Episode 9: Project Homeless Connect

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A transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

Show Guest: Meghan Freebeck, CEO, Project Homeless Connect

Voices of the Community Introduction: Welcome to voices of the community which explores critical issues facing Northern California communities. We introduce you to the voices of community thought leaders and change makers who are working on solutions that face our fellow individual community members neighborhoods cities and our region. This is George Koster your host. 

Series Introduction: This episode is part of a series of interviews we conducted through our participation in the Bay Area Video Coalition’s TV Show titled San Francisco Nonprofits Spotlight. The interviews were conducted via Zoom from April to June 2020 during the height of the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Shelter in Place requirements. The goal of the series is to shine a spotlight on the nonprofits and their staff who are struggling to deal with the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on their operations, services and sustainability. The series of interviews we conducted features voices from a cross section of organizations that make up the fabric of our community.  Each of them brings a unique perspective on how they and we are dealing with the issues facing our community during the pandemic.  

Show Guest Meghan: Of course, when we look at the greater community, it's the health and safety of everyone who cannot follow these DPH guidelines. When the guideline is to wash your hands. When the guideline is to isolate. When the guideline is to stay away from other people and stay home, but you don't have a home to go to. That's the greatest challenge that we're seeing in a community.   

Episode Intro - Show Host George: In this episode we feature the voice of Meghan Freebeck, the Chief Executive Officer of Project Homeless Connect. Back in 2004 the City of San Francisco was struggling with both the growth of community members becoming homeless and how to provide the necessary wrap around services to help them off the streets. The City of San Francisco was implementing the Care Not Cash Program to help homeless San Franciscans receiving County Adult Assistance Programs by offering them housing or shelter and support services as part of their benefits. Project Homeless Connect was created in 2004, by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Department of Public Health as a way to provide a one stop service agency for all the necessary wrap around services to people experiencing homelessness. To find out more about the origins of Project Homeless Connect please visit my website georgekoster.com and listen to my interview with Emily Cohen the Deputy Director at Project Homeless Connect in Episode Two of my three-part series titled Homeless in San Francisco.  

Show Host George: Meghan Freebeck the CEO of Project Homeless Connect joins me now remotely from quarantine via zoom. Thanks for being here, Megan. 

Show Guest Meghan: Thanks, so much for having me.  

George: So, since a large part of project homeless connect is to provide, these really amazing community days of service events at the old Bill Graham Auditorium. And then you're dropping center as well as your mobile caravan. How has the COVID-19 epidemic really impacted your outreach into the community?

Meghan: Yeah, that's a really great question. Certainly, we've had to make a lot of modifications. We're really focused on continuing to achieve our goal. And so, the ways we provide services has changed a great deal, but we continue to achieve the same impact. I'm really proud of that Project Homeless Connect was very proactive with planning for this. We knew that COVID was coming. We knew that we would need supplies and changes and a safety net. So, we started planning really early. Of course, the greatest hindrance is to our Community Day of Service events.  

These events are large expo style service days. And commonly we have about 1000 to 1200 people come for services. Over a hundred services are provided and over 1600 people might be in the Bill Graham Auditorium on March 4th was our last one that we were supposed to have. So that was a real challenge. And we had to decide on our own with the advice of the Department of Public Health, with the advice of healthcare providers, if we would end up having that event. It was before shelter in place and it was before it was required by law to cancel. So, we did end up deciding to postpone that event. We know now that that was absolutely the right decision. 

It could have been catastrophic. The effect of bringing thousands of people together in one closed space in a single day, this March. So, we're glad that we made the right call and now we're really taking our time to figure out how do we reach that same goal of access to services in a more efficient matter, but in a safe way and in a post COVID world. Our drop-in services continue. We have appointments. We allow people to come on Wednesdays to receive anything they need an emergency, their mail, hygiene supplies, things that you really have to be in person for. And then a great increase in our virtual support, emails, and phones so that we can keep reaching people every day. 

George: I know you guys have also put together hygiene kits and done some outreach. Are you still doing outreach to people who are, finding themselves, unhoused and living on the street?  

Meghan: Yeah, we are not doing it with volunteers right now. As we commonly have done, we typically have volunteer groups that join us to do outreach and bring supplies and information to people in the community. For the time being, we're doing this as staff in a very modified format. And we're including in these hygiene kits, things like masks and COVID health information, maps on where hand washing stations are in the city, things like that about, services that are active today. So, people know what they have access to what is still available to reach and really making sure that we update that information every day, so that it's as up to date as it can be. 

George: Obviously, so many people are now in tents, especially within, the Tenderloin area. And, your whole group is really, such a great, arbiter, if you will, to people who are unhoused and kind of the, you know, out in the front line. So what are you seeing? And then how can people help? 

Meghan: Thank you. I appreciate you saying that we have, been working very closely with the homelessness department around PPE supplies. This is something that from the very beginning, we knew would be a challenge, especially for the many providers and not knowing how long this would last. So, we started a coordinated effort. Where we're reaching out to businesses that are not going into their workplace to see what kind of sanitation stands they might have, that aren't being used, to our volunteers who can make masks to businesses, to the greater community, really trying to gather as much supply support as we can, and then having a coordinated effort so that it, in a fair and equitable way is redistributed to providers to outreach workers. 

To people who are really serving the community and to those clients that they're serving as well. So that's a great need that we started doing from day one. You know, I think the first day we went and shelter in place was March 17th and we started it on March 18. That's going to continue because the needs are still going to be there for those supplies. Of course, when we look at the greater community, it's the health and safety of everyone who cannot follow these DPH guidelines. When the guideline is to wash your hands. When the guideline is to isolate. When the guideline is to stay away from other people and stay home, but you don't have a home to go to. 

That's the greatest challenge that we're seeing in a community. We are also seeing a change in people seeking our services where commonly people would reach out to project homeless connect, they've experienced homelessness before, or this is not the first day they've been experiencing homelessness. We're getting a lot of people inquiring that are worried about becoming homeless because they lost their job and now, they haven't had income in several months and they don't know when that's going to end.  

So we're really trying to make sure that we modify our resources, our referrals, our assistance, and support, so that we're also very much helping in preventing homelessness for those that are housed so that when we do come through all of this, we don't see such a severe increase in homelessness for those as well.  

George: And so how can people help? They can go to your website, obviously make a donation. Do you have a special campaign going on for the COVID-19? I know you've been, you know, kind of limiting the amount of volunteers and volunteers have made it a big part of what you've done in the past, so how can someone who's watching or listening to this get engaged? 

Meghan: Absolutely. We had launched a compassionate place campaign, which is on social media. And we're asking people to simply share how they feel compassion from the community. You can tag people in it so they can do the same definitely tag Project, Homeless Connect so we see it and we can share it. But we're really trying to keep people connected and, prevent this isolation from becoming so much loneliness as well. So that's our online campaign. We encourage people to join. And then of course, donations of PPE supplies, sanitation supplies, or monetary donations, we're able to translate right back into the community need.  

George: One of the big things that, Project Homeless Connect does is provide, a doorway into the whole ecosystem of support and wraparound services. And I would love it if you would share kind of one of your favorite stories of, a, person who finds themselves unhoused and is come into one of your events, whether it's the bigger, quarterly event or right at curbside.  

Meghan: It's a great question. We, uh, Project Homeless Connect have a goal to make access to services more efficient and effective. So, one of our services is the Community Day of Service event, where we bring all these providers together in one place. And I, one of my favorite stories was an earlier one, when I first started with Project Homeless Connect and there was a man there, looking around very cautiously. And we have hundreds of volunteers that you can pair with to help navigate all the services, because there are hundreds of them there that day, but he was really shy and really apprehensive. So, I offered to stay with him, myself, and I asked him, what's your most pressing need today? And he kind of looked around and he said, well, I have no idea. I can't read any of these signs. I don't know what there is here. 

So I said, okay, it sounds like you could use reading glasses. And we went over to the reading glasses area. A volunteer did the test did the fitting. He was able to get his reading glasses right there and his whole face lit up and he jumped up and he had energy for the first time. And I, you know, I laughed a little bit and I said, all right, where, where do you want to go next? And he said, well, I'm ready. Let's go to the employment booth because I can read now and I'm ready to do my application. So, for him, the end goal was employment it was finding a job, but he couldn't apply for a job because he couldn't see, he couldn't read the application, he couldn't read the forms. So that was absolutely my greatest moment. 

It really showed the full scope of our goal, which is, a lot of people have these goals for employment, for health, for sustainability, for housing. But if we aren't meeting their most basic needs, they're not able to achieve those goals. So, Project Homeless Connect in one day, in one space was able to help him see through to the end and reach that goal. We addressed his immediate need and then we took care of his long-term need, and we did that in one place. I have stayed in touch with this participant. He is working now, he is housed. He's, you know, really, really proud and, insists on communicating over email, which I think is really neat because now he feels comfortable looking at a computer screen again.  

George: Thank you, that was a great story. So final question, what would you like to see? Um, some of the positive things come out of, the pandemic, to help, our unhoused community members? 

Meghan: This is a really good question it's really hard to think about, is there a silver lining to a pandemic? I think it's more like a gray lining, you know, there's something there it's not quite as bright as silver. But I, I thought a lot about what I've seen in the community right now. And what I'm seeing is that we have a crisis that requires 100% effort to solve. Everyone has to wear a mask. Everyone has to keep socially distant.

Everyone has to participate. If we're going to overcome this, and that's the kind of energy I'd like to see, continue in the community to address the crisis. Because homelessness has been a crisis for really, really long time. And in the same way that we understand every person has to be engaged to solve the COVID crisis. We do need everyone housed and unhoused to be engaged and to participate in the homelessness crisis. You know, homelessness is a public health issue. It always has been, it was a public health crisis long before this and people have been dying. Due to lack of access to healthcare and basic prevention measures sleeping on the street long before this as well.  

So, we really hope that this vigor, this energy and this community effort we're seeing during COVID to stop this crisis continues later, that we all continue to recognize it takes everyone and we're a hundred percent in to save lives. That's what it's about. You wear a mask for yourself and you wear it for your neighbor. So we need to treat homelessness the same way. So that's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see everyone in the community continue to work as a community, not as an individual, for all crises that we're facing right now.  

George: Thank you. I hope your vision comes true. I feel like it's been a great opportunity to kind of really shine a spotlight on all of the issues facing our community. Meghan, thanks for spending the time today and sharing the work of you and your team. We'll make sure that all the information on Project Homeless Connect, part of the show. Please stay safe out there and healthy as we, try to figure out, how to get through on the other side.  

Meghan: Thank you so much really appreciate you.

Episode Outro - Show Host George: That’s it for this episode of voices of the community. You have been listening to the voice of Meghan Freebeck, the Chief Executive Officer of Project Homeless Connect. With the new surge of Covid-19 cases that has caused the City of San Francisco to pause its re-opening, the demand for moving un-housed community members off the street will continue to expand. As the City of San Francisco struggles to move thousands of un-housed community members off the street in hotel rooms, our un-housed neighbors still need protective protection materials such as tents, masks, and hygiene items. While un-housed community members live on the streets, they can also really use sleeping bags, backpacks and socks. Donate to Project Homeless Connect.

Series Outro: We hope that you enjoyed the insights, points of view and personal stories from the voices of change makers and their nonprofits featured in the series. To find out more and get engaged with the nonprofit and staff members, featured in this episode please go to my web site georgekoster.com and click on Voices of the Community to find links to this episode. Please consider a donation and volunteering to provide a hand up to your fellow community members.

Series Credits: I want to thank my associate producer Eric Estrada as well as the wonderful team at Bay Area Video Coalition. Go to www.bavc.org to find out more about Bay Area Video Coalition’s services. To listen to our next episode in this series and to our archived past shows which feature community voices working on solutions to critical issues facing Northern California communities, please go to georgekoster.com. While you are on our website please consider making a donation to help us provide future shows like this. Please rate us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and share this story with your friends. Follow us on twitter @georgekoster and please email us at george@georgekoster.com. I'm George Koster in San Francisco and thank you for listening. 

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