Looking to take advantage of the educational benefits that the military offered, Anita Pascual joined the National Guard when she was just 19 years old.
Just as she was set to deploy to Iraq, however, she found out she was pregnant, so she left the Guard only to join the Army three years later and serve in Afghanistan.
After active duty, Pascual returned home to her three kids in Fresno, Calif. and hit a bumpy road. “One day I was me, a soldier, and the next day I’m mom again,” she tells Valley Public Radio. “Mom, and sister, and daughter and I had to do all that buckle up and it was just exhausting and overwhelming sometimes.”
Pascual couldn’t pay her bills and soon received an eviction notice. She turned to the nonprofit WestCare Foundation’s housing complex for homeless vets: HomeFront. The organization welcomed her and gave her an apartment to stay in while she got back on her feet; about four years ago, she was able to leave and move into her own home.
Now Pascual works for HomeFront, helping other female vets facing homelessness find jobs, education opportunities and support.
Elle, a veteran that Pascual is helping, appreciates the extra touches HomeFront provides to help homeless service members. “It’s not just a room and that’s it. You have all the capabilities of what can help you to move forward,” Elle says. “It doesn’t make you feel like you’re sitting under a park bench anymore.”
Elle credits Pascual with helping to put her life back in order. “I’m going to get my college benefits, she put me up with a good position with being able to get a job. Seven or eight years of back and forth it took seven weeks just for Anita to help me out.”
MORE: For Female Veterans Experiencing Employment Woes, This Organization Offers Strong Advice
Tag: Homelessness
The Unlikely Partnership That’s Helping the Poor
When low-income patients end up in the hospital with a medical emergency, it might not only be doctors, but also lawyers who save their lives.
Many medical facilities now have onsite attorneys offering free legal aid to such patients. This service makes sense, since issues such as eviction, homelessness and difficulty attaining services for a disabled or developmentally delayed child can negatively impact a patient’s health.
This model of partnership between the medical and legal professions began in Boston in 1993, and since then, it’s expanded to 260 locations in 38 states, according to NBC News.
The Cox family of Cleveland is an example of how these programs are effective. Tony Cox had a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job. Out of work, he fell behind on his mortgage payments, and his family was on the verge of eviction when a legal services attorney stepped in and worked with the bank to renegotiate their loan. “We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,” Donna, his wife, says. “We would have been separated.”
Colleen Cotter, director of Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, tells NBC News, “When we really look at the issues in our clients’ lives, there’s almost always a health issue involved. Poverty is unhealthy, and bad health can lead to economic chaos. I see everything we do as increasing the health and communities we serve.”
Pediatrician Robert Needleman of Case Western University Medical School says, “In general, medicine does not spend much time on the parts of patients’ lives that we can’t fix.” Needleman is striving to change that, however, by instructing medical students to chat with patients about stressors in their lives and issuing referrals to free legal aid when appropriate.
Not only do these partnerships between lawyers and doctors save people from eviction and bring about other positive changes in their lives, but they also save money. In Pennsylvania, Lancaster General Hospital established a clinic for “super-utilizers” (i.e. people who come to the emergency room frequently). When they added a lawyer to the services the facility offered, the patients’ use of the health care system declined by half.
As Megan Sprecher, a Legal Aid Society of Cleveland attorney says about one client she helped avoid homelessness by obtaining a tax refund that had been lost in the mail, “It was a very simple issue, but these systems can be hard to navigate if you’re not familiar with them.”
MORE: When it Comes to Helping Homeless Vets, Could Thinking Small be the Answer?
How Putting a Pen to Paper Saved a Disabled Veteran’s Home
Saying that 65-year-old disabled Vietnam veteran Buck was down on his luck is an understatement.
His septic tank failed and would cost $27,000 to repair. His daughter is ill, so he and his wife support their children, leaving them with no money to spare and the belief that they might have to abandon their home in Pontiac, Mich. Desperate, Buck’s wife started writing letters to any organization and individual she could think of, asking for help.
“My wife started applying for everything and I remember it was almost funny the envelopes of rejection coming in,” Buck tells Fox Detroit.
When his wife exhausted all the places she could think of to ask for help, Buck sat down to write a letter of his own to L. Brooks Patterson, a lawyer and politician who is the County Executive of Oakland County, Mich., where Buck lives. “You sir are my last hope,” he wrote, “we gave up for the most part last month but something tells me to contact L. Brooks Patterson.”
Buck’s instinct was right. Patterson immediately directed his staff to search for grants to help Buck. “We picked up a $10,000 grant from the Michigan Veterans Trust Fund and a $16,000 grant from the Michigan Veterans Homeowners Assistance Program,” Patterson says. “Put that together and you can fix the septic and stay in your home for Christmas.”
“It was one of the most amazing feelings I ever felt,” Buck tells Bill Mullan, an Oakland County Media and Communications Officer. “For months we had been thinking we were going to have to leave our home, about the packing we had to do, and how we were going to have to come up with the money to move. I felt safe again.”
MORE: The Coordinated Rescue Team That Saved A Disabled Veteran From Homelessness
This 85-Year-Old Knitter Churns Out Hats to Help Homeless Veterans
Seven years ago, 85-year-old Orville “Mark” Skattum, who served in the Army National Guard during the Korean conflict, took up a new hobby: knitting.
He got the idea after seeing a friend work on a loom. After getting one of his own, he started knitting hats to give to family and friends at Christmas. Then, he realized that homeless veterans could use some extra warmth.
“I feel sorry for the ones that have a hard time. They’re homeless and out of work,” he tells Kevin Simpson of the Denver Post. “The least I can do is help out a little.”
Skattum began knitting about five hats a week, each with a tag that reads, “Made by a Vet, for a Vet…God bless.” Whenever he has completed 50 hats, he donates them either to his church or to the Denver V.A. hospital to be given to needy vets. He estimates he’s knitted 1,200 hats.
Last year, his daughter Karla Tillapaugh joked with her father about getting a booth at Holiday ManCraft, a hipster-delighting fair that has been showcasing the wares of crafty men — many of them professional artisans — since 2000. She didn’t realize he’d taken her seriously until several months later, when he told her that he’d knitted 150 caps for his booth. Tillapaugh quickly contacted the craft fair organizers to see if her dad could join.
ManCraft founder Stu Alden immediately accepted him. “How can you say no to that?” he tells the Denver Post. “There was something really touching that he got excited about it.”
Skattum will be selling his specialty hat, called Orville’s Bucket, when Holiday ManCraft takes over a Denver VFW Post on December 5 and a Boulder, Colo., American Legion on December 6.
Not surprisingly, Skattum plans to donate any proceeds to charity.
MORE: How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share with Others
When Skiers Leave Behind Warm Clothing, These Teens Dole It Out to the Homeless
There’s more than a mountain of snow at ski resorts each season, as giant piles of winter coats, mittens, hats and scarves accumulate in the lost-and-found departments.
Back in 2011, two 11-year-old ski racers from the Bay Area, Corinne Hindes and Katherine Kirsebom, noticed these mountains of unclaimed winter wear at Lake Tahoe ski resorts and decided to use them to help less fortunate people.
They didn’t stop with just donating one batch of coats to homeless shelters and other charities, however. The girls founded the nonprofit Warm Winters, and to date, the organization has donated 5,000 pieces of warm clothing to help thousands of homeless people.
Even though Hindes and Kirsebom are still only teenagers, they plan to expand Warm Winters nationally with the help of a 2013 Jefferson Award, given by a foundation that describes itself as “the country’s longest standing and most prestigious organization dedicated to activating and celebrating public service.”
As part of the award, Hindes is studying leadership with the Jefferson Awards Globe Changers Leadership Program. She aims to expand Warm Winters to 10 ski-friendly states, while keeping the program a teen-led initiative as they work with the National Ski Area Association to get it off the ground at 50 or more ski resorts.
Hindes tells TalkingGood, “There was a time a few years back where I saw a homeless man in a T-shirt and jeans on a terribly cold day in winter and I was horrified by how cold he was, and the fact that he had no jacket to shield him from the cold broke my heart. That was a moment where I gained clarity about my purpose because I knew that I had to help him and others like him in any way that I could, and I had to do all that I could to make their situation better. When I gave my first coat to a homeless person, the smile on his face gave me the most rewarding feeling I had ever felt, and it still does today.”
MORE: How Does A Professional Skier Inspire Kids Toward Academic Achievement?
The Military Gave This Veteran the Permission Slip She Needed to Lead
From leading the 100,000 Homes Campaign to being recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change to founding the Billions Institute, an organization committed to supporting new solutions to global problems, Becky Kanis has committed her life to making bad things better.
Her motivation stems from one moment, which she shares in her Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. When she was a lieutenant in the 25th Infantry Division, a U.S. Army division in Hawaii, every single link in the communications system went from green to red. At three in the morning, Kanis stood at the colonel’s door — and with a knock, knock, knock — woke her up and explained the situation.
“She literally poked me in the chest and she said ‘un-f*** this lieutenant,’” Kanis says. The colonel could have kicked a trashcan; she could have micromanaged. But instead, she gave Kanis permission to fix the problem.
Kanis says that in order to do our part to make the world a better place, we should ask ourselves three big questions: What do you really want? What are you willing to let go of? And what lights up your heart? Kanis’s talk centers on how she has applied those questions and pursued answers to them in her own life. And it explores how we can all give ourselves permission slips to un-f*** things.
While her seven minutes onstage includes a lot of laughs, there is also a moment leaves the audience in awe. Kanis displays two images of a formerly homeless man named Ed Givens. First, he appears drunk, with his back against a brick wall, and later he appears in a suit at a party the White House threw to celebrate the success of the work that Kanis and others did to address homelessness.
“This is the kind of change that I know in my bones is possible in the world,” Kanis says. Watch the video, then join Kanis in her call to action to un-f*** big things together.
These Frat Brothers Are Using Tiny Houses to Change the Lives of the Homeless
When the idea of frat brothers comes to mind, most of us probably conjure up images of crazy college parties. However, one fraternity is defying the stereotype and extending the notion of brotherhood to an unlikely group: the homeless.
Huntsville, Ala. has a substantial homeless population and a large portion of it is comprised of veterans. Fortunately, the Phi Kappa Phi fraternity at the University of Alabama – Huntsville has a solution in mind. In operation for less than a year, the members of frat have been working toward creating a tiny homes village for those without shelter in their community.
The idea began to develop after members of the group encountered a homeless man at a local Sonic restaurant. Moved by the experience, the frat brothers started having regular meals with various members of the homeless community, which inspired them to become more involved.
“Me and my brothers were like, ‘we want to do something about this,’” Phi Kappa Phi president Taylor Reed tells WHNT News.
With the help of Foundation for Tomorrow and the Help Our Veterans and Civilians organization, Phi Kappa Phi began plans for a tiny homes village, which will consist of multiple residences that are less than 500 square feet, are mobile and are fully equipped. To create an inclusive feeling, the village will also include a community garden that will be maintained by the residents as well as a space where a group meal will be consumed at least once a week.
Each unit costs about $5,000 to build, and about 30 homes can fit on one acre of land, which is the amount that the Foundation for Tomorrow is hoping to receive from the city of Huntsville. Alabama Center for Sustainable Energy has already volunteered to supply solar panels for the homes. Further, the frat brothers plan to build all of the homes themselves with the assistance of their fellow community members.
In order to raise the funds, Phi Kappa Phi is currently operating a website fundraiser. Their goal? To raise $10,000 and, as of November 19, they have raised $6,493.
For Help Our Homeless Veterans and Civilians CEO Rusty Loiselle, these homes are a rare and needed opportunity.
“Get them out of cardboard boxes and into these tiny homes while they go through re-training and get the assistance they need,” Loiselle tells WHNT News. “These tiny homes are a step towards nice solid housing, it’s a step up.”
MORE: Portland is About to Get Tons of Tiny Homes That Can Shelter the Homeless
This City’s Homeless Are Building Their Own Houses
The tiny home trend has been on the rise for those who want to live more modestly or sustainably, and now the movement is especially gaining traction for a very different group of people: the homeless.
That’s the aim for Tiny Houses Greensboro, Interactive Resource Center and other volunteer organizations in Greensboro, N.C., who are currently raising funds to build a 128 square-foot prototype home that includes a bedroom, a fully functioning bathroom and a kitchen in order to end homelessness in the area.
According to their IndieGogo campaign, once the first home is successfully constructed, the team plans to eventually build an entire tiny home village for 879 homeless residents that are currently living in tent communities and homeless shelters.
Most notably, these small spaces won’t just be built by the volunteers, but also by the people who will be living in them one day. The Huffington Post notes, the organizers held a “How to Build a Tiny House” workshop to teach homeless residents and community members how to erect framing for the prototype home.
MORE: Small Spaces, Big Ideas: 7 Tiny Homes With the Power to Transform How We Live
“The process of helping to create and build a home of your own provides people experiencing homelessness with greater dignity, self-respect, and the discipline to improve their lives substantially and more holistically,” Tiny Houses Greensboro says on their campaign.
“The person experiencing homelessness has got to put a lot of sweat equity into the house,” a member of the organization tells Fox 29 News. “You know, sometimes it takes a village. Well, there’s also a saying that says, ‘If it takes a village, build one.'”
We previously reported that tiny home projects for the homeless have popped up in Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis.; Austin, Texas; and Newfield, N.Y.
The idea of “housing first” has been championed by anti-homelessness advocates. The idea is that housing the homeless can cost significantly less than leaving them on the streets. Per the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “homelessness causes illnesses and makes existing mental and physical illnesses worse, leading to expensive treatment and medical services. Permanent supportive housing improves physical and mental health, which reduces the need for these services, particularly expensive inpatient mental health care and hospitalization.”
It’s amazing how a tiny house can mean something so much bigger.
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DON’T MISS: Does It Take a (Tiny) Village to End Homelessness in America?
The Bay City’s Latest Plan to Combat Homelessness
San Francisco is a city of paradoxes. Walking around, you can see evidence of the booming tech scene and expensively-clad citizens, yet it also has a chronic homelessness problem. But the City by the Bay finally thinks it may have a solution by combining the needs of both the homeless and corporations: tax breaks for community projects.
With 6,436 homeless people and 3,401 living on its streets, according to the Human Services Agency, San Francisco has to be inventive. And that’s where this new initiative comes in. As more and more tech companies, (like Twitter) move to the area, San Francisco is hoping that its new “community benefit agreement” will encourage these businesses to stay and improve the city.
Through the initiative, tech companies will receive multi-million dollar tax breaks if they set up residence in a troubled neighborhood and invest a portion of those tax breaks into improving it.
While some remain skeptical about the amount of money that a company will actually put towards a neighborhood, this program offers unique possibilities for great change. For instance, many tech companies will set up micro-apartment communities for their employees; if created for homeless people, there’s the potential to drastically reduce the problem.
Salt Lake City is a model for this type of project. Ten years ago, the Utah city started a program to combat homelessness through these micro-apartments communities. Apartments were set up outside of troubled neighborhoods, and residents were quickly placed into them, removing them from the negative influences.
In each housing complex, on-site counseling was available. These counselors helped residents beat drug addictions, find jobs and diagnose and treat mental diseases. The result? Salt Lake City now only has about 400 homeless persons.
Although there are differences in cost of living and other factors between Salt Lake City and San Francisco, there is possibility for replication and improvement.
For Matt Minkevitch, who runs Road Home, the main nonprofit homeless agency in Utah, these houses serve as a stepping stone.
“The idea is, we don’t want people to just live in this shelter,” Minkevitch tells San Francisco Gate. “We want to make it as comfortable as possible, but we want them to move on to housing — on to better lives.”
DON’T MISS: Ever Wondered What To Say To A Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say And 5 Things Not to Say
The New York Town Putting Roofs Over 60 Vets Heads
Long Island took a big step forward toward its goal of eliminating veteran homelessness when Liberty Village, a brand new housing complex in Amityville, N.Y., welcomed its first residents on Sept. 29.
According to the Long Island Report, 152,000 veterans live on Long Island and 5,500 of them are homeless, says John Jarvis of the nonprofit Mental Health Association. With all the apartments occupied, Liberty Village reduces the number of homeless vets by 60.
The Medford, N.Y.-based nonprofit Concern for Independent Living raised $25 million in five months to bring Liberty Village to fruition. The complex features green lawns and white picket fences, and each unit contains four apartments that come complete with granite countertops, furniture and kitchen supplies.
The housing complex has been a lifesaver for several of the vets who moved in about a month ago.
Robert Veney, a 54-year-old Marine Corps veteran suffering PTSD, fell into homelessness when his mother died and he could no longer afford to pay the $2,200 monthly mortgage on her house. He slept in his car or on a friend’s couch and hid his homelessness from his children. But now he can welcome them at his new apartment.
Nat Conigiliaro, an 83-year-old Korean War veteran, was moved to tears when he spoke to the Long Island Report at the grand opening. “I want to dig a deep hole and I want to throw in all the horrors of homelessness, all the depression, all the hurt, and I want to bury it, never to be resurrected again,” he says. “[The apartment] It’s the Garden of Eden, and best of all, it’s home. Can’t thank them enough.”
Ralph Fasano, the executive director of Concern for Independent Living, says, “The opening of Amityville has to be one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. To see people who were going to die homeless, and at the end of their life, to have some joy and some peace.”
In cities across the country, nonprofits and government agencies are making bold moves to alleviate veteran homelessness — bringing the prospect for eradicating it closer than ever.
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