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Our homeless community feels the cold first
Fort Collins Coloradoan
February 8, 2003
Columns
During the last few days of cold weather, more than 60 people have ended up at the Severe Weather Hospitality Center, a temporary shelter in a church in Fort Collins, and some were transferred to hospitals.
What’s going on here? During extreme weather, homeless people face a miserable and sometimes dangerous existence. Even if they find respite in a night shelter, there are few places for them to go in the daytime, except the mall, the library or any church that will take them.
People become homeless for a myriad of reasons. Few of them plan to, or want to be homeless and supported by the state. These are not people looking for a free lunch. Some have mental health difficulties and have slipped through the cracks in ‘the system’. Some have jobs but fall into the ‘working poor’ category. Others may have been barely making it, when one disaster such as illness leads to financial crisis, followed by loss of rental accommodation.
This can affect families as well as individuals: the Poudre Valley School District has identified over 600 children who are without a permanent home and are living in cars or friend’s garages. In another case, a man went to pieces when his entire family was killed in a car accident, and ended up on the street after losing his job and home … a situation no one knows how they’d deal with it until it happened to them.
United Way is collaborating with the City, the County and the Faith community, as well as non-profit agencies like Neighbor To Neighbor, to address this pressing need.
Our vision is to create a day center that not only provides physical shelter and a place to wash, eat and stay warm, but also gives people the assistance they need to get back on their feet. There is nothing currently in our community that does this. United Way is working with the community agencies to plan, fund and develop a capital campaign for such a day center.
Our goal is to help people become self-supporting, contributing members of our community. The day shelter will provide a link with resources to help them move out of their situation: it will connect them with services such as case management, transitional housing, career counseling and mental health or drug/alcohol counseling. The day center will also provide shelter for children after school, before their parents finish work, so they can continue unimpeded in their efforts to become self-sufficient.
We don’t always know the reasons people become homeless. But the truth is, most of these people do not chose to live under a bridge and exposed in the winter snow. It’s also true that we can’t solve all of the problems for all of the people.
However, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to make life as tolerable for as many of the homeless as we can. Everyone in our community deserves at least this basic level of human services support.
-By Meg Brown a.k.a.: Sophie Waghorn
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