Paulette Roberts, a veteran caseworker at
Helping Hands, is well known for her derring-do.
When fights erupt, as they inevitably do at
Springfield’s cramped and crowded homeless shelters,
it’s often Roberts who bounds into the center of the action.
But last Thursday night, as the emergency
overflow shelter prepared to close its doors, sending dozens of
homeless people back onto the streets, even the fearless Roberts
was shaken.
In the basement of Contact Ministries,
shelter director Rita Tarr passed out sleeping bags and other
essentials. Volunteers served up slices of pizza and scoops of ice
cream. But the mood was hardly festive.
Many people had been staying at the overflow
shelter since it first opened last November. Most didn’t know
where they were headed. They lay quietly in their narrow beds or
sat in a backroom, staring at a TV airing crime shows.
Meanwhile, outside, a man who was visibly
intoxicated appeared on the front stoop. He pounded on the heavy
metal door, forced his way inside, and staggered downstairs to the
shelter, spitting obscenities at those who tried to obstruct him.
Roberts stepped forward to confront the man,
as she has done in similar situations many times before. She
patiently escorted him back outside, where he scowled and jabbed
his index finger into her face. The man urinated on the building as
Roberts retreated inside to call police.
“I really thought he was going to punch me,” Roberts said as she walked back
downstairs. “It’s never happened before, but there’s
always a first time.”
There’s nothing extraordinary about a
drunken homeless person arriving at a shelter, acting belligerent,
and making idle threats. But for the overflow shelter, it was
unusual that a professional such as Roberts was there to defuse the
situation.
Normally that burden would have fallen to an
untrained volunteer. Springfield has two year-round emergency homeless
shelters — the Salvation Army facility, which houses about 40
people, and Helping Hands, which sleeps about 25.
Social-service leaders joined forces last
year — after a homeless man was found frozen to death near
the Clear Lake overpass — to create a third option for the
city’s neediest during the winter months.
Tarr squeezed several dozen bunk beds into the basement of Contact Ministries and
helped form a committee that recruited more than 200 volunteers, mostly
from area churches, to run what became known as the Springfield
Overflow Shelter, or SOS.
The shelter, which stayed open for 12 to 16
hours each day, was staffed entirely by volunteers. During the
overnight shift, 11 p.m.-7 a.m., just one volunteer was usually
there to supervise.
During the last five months, SOS has taken in
more than 300 people. Consistently filled beyond capacity, the
shelter has housed more than 50 people a night despite being
designed to hold just 30. This is not surprising; fewer than 100
emergency-shelter beds exist in Springfield to accommodate a
homeless population that experts say exceeds 1,000.
But unlike the other emergency shelters,
which enforce a strict code of rules, SOS sought to be more
lenient. There was no breath analyzer with which to test and ward
off apparent drunks, no metal detector to keep out guns and knives.
Even those who were banned from the other shelters because of their
brawling or boozing were welcome at SOS.
“Our goal was to make sure no one else
froze to death,” says Tarr, who also chairs the Mayor’s
Task Force on Homelessness. “Last year there was a lot of
negative publicity.”
But the lax environment led to several
near-catastrophes, according to accounts from volunteers and
members of the SOS committee, raising questions about safety
precautions that should be taken when the shelter reopens in the
fall.
Francie Staggs, an SOS committee member who
also served as the shelter’s volunteer coordinator, recalls
feeling physically threatened one night when a fight nearly broke
out.
“A resident kicked a chair and started
to yell,” Staggs recalls. “I felt fearful. I ran to the
back desk, got the phone, and called 911.”
Such recollections are not uncommon. Two
weeks ago, a man was found with a box cutter inside the shelter.
People have often arrived at SOS so inebriated or high that they
have had to be carried downstairs and lifted into bed.
Others have caught a buzz while in the
shelter. Volunteers attest to regularly finding empty liquor
bottles and beer cans and point to incidents in which people have
been caught smoking crack cocaine.
Most appalling, Staggs says, was the
realization that at least three convicted sexual offenders have
been admitted. Each stayed for several nights before his criminal
record was discovered. This is particularly worrisome because a
transitional shelter for single women with children is housed in
the same building, just a couple of stories above.
“I see a recipe for disaster,”
says Robert Brooks, an SOS committee member who once oversaw both
the Salvation Army and Helping Hands emergency shelters and now
works at SARA Center, which offers assistance to people with HIV
and AIDS.
“Sometimes in shelters things kick off
and there’s fights with a lot of people involved,”
Brooks continues. “How are church volunteers going to handle
that?”
Most volunteers, such as LuAnn Atkins, say
their experiences at the shelter were largely positive. They bonded
with some of the clients and witnessed a side of life from which
they are usually shielded. They also lamented that the shelter had
to close, especially in light of the fact that temperatures this
past weekend dipped into the midthirties.
But Atkins and others say that more needs to
be done to ensure the safety of clients and volunteers alike.
“They should not give the
responsibility to volunteers to handle these situations,”
Atkins says. “It’s not a good way for an organization
to operate.”
Some volunteers suggest conducting more
aggressive background checks and installing a metal detector. But
funding is limited. Tarr has applied for a $15,000 city grant with
which to hire a professional to supervise the shelter and help keep
the peace.
But Tarr bristles at any suggestion that SOS,
in its first year of operation, was a powder keg that fortunately
never exploded.
“This isn’t the only shelter to
have the police called,” Tarr says. “I don’t
think our volunteers were any more at risk than [were] people at
other shelters.”
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2005.
