Fort Worth’s homeless numbers hover around 2,000 to 2,200 at any given time, said Toby Owen, president of Presbyterian Night Shelter, the largest provider of homeless services in the area. Tarrant County’s overall homeless population, he said, is probably about 6,000. He put it this way: “Our shelter’s capacity is 675. We reach that almost every night.”
And while some homeless people do suffer from mental illness and drug and/or alcohol addiction, most of them are homeless due to unemployment or, even more obviously, literally losing their home.
“Some people move in together, something happens, he or she has to move out, and then there’s nowhere to go,” Owen said.
But that cause is itself only superficial. The majority of the homeless using his shelter are single mothers and their kids, and the reason why they’ve moved out is much darker: “Most of the single mothers in the shelter are there because of domestic violence.”
Unfortunately, the stigma perpetuated by the panhandling vagrants behind your local watering hole occludes the real story. It’s a variation on the one “oh, shit” wipes out 10 “atta-boys.” A couple crackheads or sunstroked drunks are what people associate with the lifestyle, rather than the mother and children trying to find a warm place to sleep. Add the touchy reality of gentrification to this mix, and the path out of the street becomes that much rockier and steeper, especially when a neighborhood undergoing up-market renovation wants to make the place neater, cleaner, and free of people begging for change. It’s a grimmer picture than the proponents of neighborhood revitalization would like to believe.
Presbyterian Night Shelter’s neighborhood on East Lancaster Avenue is such a battleground. The street’s businesses are constantly trying to push out the homeless, as if they were dust and lint you’d sweep out onto the front porch to let the wind do the rest. But oddly enough, it was this dilemma that sowed the idea for helping the homeless on their own stretch of Lancaster. One of the businesses on the block, a uniform supply store called Got You Covered Work Wear and Uniforms, had been there long enough for its owner to know that the homeless there don’t really cause problems.
“Oh, the homeless are harmless,” said owner Bob McCarthy, who also owns Cheyenne Construction in Mansfield.
McCarthy had known Owen for a long time, and he knew of Owen’s increasing frustration at both the numbers of homeless continuing to pack his shelter, as well as their problems with the neighborhood property owners. Owen declines to throw anybody under the bus, but McCarthy wanted to help nonetheless. “I just asked him what I could do,” McCarthy said. “How can we give the homeless their neighborhood back to them?”
The answer ended up being right in front them. Or across the street, anyway: the historic Parker-Browne Building. But how exactly do old masonry and broken windows translate into jobs?
“We wanted to be a different voice on the street,” McCarthy said. “But to do that, you have to have a stake in it.”
His stake turned out to be an old building in need of $3.3 million in repairs yet valued at only $2 million.
“I was going to be upside down on it,” McCarthy said, “but I just knew this was going to be the way to help these people.”
Getting the building’s historical designation helped cover the some of the deficit, but McCarthy sought and obtained from the city an Urban Development Action Grant to cover the rest. Part of the UDAG stipulated that he would employ homeless people. So for nearly two years, he hired homeless for various concrete construction jobs at Cheyenne, as well as using his entrepreneurial contacts to put others to work. But something nagged at McCarthy. He felt like he could do more.
“At first, I thought, ‘Well, how much skill do you really need for concrete work?’ ” he said. “But a lot of the people I’d hired were at a loss as to what to do.”
During an interview with one particular applicant, McCarthy asked why he wanted to work there. “And he just said, ‘Man, I just need a job. I just want to work.’ And I just flat-out asked him what he wanted to do more than anything. And he told me he wanted to be an electrician. That’s when it hit me.”
McCarthy realized that the solution to getting homeless off the street and into a happy, stable lifestyle lay in giving them the skills to make themselves happy. And this is how the Leg Up program got started.
“I believe that your quality of life relates to how much stress you’re willing to endure,” he said.
In his mind, stress is “a lack of knowledge of how to get to where you’re happy.”
Having a home is part of that happiness, but while homes are often costly, knowledge is not: “We tell our clients that it’s OK to ‘ride the coattails of knowledge.’ And riding on the coattails of knowledge is free. You just have to be willing to put in the effort.”
Owen agreed: “Homeless people have to still do their part. You have to dress nice, shave, take a bath, show up to work on time.”
Those seem like givens for anyone who’s ever applied for a job, but for people accustomed to bouncing around shelters for years and years, those skills are not so obvious. But like swinging a hammer or painting a wall, they’re skills that most people can learn if they’re willing. That’s where Lauren Doeren came into play.
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McCarthy had been hiring homeless for a year or so when he connected with Doeren. “I admired her passion to help people,” he said.
At the same time, the initial form of Leg Up was getting too big for him to operate it like he felt it needed to be. What Doeren brought to the table was a willingness to get her hands dirty and take on the role of interviewing Leg Up’s potential clients, which also required her to formalize the vetting process.
“Honestly, our process has been trial and error,” she said.
But at present, the Leg Up path from privation to gainful employment begins with Toby Owen’s ministry.
“Our process starts with the Presbyterian Night Shelter’s case managers pre-screening their clients to find those who might fit the Leg Up program,” Doeren said.
The first hurdle is making sure a potential client wants to work 40 hours a week –– Doeren said a 40-hour workweek is an automatic dealbreaker for many of the shelter’s residents. Some homeless really want to work. Others merely say they do. But the ones who are serious about gaining employment eventually make their way to Doeren.
“Then the case managers do a soft verification that they can pass a drug test,” she said. “They have to have their state and federal IDs, like their Social Security number, birth certificate, driver’s license, and they have to be willing to participate with the Leg Up programming. From there, I meet with them, screen them further, go over expectations, and if they decide they want to proceed, we start the actual process.”
“Willingness to participate” is the foundation on which the clients must build their plan to turn their lives around. Both McCarthy and Doeren reiterate that their program is “a leg up, not a handout.” At Leg Up, the clients start at a very basic level. Rather than jumping into resumés and job applications, participants begin with five mandatory sessions of life skills coaching. Doeren treats life skills coaching as another name for cognitive behavioral therapy.
“What we do is we teach our clients how to think proactively rather than reactively,” she said. “For instance, they might not be able to do what their bosses ask them to do immediately, but we teach them that what they can do is ask a question. In a lot of cases, homeless people weren’t taught that. That life skill, or lack thereof, is often what’s landed them on the street to begin with. It affects all decision making in life. Like, ‘I lost my job. I can’t pay my rent, but what can I do? I can go look for another job.’ ”
That line of thinking might sound obvious to everyone who’s never had to bed down on a bus stop bench, but when your life is completely occupied with basic survival needs, it’s difficult to see past obstacles more complex than the ones between you and your next meal. In Doeren’s view, helping the homeless learn a different way to process situations is crucial to keeping them from landing back on the street.
If the staffers at Presbyterian Night Shelter can recommend a person to Leg Up, they will introduce him or her to Doeren, who gives the applicant a fairly thorough interview, in which he or she answers about 80 questions ranging from the individual’s criminal background to an estimate of daily meals and hours of sleep.
“The city will hire a class C misdemeanor but not an A or a B,” Doeren said. “Some employers will take felons, but obviously there are a lot who won’t. I ask how long they’ve been homeless and what the circumstances were that led to their homelessness, how they pay for their bed at the shelter, are they in the work-live program, do they pay cash for it, are they donating plasma, doing day labor, do they get disability?”
Doeren herself is not a social worker or psychologist (she has a degree, from TCU, but in English), but she came up with her list by trying to think like a potential employer: “I tried to put myself in the place of businesses I’ve asked to partner with Leg Up. …. This [employer] has a landscaping company. He can accept individuals who have certain misdemeanors and certain felonies, but that person probably doesn’t want an employee going into people’s houses when he has burglaries on his record.”
Keeping these people employed and off the street is her organization’s primary aim, but trying to find the best fit between employer and employee can be a challenge. “Automax’s owner, Steve Gregg, called and said, ‘I need three guys,’ so I sent him three guys. He called a few days later and said that he was keeping one and sending the other two back, because two of them had a record of auto theft. So that was a big lesson. There’s been a learning curve to getting those 80 questions right. I bounce a lot of questions off [McCarthy] –– I gave him the title of ‘Chief Visionary Officer’ –– though he’s actually the chairman of the board and primary benefactor.”
When an individual looks like a good candidate for the Leg Up program, he or she commits to completing five sessions of life skills training. “We have a volunteer psychologist who has over 40 years’ experience LS coaching, from homeless people to NASA and federal government and corporate,” Doeren said.
Leg Up clients attend the five sessions for two and a half weeks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “We don’t want to ask them to drink from a firehose, but we also don’t want to drag the process out for them. It’s kind of intense, and it’s a lot to absorb. They end up learning a lot about themselves in the process.”
Following the life skills training, Leg Up clients begin the professional development phase. “At that phase,” Doeren said, “their pace is really dictated by how hard they want to work. Some people are fast, but others kind of take their time.”
Professional development involves basic visioning exercises, utilizing goal charts depicting a client’s present and aspirational, future self. “I tell them, ‘We have to figure out what makes you happy.’ Of course that means a job and a place to live. But let’s expand beyond that and develop your forward-thinking mindset. Once we have this ‘visioned,’ or mapped out, then we’ll come up with a plan on how to get there.”
Clients chart their progress with milestones. “We’ll have little mini ‘wins’ along the way, that when you bundle them all together equal a home and a job and a happy self.”
The clients then write affirmative statements for themselves –– “all is well for me,” “negative thoughts are of the past” –– to help them focus on their goals when they meet whatever setbacks or challenges lie in their paths to success.
“Then they fill out this worksheet called the Creative Workshop Process, where they outline what they want for their career and their home and the reasons why,” Doeren said. “Some of my clients ask for extra copies of this, and they fill them out, and it’s like a daily exercise.
“If you write down, ‘I want good furniture,’ what are your reasons?” she continued. “Maybe you want to entertain. One of my clients wants a grill so he can cook out during Cowboys games and have his family over.”
The more detailed a client’s aspirations are, she said, the more likely he or she will work to achieve them.
“Through our visioning exercises, we figure out what these people want to do. I’m not gonna send a guy who wants to be an electrician out on a concrete job. One client was an RN who had done in-home healthcare, and she had gotten burned out on it. She wanted to work with nonprofits, so I got her set up with the women’s shelter.”
Helping the homeless to visualize a better life is one thing, but putting them to work is another, so Leg Up also helps with basic job placement tasks like polishing resumés and teaching interview skills.
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Love these people.