11/02/08 begin serving families.
The governmental and service agencies that serve the homeless in Palm Beach County
are working on a ten year plan to "eliminate homelessness". This is a requirement
for receiving federal funding for homeless programs. Eliminating homelessness is
a very ambitious goal that is not likely to be met without community support far
greater than that which is probable today. We propose to enlist faith communities
to foster political support and to make resources available to make this goal a possibility.
19 people representing faith communities and service providers met at the office of The Homeless Coalition
on July 17 (2006) at 10:00 am to discuss how we might put this idea to work in Palm Beach County.
We continued to meet monthly, most often at
The Homeless Coalition of Palm Beach County, Inc.,
2100 Palm Beach Lakes Blvd.,
West Palm Beach, FL 33409.
We agreed that our purposes were these.
- Tell the story of homelessness so people will have a more accurate (and sympathetic) view.
- Increase support to current service providers.
- Help faith communities see how they can do more to help their people and others in need.
- Mobilize political support and community leadership.
Our tasks were these.
- Inform & enlist current providers: Current service providers and faith communities serving
the homeless are critical as partners in bringing understanding to a broader list of faith communities.
- Find advocates:
We have a list of
800 faith communities in Palm Beach County (Home Page).
There are probably actually twice that number of faith communities and it lacks names of clergy and phone numbers.
But we could find volunteers in each community to start working on improving the lists.
- Learn how to mobilize advocates:
We need to develop materials and strategies for talking with faith communities.
Part of our strategy will be that we can help them learn how to help services be available to their people.
- Learn about idea sources & strategic options:
We are developing resources that can provide
stories, data and ideas for discussion.
We are exploring Family Promise which organizes faith communities into networks
to help the homeless so that the resources required from each faith community can be pooled.
They have been working for eight years and already have 122 networks in 39 states.
We're developing notes on how to start a Family Promise network in PBC.
- Identify alternative solutions and their costs:
Some of us will want to be well informed on alternative programs.
Broward County has built a large multi-story facility while some service agencies feel
that scattered housing is far better.
We need to distinguish between emergency shelter and transitional housing,
and we mustn't forget the services that are needed to support both.
We need to know more about these possibilities.
- Develop logic for social investment:
People who choose to sleep outside (in Boston)
have an average health care cost of $28,000 per person per year.
Once those same people have permanent housing, their
health care costs dropped to $6,000 per year.
This savings of $1833 per month could pay for housing and other services
if a program can be designed to put it in the appropriate budgets.
- Think about how to change how homeless people are thought of:
The public perception about homeless people is very inaccurate and very negative.
How do we make the public perception more accurate ?
- How do we handle that if we succeed we'll have requests for help greater than we can handle:
Some fear that if we have a good program to help the homeless, people will migrate to this area from other areas.
What do we do about this idea ?
- How might our assistance to the homeless have a dedicated income stream:
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Our greatest urgency is to help as best we can the large number of homeless children
that are an inevitable consequence of job losses and home foreclosures.