Revelation: Our National Strategy for Helping the Homeless Does Not Work
From the NATIONAL VETERANS FOUNDATION
By Shad Meshad November 21, 2010
Shad Meshad is the President of the National Veterans Foundation. Shad served as a Psych Officer in the Vietnam War, and afterward was instrumental in the recognition and diagnosis of PTSD.
Recently the NVF Team spent some time with Steve Lopez from the LA Times. Mr. Lopez, as anyone who has followed his work knows, has an interest in homelessness. He wrote a series of columns about Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musician living in Los Angeles, which became a bestselling book and was made into the movie The Soloist¸ starring Jamie Foxx.
The National Veterans Foundation and I have a unique history in helping homeless Veterans, and that’s why Mr. Lopez came down. I have been working with homeless Veterans for 40 years and for much of that time the National Veterans Foundation’s Street Team Homeless Program has been operating.
While he was here, Lopez asked me what has changed for homeless Veterans in the last 40 years.
The answer: Not very much, and definitely not enough.
The National Veterans Foundation’s Street Team goes out every week to where homeless men and women live, and hands out food and water to them. We do this because it provides some small comfort and nutrition for these people, but we also do it because we’re fishing for Veterans.
Our program is predicated on two ideas: that a homeless man or woman’s life can be truly resurrected, and that our U.S. military Veterans deserve to be saved first.
Finding Veterans among the general homeless population is easier than you’d think, considering that one third of all homeless men in America are Veterans.
The National Veterans Foundation does what it can, (along with other organizations) working to save the lives of a handful of former service members every year, as do all the homeless programs out there. But for all the resources put into helping homeless people, they amount mostly to moving people around. From street to shelter, to drug rehab or transitional housing program. From jail to hospital, to street, to another shelter or soup kitchen. Services are fragmented and segregated. Without an integrated infrastructure or mission, the rate at which men and women are saved from the street is depressingly low.
Every year at Thanksgiving regular people flock to Skid Row to volunteer and serve Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a well intentioned action, and a noble tradition. But the day after Thanksgiving, the place is a ghost town, except for the homeless men and women who are still there.
We feel good about ourselves after serving Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless, but we haven’t really done anything substantial to help these individuals.
In the first three years of our history, the National Veterans Foundation produced one of the largest Thanksgiving dinners for homeless Veterans in the country. We received over $60,000 in-kind services and used about 100,000 man hours to put on the event. We served 3,000 Veterans the first year, and 5,000 the second. It brought attention to the issue and baptized a lot of people in the problem. It was big, but it wasn’t smart. Three months of preparation for one day of serving homeless Vets.
In subsequent years, we started the Street Team program, which focused on impacting smaller numbers of homeless Vets with a greater impact. Get them a license; get them a job, a place to live. Get them off the streets. Resurrect their life.
And we’ve been resurrecting lives ever since.
When I spoke with a Veteran who had been homeless for 11 years in New York, he told me that the main thing he’d learned from the experience was that a homeless person is completely invisible. People walked by him every day and didn’t see him.
It ain’t pretty.
Many people and organizations who work with homeless people seem to be waiting for some government or private entity to put integrated services in place. And that’s what’s needed. So instead of us all doing our own thing with minimal impact, we can come together and effectively refurbish men and women’s lives.
But right now, we’re just keeping them on a respirator.
Currently, the VA estimates that 107,000 Veterans are homeless on any given night. Over the course of a year, they say, approximately twice that many experience homelessness. I think it’s three times that number.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are going to be more. It’s going to be a tsunami with all these new Veterans with all the physical and emotional scars of war, falling into that septic tank.
It’s hard to look for a job after you’ve been swimming in a septic tank. You can say, “I saved three lives in Iraq. I served my country. Sorry I smell like a toilet.”
Let’s fix the problem at the core.
Let’s focus on fixing the problem at the core, and in truly resurrecting the lives of homeless men and women.
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