Project Homeless Connect: Successful, Necessary… and No Longer Funded?

For eight hours today, healthcare is free in Portland. Well, if you could wake up in time to snag an appointment at Project Homeless Connect down at the Waterfront, a twice-annual event which hooks upneedy people up with every kind of care — dental work, eye glasses, bike repair, food stamps, free socks.

While signing people up for haircuts, I met a kid from Kansas City who sleeps in trees at night to evade junkies and sit-lie tickets. Outside the chiropractic booth, I met a man who sleeps in a bush in Beaverton at night (explaining: “They don’t think they have a homeless problem up there. Here they give you little tickets.”) and wanted to send a personal “Fuck You” to the City for affordable housing programs he feels shafts low wage-earning, able-bodied single people like himself.

And I met some volunteers who should be immediately taken out for ice cream and wine at 5PM, like Providence Hospital nurse Robin Beaver who took a vacation day from work to scrape calluses off poor people’s feet:

The woman receiving the foot-scrape was highly appreciative – since she’s disabled and her insurance only covers one podiatry visit annually, she only gets her toenails cut once a year unless she can convince friends to do the job.

These are the kinds of services Project Homeless Connect provides every six months to an estimated 1,000 people. Started in 2006, Portland’s one-stop-shop free services days has “lit the fire” for 10 similar events around the NW, according to Regional Coordinator for the US Council on Homelessness Paul Carlson and been a model of success other cities look to. But this year, this city sliced its funding completely from the budget, passing the ball to Commissioner Nick Fish’s office to figure out what to do with the event. While Fish’s office and the event staffers seem confident Homeless Connect will continue, they’ve got to come up with roughly $15,000 to fund each event. It looks like the highly-lauded public service project will need to rely more on companies, churches and nonprofits for funding and volunteers — or it could fall apart.

Nick Fish’s perspective, words from the Project coordinator and a sweet mohawk bearing America’s most offensive name for a lady, all below the cut.

The key theme reiterated while I talked to people about how Project Connect is going to continue was: The government can’t do this alone.

“For this to be sustainable, I’ll have to find some dollars from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors,” said Commissioner Fish, while we talked at a table that would be turned into a haircutting station minutes later, “I hope to continue it and I’ll be looking for funding from both City Hall and other sources.”

“It’s both morally right, but if you want to be pragmatic about it, if someone can come here and get access to all the services they need, then it’s going to save the city a fortune down the road,” Fish continued, “We’re going into a down economy, there’s going to some tough calls at city hall but I’m the Housing Commissioner, so I’m going to fight for all the programs which are successful and this is a successful one.”

But how exactly it’s going to continue, no one’s sure. “It will happen,” said Mary Carroll, a coordinator for the 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, “Where the money is coming from, we don’t know yet.” Carroll noted that churches around Portland have taken the city’s idea and made it their own, hosting Compassion Connect. As an uninsured person seeking health care, I was weirded out by the prayer at the Compassion event I went to in June, but they did do a commendable job of providing free dental and check ups to several hundred people. More partnerships with churches who can provide solid volunteer bases and private companies (like Supercuts, which sponsored all today’s haircuts) seems to be the way Project Homeless Connect will go.

Ruth Benson, one of the two full-time staffers who coordinate the project and whose paycheck is now up in the air, seemed pretty calm in the center of the chaos around lunch time today. She stood in the middle of the tents, covered in walkie-talkies and cell phones. In the four minutes I snagged with her, Benson greeted a heartbreaking couple who came hoping to find their runaway son in the crowd, cleared the sidewalk for an ambulance and radioed in a power-outage at the vision booth all while keeping up a conversation about what will happen to Homeless Connect.

“At this point, we need the funding for the staff to continue working on partnerships,” said Benson, “This is meant to be a community effort, government can’t solve all the problems. We’re hopefully the guiding force that helps build up these partnerships… the more partners we have, the more donors we have.”

A big part of why Homeless Connect is a good thing for Portland is that it encourages non-homeless people to talk face-to-face with people that sleep on the streets. “A thing I was really surprised about what that people really wanted to talk to me just because I had a clipboard,” said David Cook, a first-time volunteer who thought it was cool that some people got philosophical about the questionnaire he distributed asking about family size and housing status. “This one guy said he was not homeless, but he lived on the street… and was like, ‘All the people on the street are my family!'” Cook said that after all the conversations, he’s more likely to talk to homeless people in real life, too. “In general, the homeless people weirded me out a lot less than the crazy people running the event,” he said, “They were stressed out and crazy.”

Things were wild at the haircutting station where I volunteered for two hours. Before lunch, just under 100 people had signed up for haircuts and beard trims and remaining calm while people shouted their names out and stylists’ scissors clipped all around me was tough. But watching people get their haircut reinforced the idea, for me, that all kinds of people are homeless.

This guy hadn’t had his beard trimmed for 13 months:

And this wily Youth named Zay strode up to the tent knowing exactly what he wanted:

(yes, that’s a mohawk inscribed with “kunt”)

There’s some obvious shortcomings of the event that a permanent facility or more funding could possibly resolve. By 11am, the vision center ran out of eyeglasses and the dental station’s appointment list was full. And the zoo-like crush of people wandering between wait lists for services made the event rather chaotic. Obviously, the need exists for these services and more of them. “If we could go in and take care of these things on a day-to-day basis rather than having to flock here, that would be better,” said a woman named Patti who came from the De Paul treatment center looking for replacements for her almost unwearable five-year-old New Balances. With a permanent day access center delayed until 2010, let’s hope Commissioner Fish is true to his fighting promise.