2:00 a.m.).

Cold weather outreach usually has more driving and walking and less contact with people who are unsheltered, but the contact that we do have is often more critical. So far, we have yet to find anyone who likes being out in the cold, but people are there. Cold weather outreach also isn’t a favorite of the team, but it is all part of the ministry to people experiencing homelessness in Racine who are unsheltered.

The Man Behind the Mask

Who was that masked man?

Since the autumn surge of the COVID pandemic, we have split our small office staff into two teams that are in the office on different days. The housing and admin team are in the office on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, with Andre (housing case manager) and JaneMarie (administrative specialist). On Wednesdays and Thursdays the outreach and PATH team (Ben, Kathie and Scott) is in the office and Andre is working from home. By compartmentalizing the staff and reducing contact between the two separate teams, it mitigates the risk of having to quarantine the entire staff at once. It is not the most efficient way to operate, but it helps prevent potential gaps in service in the event that one of the staff members is exposed to the Corona Virus.

Today was one of the unusual days that Andre was in the office on a Wednesday. Andre has been our rapid rehousing case manager for several years and has done an excellent job of housing people experiencing homelessness in Racine. He also assists walk-ins at the office, responds to phone calls, receives donations, and is the go-to-guy for just about everything in the office.

These days he is busy try to help house six households that are currently in shelter (some at HALO and some at WRC) and he was in the office today to meet with one of those households. He was only here briefly, for the meeting and checking some housing information. So when we saw a masked man sitting at the computer in reception, we weren’t overly concerned. We were pretty sure it was Andre, getting updates and information to help serve a household on its way out of homelessness.

Leveraging Existing Outreach Teams: PIT 2021

Every year there is an annual estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in Racine and across the United States. (We actually do it twice per year in Racine.) It is called the Point-in-Time (PIT) count and it includes the people who are staying in shelter during a given night and an estimate of the number of people who are sleeping outside (unsheltered) The Continuum of Care for the City and County of Racine (COC) brings together representatives from its member organizations and the broader community to conduct the street count portion of PIT, sending teams of volunteers all across the county to look for people who are unsheltered on the night-of-count. That is… until we entered the COVID pandemic. PIT 2021 is a little different and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued some revised guidelines for this years point-in-time count.

Racine’s PIT usually has about 35 -60 people participating in the unsheltered count that takes place on the 4th Wednesday of January and July. They gather together to get supplies, register, are formed into teams, and have orientation before going out to conduct the count; each team assigned a specific area of the county. Some teams meet people who are unsheltered, some don’t. Then they return with whatever information they were able to gather and we start putting together our estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in Racine on that night by adding the unsheltered count to the number of people who were in shelter.

The COVID-19 pandemic raises concerns in Racine’s normal PIT process because of the possibility of exposure to the corona virus while meeting together at registration and orientation, as well as contact with people during the course of the count. HUD allowed room for some minor changes in PIT methodology, and even a waiver to eliminate the street count portion this year if the COC deemed it necessary. The National Alliance to End Homelessness also worked with the University of Pennsylvania to identify strategies for conducting PIT during the pandemic. Racine is conducting its 2021 Point-in-Time count, but will be using some of those revised strategies for the street count.

There are two main strategies that Racine is using for the unsheltered count this year that are different from most years:

1. Leveraging Existing Street Outreach Teams: Rather than bring in volunteers who need to be oriented, etc. Racine is using existing teams that already conduct street outreach across the county. This winter HOPES has two teams that go out on different nights: The “A-Team” (Warren, Rebecca, and Loretta - with two out of the three going out on a given night) and “The B-Team” (Ben and Scott). A third team was added for Point-in-Time with Andre (HOPES’ Housing Case Manager) and Kayla (an experienced PIT team leader). The team members have extensive outreach experience and did not to meet for orientation before the count (although the A-Team and B-Team ran into each other before we got started). Using personal protective equipment such as masks was another strategy, but HOPES’ street outreach teams have already been using masks since very early in the pandemic.

2. Extended Count: We will be conducting the count over several days. On Wednesday January 27th, the three teams covered the entire portion of Racine that is east of I-94. Over the next few days, the “B-Team” will cover the area west of I-94 and conduct some follow-up as needed to ensure that we have the best estimated count possible.

So last night (Wednesday, January 27th, 2021) started the count. It was the coldest night of outreach so far this winter, with the temperature dropping into the single digits before the last team finished around 3:00 a.m. The shelters (HALO, Women’s Resource Center, SAFE Haven, and Transitional Living Center of Burlington) will take their counts from the people who were in shelter that night, as well as transitional housing programs at Bethany Apartments and veterans’ programs at Union Grove. Eventually we will put all the data together and have a final count that will be submitted to HUD and rolled up into the national PIT count for 2021.

Just like everything else since last spring, Point-in-Time is different this year. We missed the comradery and excitement of having lots of community members and COC agency representatives join together for PIT. This year has been a more low-key approach to the unsheltered count (six people who didn’t even all meet each other before going out), but we were able to adapt to the current situation. We hope that by the July PIT we will be able to open PIT up to our wonderful community volunteers again.

Note: HOPES Center participates in PIT and also chairs the COC’s Point-in-Time work group that organizes the annual PIT counts in Racine.

Getting ready to head out for Point-in-Time 2021: Warren, Ben, Rebecca, and Sadie the Outreach Dog.

Outreach Principle: Meeting People Where They Are

“Meeting people where they are” is a principle that guides street outreach, not just in Racine, but all across the USA. In the literal sense, street outreach takes services to people where they are located on the streets. Most of the people we meet during street outreach do not initiate contact by coming into the office or calling us on the phone. We come across them on the streets during the course of outreach and start to get to know them. Street outreach takes services to where people are located, even if it is in the woods, a parking garage, behind a dumpster, or in their car in the corner of a parking lot. This week, for example, our street outreach team completed a housing assessment and referral in a laundromat after midnight. Sometimes people start coming to the office after we have contact with them on the streets, sometimes not. We continue meeting them where they are at night as long as they are on the streets and consent to us doing so.

Street outreach also meets people where they are in a figurative sense, whatever their current status is. People might be happy, sad, angry, depressed, intoxicated, or anxious. However we find them, street outreach starts from there. Some people may not accept any assistance, and that is also OK. People’s situations change over time, and however we find people, that’s how they are the moment. We start from there and try to serve them in the moment as well as looking at how we might be able to assist.

Outreach Principle: Worth and Dignity

Recognizing the worth and dignity of each person, HOPES Center serves the mental health and social service needs of people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Recognizing the worth and dignity of each person is not only a key part of HOPES Center’s mission. How we treat people is important to HOPES in everything we do, but it is especially relevant to and a core principle of our street outreach work.

As we say in one of our videos about HOPES, homeless is a situation, not a person. We serve people who are in an unsheltered homeless situation. That means that their ordinary sleeping accommodation is a place not meant for human habitation. As an outreach team, we don’t focus on the person’s situation except to the extent of what we can do to help them while they are in it and help them as they try to leave it. Above all, we recognize that the people we serve are people just like us. They may be in a more challenging situation at the moment, but people are defined by so much more than their situations.

We recognize that we meet people who live in tents who may know how to play an instrument, know a lot about animals and birds, or have spent a lot of time studying the constitution. We meet people living in cars who have long histories of work, who have served our country, who have very high IQs, who are always concerned about other people in need, or are looking forward to being housed again so that they can have their family stay with them. We meet people who can identify the constellations above us and people who have great senses of humor. One of the blessings of street outreach is that when we go out, we consistently encounter strength, resilience, kindness, worth and dignity in the people we meet. We frequently have people express concern for the team, wishing us well and telling us “be safe out there,” as we part for the night. Mutual respect and recognition of our humanness is the basis of a relationship that can become a path out of their homeless situation. It is fundamental to who we are and what we do at HOPES.

Slow Down and Don’t Assume

HOPES Center provides orientation to new street outreach staff and volunteers when they come on board. The real learning comes in the field though. Orientation materials make a lot more sense after you have done it for a while and have some practical experience During orientation, we talk about two common “mistakes” in approach during street outreach, one by new team members and one by experienced team members.

Slow Down: One year we had people who were unsheltered gently tell us that some of our new team members were a little “pushy.” They were so eager to serve and do outreach that they barraged people with all of the things that they wanted to offer in rapid succession and asked people a lot of questions, sometimes personal questions, before having established any kind of real rapport. The advice we give, even before people go out for the first time, is to slow down, listen more than you talk, and follow the (unsheltered) person’s lead. Giving someone a cup of coffee is easy. Building a relationship that will help someone as they work towards ending their homelessness is not as easy and usually doesn’t happen with the first meeting.

Don’t Assume: As an experienced street outreach leader, I (Scott) have often made the mistake of either assuming that a specific spot will not be occupied, or that it will be occupied by the person who has usually been there. This had led to me skip going to a location where someone might have been (because I believed it would be vacant), being surprised to find someone and caught off guard, or approaching a location expecting to make a familiar contact but then running into someone I have never met before. We made our only contact to date with an unaccompanied minor (16 years old) in a spot where we didn’t expect anyone to be that night. We checked for due diligence purposes only to find someone who needed help. My advice to myself and other experienced outreach team members is to always assume that you are going to run into someone you don’t know. It makes an unexpected contact a lot easier for everyone.