“It’s hard to know how to navigate all the different things coming our way on the global and national stage,” Stephen Hitchcock, the executive director of The Haven told me recently. “To understand how to think well and live well in light of the systems we’re entangled in. It can feel almost paralyzing.”
That’s one of the reasons Hitchcock does the work he does, running The Haven, the downtown day shelter for homeless and extremely low-income people in the heart of Charlottesville. “To give my time and attention to this group of folks feels like a small way forward.”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time at The Haven, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this January. The range of help it provides is hard to summarize: from basics like a hot breakfast, a clean pair of socks, and a warm, dry place to spend the day, to services like a walk-in medical clinic (run by UVA), free counseling, assistance in getting an ID, and an array of housing programs to help guests get and keep a permanent place to live.
More than anything, The Haven is a model of community, of kindness and respect. It runs on generosity, from the local businesses that donate food and services to the former teachers frying eggs and the one-time guests returning to give back to the place that helped them get a new start.
“To see these volunteers coming here, looking for nothing in return, you don’t get that in the world a lot,” Keavon, a recent guest, told me.
It feels like an example of the best that Charlottesville has to offer, and one that’s particularly welcome this time of year. When I asked Owen Brennan, the director of operations, why he does this work, he paused for a long time. “I think because I, on a regular basis, get glimpses of how we’re meant to live together, as human beings,” he said.
You can’t get a better Christmas message than that.
Kitchen manager Dee Dee Slezak arrives at 5am to lead a team of volunteers, who make “magical breakfasts” out of food donations from Trader Joe’s, Market Street Market, and various local restaurants and caterers.
Photos by Zack Wajsgras
In January, The Haven will celebrate 10 years of serving homeless and extremely low-income people in the heart of Charlottesville.
As the Downtown Mall has been revitalized, the area has become increasingly expensive, home to luxury residences like C&O Row and the 550. The Haven, in a 19th-century church at First and Market streets, is both a stark reminder of those left behind by Charlottesville’s growing wealth and lack of affordable housing, and a beautiful example of community and kindness.
The Haven is a low-barrier shelter, meaning it accepts everyone who walks in, even if they’re drunk or high. It serves a free hot breakfast 365 days a year, and offers guests (the preferred term for people who access its services)a place to shower, do laundry, store their possessions, get mail, and use the internet. Staff connect people to services for mental health, substance abuse, job training, and medical care. And they administer several housing programs to help guests get and keep a permanent place to live.
“This is a community in which our first goal is to care for each other, to treat each other with respect,” says operations director Owen Brennan. “So beyond the services, at base this is a place where we want folks to feel like they belong, where they feel at home, and where they’re always welcome.”
At 6:30 on a cold December morning, it’s still dark, and Charlottesville’s streets are quiet. In the basement of The Haven, light shines through the windows like a beacon.
Inside, David Slezak, a retired Latin teacher who wears purple Converse sneakers and a slender gold chain over his T-shirt and jeans, has been in the kitchen since 5. Coffee is brewing and the team of four volunteers, all women, are busy washing dishes, shredding turkey, and toasting bread on the griddle. Slezak, who goes by Dee Dee, is surveying the latest pile of food donations heaped on one of the kitchen’s metal work tables.
“Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do with two gallons of molasses,” he muses.
Slezak, 72, has been volunteering with The Haven since it opened, and was hired as kitchen manager in 2016. He makes what one staffer refers to as “magical breakfasts” out of the sometimes odd assortment of donations from local restaurants, caterers, and church dinners that supplement the staples. “We’ve been known to have salmon, scallops,” he says. “Once we got two bushels of crabs donated from a local restaurant. I reheated them and we got out the hammers and the newspapers and had Maryland crabs.”
This morning, there’s turkey in gravy, cheesy asparagus, and buttered cabbage, along with the usual eggs, toast, and grits. “I try to serve two proteins every day, and two vegetables,” Slezak says. There are strawberries and whipped cream, yogurt and granola.
Eggs are cooked to order.
After the front doors open, at 6:45, guests start filing in, filling mugs with coffee and taking seats at the big round tables. Breakfast is served starting at 7:30, but there’s already cereal out, and trays of donated Christmas cookies. Several guests pause by the kitchen to say hello and good morning.
Mark Malawa, a slender man in a baseball cap and glasses, sticks his head through the door.
“What do you need?” Slezak asks.
“A milk and an Ensure?” Malawa asks. “If you can help me; I’m going to be gone all day.”
“You want food to go? I can put a little plate together for you,” Slezak says.
“Whatever you can do, I’m grateful.”
Malawa used to work for PACEM, the nonprofit group that provides overnight shelter at local churches from October through March, but recently he’s become a guest himself.
Slezak grabs a takeout container and fills it with turkey, cabbage, toast, and a fried egg. He doesn’t forget the fork.
“This is more than breakfast to a lot of people,” he says later, noting that many pack extra food to take to work.
At 7:15, everything is ready, and Slezak lifts up the metal shutter between the kitchen and the dining room. “This is our dinner bell,” he says, smiling, as the metal clanks loudly into place. “I wish it was a little more romantic.”
Volunteer Janice Pfund serves breakfast.
For the next hour or so, the volunteers are busy filling plates, taking requests, replenishing mugs
“White or wheat?’
“Do you want the turkey on top, or on the side?”
“We don’t have oats, but we have Cream of Wheat, is that okay?”
When you’re living on the street, Slezak says, “you have so few choices.” So he cooks eggs to order. “You need a scrambled egg, you need an over easy, you need a sunny side up, we’re going to do that for you.”
Cleveland Michie, 62, used to buy breakfast at McDonald’s, until a homeless friend told him about The Haven. Michie is “housed,” but lives alone and is battling lung cancer. “I can’t afford good, nutritious food,” he says. He’s been eating breakfast at The Haven every day for the last two years, and says his appetite has increased and he’s gained “at least 10 pounds.”
“Dee Dee and Ellen [Hickman, a kitchen volunteer], they serve deeply, with honesty and love,” he says. “They have smiles, they don’t make you feel bad or look down on you. And they know the kitchen.”
Slim and neatly dressed, with glasses and graying hair, Michie says he gives back by offering free haircuts to other guests, as well as to residents at area nursing homes.
“If I ran across a lot of money,” he says, “I’d build a building just like this.”
***
Volunteers Lizzie Weschler (left) and Riley Goodwin help out at the front desk. Throughout the morning, guests stop by to check their mail, make appointments, ask for toiletries and towels to take a shower, or get clean socks, underwear, and other clothes.
By 8:30, breakfast is winding down. Riley Goodwin and Lizzie Weschler, high school students from St. Anne’s, make their way to the front desk. They’re in the midst of a three-week “intensive” on reimagining community service, so they’re staffing the front desk every morning, while two other students help out in the kitchen, on the prep shift for tomorrow’s breakfast.
Guests stop by to sign in and ask for towels, shampoo, razors, and soap, so they can take a shower. They use the hand sanitizer on the corner of the desk, ask for socks and ibuprofen.
“Can I get a shirt?” one man asks. Goodwin disappears into the long, narrow room behind the desk, which is stocked with supplies from underwear to hats. She emerges a couple minutes later with a hooded sweatshirt.
“No shirts, but we have a hoodie,” she says.
“Awesome, that’ll work.”
The girls field a call from someone looking for dental care (they connect the caller with the Charlottesville Free Clinic) and refer someone else with a housing question to Herb Dickerson, the shift supervisor, who’s been working at The Haven almost as long as it’s been open.
“I’m pretty much like a walking resource manual, if you will,” he says. “I direct people to whatever services they need, keep trouble down.”
Guests ask for their mail (they can use The Haven as their mailing address) or for a cup of detergent to do laundry. There are three washers and dryers, and people like Dickerson make sure guests move their loads through promptly.
Monday through Wednesday, Dickerson works the floor, and on Thursdays and Fridays he does community outreach, working with ex-offenders, substance abusers, and people with HIV/AIDS. An ex-offender himself, Dickerson says “I’ve lived on the streets. I understand being homeless.” When people come in, he says, “The first thing they need is rest.”
Later, a guest who introduces himself as Tim lingers by the desk, serenading the students with a couple Christmas songs. “This is a place where you can chill,” he says. “It’s a blessing to have a place like this.”
***
Volunteers Anne Cressin (left) and John Rogers, who also provides free counseling, sort through mail for guests. Many use The Haven as their mailing address. Along the left wall, more than 70 bins provide personal storage for guests (there’s a waiting list).
The Haven was born when Hollywood director and UVA alum Tom Shadyac returned to Charlottesville to film Evan Almighty in 2005, and decided he wanted to do something to help local people experiencing homelessness. He purchased the First Christian Church, and The Haven opened in 2010, part of the Thomas Jefferson Coalition for the Homeless.
At the time, says current executive director Stephen Hitchcock, the public library was the de facto low barrier day shelter in town, as it is in many cities. All along, the intention was to not only provide basic services to the homeless, but to incorporate housing programs that would help get them out of it, to “see homelessness as a circumstance, not a condition,” Hitchcock says.
The Haven became an independent nonprofit in 2014, and it now administers two federal housing grants: the Rapid Rehousing Program, which provides temporary subsidies for people exiting homelessness, and Homelessness Prevention, which is meant to help people at imminent risk of losing their current housing.
“The public perception is we’re a day shelter, but half our operations are helping to get folks into housing and helping to stabilize them once they’re there,” says Brennan.
The Haven follows a “housing first” philosophy, a nationwide trend toward connecting people with housing as soon as possible, rather than waiting until they’re “housing ready” and all their other issues have been resolved.
Staff meet with guests one-on-one to determine what their housing needs are and what resources may be available to help. “Some people only need a little bit of help,” Hitchcock says. Some people make enough income to pay rent, but don’t have the money to put down first month’s rent plus a security deposit. Others are dealing with acute mental health crises or substance abuse. “We’re trying to provide the right amount of help at the right time,” Hitchcock says. And that help can be more than just material.
“A colleague of mine likes to say that people don’t become homeless because they run out of money; people become homeless because they run out of relationships,” says Hitchcock. “I think there’s a lot of truth in that.” He recalls the epigraph to Howard’s End—“only connect.”
“I’m reminded of that all the time,” he says. “What we’re talking about is creating connection. So many folks are disconnected.” That can come from aging out of foster care, or aging alone; it could be because of divorce, or loss of a job, or incarceration. Whatever the reason, “we want to be a place where people can start, or start again.”
***
Guests at a weekly writing group run by Day Shelter Coordinator Rob White (center) in the sanctuary. The space is an extra place for guests to sleep or find quiet during the day, and is also frequently rented out for weddings and community events.
On Mondays at 10am, Day Shelter Coordinator Rob White hosts a writing group in the former sanctuary. The space is large, and beautiful, with beamed ceilings and stained glass windows. The Haven hosts groups and events here throughout the day, like a weekly class on mindful breathing, and monthly touch therapy sessions from Zero Balancing. But it also rents out the space for weddings and community events, like concerts and film screenings. The Village School, a private all-girls middle school down the street, uses it for recitals. “It’s such a cool thing, to hold these things proximate,” says Ocean Aiello, the community outreach director. “Screaming seventh grade girls and a homeless shelter; those things are not usually next to each other.”
Guests here for the writing group gather around a large table, and share their work. A woman named Marie reads a poem, and says she wrote it after getting a cardiovascular stress test. “The doctors told me, ‘You have a fragile heart,’” she says. “Doesn’t everyone have a fragile heart?”
One man reads from an ongoing story he’s writing, and a woman shares a short passage on camping, showing the meticulously drawn rocks she’s sketched in her small notebook.
There’s a new visitor today, Harold Tucker. He’s a large man in a ski cap, with a ruddy face and a mustache that’s turning white. He sits down and immediately starts writing.
He lost his wife three years ago, he tells the group. They were married for 41 years.“Life has gone downward since.” He writes about a dream he had, in which his wife urged him to move on. “I don’t know how to do that,” he says.
Marie tells him he is in the right place. White offers him a journal, and suggests he try writing directly to his wife, in the present tense.
The group has been talking about mindfulness, and today White has a poem for them to read, “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s a fairly long piece, about catching a fish, one that’s been hooked many times before.
“He’s tired,” Tucker says of the fish. “Like a lot of us are.”
“Every day, you keep hoping things are going to get better,” he says. “But sometimes they don’t.”
Tucker was a truck driver for decades, but after his wife died, he got cancer, and had to get off the road. He’s estranged from his kids, and was sleeping in the park before he got connected with The Haven and PACEM.
White asks him to think of one thing he does, or could do, that would bring him purpose, and Tucker starts talking about kindness, about how he makes an effort to greet people and say good morning.
“That would make a nice poem,” White says. “It does matter.”
The group turns back to the Bishop poem, talking about how she focuses on the moment.
“The whole point of the poem is, don’t give up,” Tucker says.
Marie turns to him with a smile. “See how you get what you need in this class?”
***
Debbie Arrington makes use of The Haven’s laundry room. Guests use a sign up sheet for the washers and dryers, which are typically busy all day.
Kevin Mellette, a wiry man who seems to be constantly in motion, ducks outside for a smoke break in the rain. His official title is facilities manager, but his role seems to encompass a bit of everything: “I do shift supervision, I do security, make sure the building runs properly.”
A certified peer recovery specialist, he provides support for people who are using or suffering from mental health issues. “I’m also a recovering addict, so I kind of know my way around, if you will,” he says. “A great deal of our population—maybe more than 50 percent—suffer from something that is related to some form of trauma. And being homeless, that’s trauma in itself.”
The Haven doesn’t have any official security guards, but Mellette and others, like Dickerson, are in charge of keeping the building safe. “Mr. Dickerson and myself, we’re both from the street, so we have a tendency to be able to come across to people,” Mellette says. If there’s a conflict, he’ll do his best to de-escalate it, and will call the police when needed to escort someone off the property.
Mellette first showed up at The Haven for mandatory community service, through the circuit drug court. He’d been in a worsening cycle of substance abuse and criminal charges. “On this last go round, I decided to do something different,” he says. He’s been clean since September 28, 2015. “The Haven gave me that opportunity, that continuing of care for me. The way I pay it back is by helping others.” He’s been working here for four years now. About The Haven, he says, “I think what it does is, it offers those who are homeless a place in which they can gather themselves. A haven, a place where people can feel safe and deal with whatever trauma they’re going through, without having to be inundated with more trauma.”
***
PACEM guests board a JAUNT bus, headed to a local church where they will sleep for the night. Through PACEM, a rotating group of congregations and community groups provide dinner and shelter for roughly 45 men and 20 women each night. In the morning, they are bused back to The Haven for breakfast.
At 5pm, the Haven staff turns things over to PACEM, whose offices are also in the building. Every night, roughly 45 men and 20 women gather to board JAUNT buses that take them to area churches, which provide dinner and beds for the night. The number of women seeking shelter has gone up sharply in the last couple years, says caseworker Heather Kellams. She’s working to extend PACEM’s season to provide year-round beds for them, while also looking for private funding to create a permanent women’s shelter. “These women…are extremely vulnerable,” she says. “They need a lot of care.”
Like The Haven (and unlike the year-round shelter at The Salvation Army), PACEM is low-barrier. So before loading the buses, Brian Henderson, a seasonal staff member who is simultaneously warm and commanding, asks guests to give him any drugs, alcohol, or other “paraphernalia”they may have in their bags, and to stay in the designated sleeping areas in the churches where they’ll be staying.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Tucker shows up looking for a spot, but the rules have changed and guests are supposed to register earlier in the day. The staff know Tucker, though, and it’s almost Thanksgiving, and there’s an open bed. They let him join.
One phrase Haven staff use to describe their work is “radical hospitality.” “We try to cultivate a culture of accompaniment,” says Hitchcock. “We work to be the kind of community we hope Charlottesville is—to hold out, this is how folks can be with one another across different backgrounds, different ages, races, genders, sexual orientations—you name it, it’s all here.”
It’s a feeling that comes across to many guests, too. “They’re good people,” Tucker says of The Haven staff. Yes, there’s the food and shelter. But he also talks about how they’ve given him bus fare, helped him get his license when his wallet was stolen. “They give me clothes, they give me gloves, let me take a shower, so I feel like I’m human.” He pauses. “So I feel like I’m human. Not just somebody sleeping on the street.”
*
Guest book
Virginia Lypps
Mark Mulawa
Tammy Edwards
Harold Tucker
Joe Bostock
Justin Watkins
Sharon Shelton
Tim Ferguson
Tevin Rogers
“When you see somebody sitting on the street, before you sit there and judge them, know their story.” –A Haven guest
Shift supervisor Herb Dickerson sings as volunteers prepare for the Wednesday lunch café.
Food for the soul
The Haven closes from noon to 1pm, and on Wednesdays, the dining room becomes a lunch café, open to the public for a $10 donation. It’s not a moneymaker, but it’s a chance for guests to get some paid food service experience, setting up, doing dishes, and serving the downtown lunch crowd. And it’s an opportunity for the public to see “a different side of what homelessness looks like,” says Evie Safran, who runs the program.
Like many Haven staff, Safran is a former teacher (she taught public preschool in Charlottesville), but she also had a 30-year catering career. She recruits weekly guest chefs, ranging from local restaurant and corporate chefs to caterers and dedicated home cooks, and the food “runs the gamut from down-home Southern to South Indian vegetarian,” she says.
Lunches also include a salad, sides, delicious homemade limeade, coffee, and dessert.
Like the church rentals, and an annual 8K run in the spring (which features a homemade breakfast in the sanctuary afterwards), it’s a way to bring the broader community into The Haven.
Sara and Tennessee got married in Emancipation Park July 8, the same day as the KKK rally at Justice Park. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
In the center of Charlottesville is a park. A park that, lately, has seen its fair share of blood and spit, pepper spray and violence, tears and prayers. It sits in the city’s northeast quadrant and takes up a square block, sandwiched between First and Second streets to the west and east, Jefferson Street to the north and Market Street to the south. For nearly 93 years it was known as Lee Park. But for the last three months, officially at least, it’s been called Emancipation Park.
Becky Blanton became homeless by choice 10 years ago, but she didn’t realize the societal
and psychological ramifications she would experience. Today Blanton wants to help others in the same situation. Photo by Keith Alan Sprouse
Becky Blanton became invisible 10 years ago. She shared her story—how she went from working as a newspaper editor to living out of her van and eventually identifying as homeless—with her fellow entrepreneurs in a Community Investment Collaborative program in the fall of 2015.
CIC runs a 16-week program for local entrepreneurs in Charlottesville, as well as Fluvanna and Louisa counties. It caters to small businesses, determining whether each idea is viable and then educating participants on the ins and outs of running a business.
Toward the end of the class, Blanton was asked to talk about what motivated her to join. She said she had previously experienced homelessness, living in her 1975 Chevrolet van for a year and a half while in Colorado. Afterward, four people approached her and confided that they, too, had been homeless—and a few still were.
“I was surprised,” Blanton says. “It can happen to anyone. Sometimes it’s just for a week, sometimes it’s a couple of months until you find an apartment. You couch surf or you sleep in your car, or a hotel room if you can afford it.
“After people came up to me and told me they were homeless, that’s when I came up with the idea to write [The Homeless Entrepreneur],” Blanton says. “I thought, ‘If I could put what I just told the class into book form, maybe I could touch other people, too.’”
It took her just a few weeks to put the story together. She then reached out to her CIC instructor, David Durovy, to get his opinion.
“Becky sent me the PDF she had just written on the book and had asked me to go through it, make some comments and suggestions,” Durovy says. “I was very impressed with it. Not only was it good for people who are down and out and need help, or are broke or homeless, but I thought it had a lot of great wisdom in there for anybody. I said she should do a class for the homeless.”
The book followed Blanton’s experiences in Colorado more than a decade ago, in 2006. She was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day as an editor for a small newspaper in Craig, a town of about 9,500 people, less than an hour from the Wyoming border.
Her father died of a brain tumor a month prior to her start at the paper. Blanton says her dad’s biggest regret was that he worked all the time. So she quit her job, bought a van and became a freelance photographer.
“When that job ended, I tried to find another one and I couldn’t,” Blanton says. During this time, she packed up and moved to Denver. She landed a job at Camping World, making $11 an hour, but it wasn’t enough to afford an apartment.
“It’s like trying to find an apartment in Charlottesville on $9 an hour,” she says. “So I said, ‘Well, I’ll just live in the van until I find something.’ For me, it was like camping. I’d been an RV-er and camper most of my life. Living in a van was no big deal, but when you’re 50 years old and you’re female, people see that as ‘you’re homeless, poor you.’”
She wasn’t able to find an affordable place for another 18 months, despite having jobs.
Showering and parking were difficult, but she became creative. While working at a temp agency, she got off on the wrong floor and discovered the office building had showers in the bathrooms. So, she started using those. She also washed up in truck stop bathrooms, and took advantage of a local YMCA.
“When I got the Camping World job, they had a gym and a shower for their employees so I could go in the morning and before I left work at night,” she says. “If it was really hot, I could take a shower to cool off before I got in the van.”
Then, the challenge became where to park.
“You have to change where you park every night,” Blanton says, listing the various places she would hide the car. Parking lots, parking garages, Walmarts, rest areas, truck stops, even hospital parking lots housed her van. “Police officers get used to seeing a car in a certain place, so you have to change (it) up.”
Blanton says she was working in one of the richest suburbs of Denver—Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Lexus dealerships were just down the street from the Highland Ranch Walmart where she parked her van.
She said although those months were challenging, things were okay until her coworkers at Camping World found out about her situation.
“[They] were calling me ‘that homeless woman,’” Blanton says. “I started to believe it. I mean, everything I know about psychology and social experiments—I shouldn’t have believed. …I should have just kept thinking ‘I’m an RV-er,’ but I started to believe it.”
The bullying from her coworkers, the names and the looks they would give her, began to take its toll.
“When you start to believe other people’s perceptions about who you are and what you are, you change,” Blanton says. “You become that. I started seeing myself as a homeless woman. I started avoiding people’s eyes.”
Blanton admits she was suicidal.
But one day a friend called her while she was sitting in the back of her van. The friend said the late Tim Russert, the longest-serving moderator on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was talking about her on television. Before she was a newspaper editor she had written a story competing to be in his latest book. Out of 60,000 submissions, hers was chosen.
When the book, Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons, was published, Blanton picked up a copy and read it. When she saw her name, it clicked—she was not a homeless woman, she was a writer.
“Then, I changed my own mindset,” Blanton says. “It was instantaneous.” She vowed that whenever she made it out of the rut, she would help people just like her.
Blanton and Durovy were planning to teach an entrepreneurship class after the CIC program, but it didn’t have enough students. So the pair decided to use Blanton’s book as a basis for the Suitcase to Briefcase program for homeless entrepreneurs in Charlottesville. The pilot project came together quickly, in a couple of weeks.
“You can literally change your mindset and change who you are, what you want and how you feel about yourself in an instant with the right input, and that’s what’s important to me,” she says. “It’s not that I’m going to teach people how to start a business. It’s that I’m touching them on a deeper level and I believe in them. People don’t believe in homeless people. They think they’re lazy and they’re crackheads. I want to be, to them, what that book was to me.”
Durovy says they had two major goals: Change the way homeless people see themselves and change the community’s perception of homeless people. The pair partnered with The Haven, a local homeless shelter, to bring their program to life.
The Suitcase to Briefcase pilot program, led by Becky Blanton, was held at The Haven, a local homeless shelter. Photo by Keith Alan Sprouse
Samantha Wood is a housing stabilization case manager for The Haven. She worked closely with Suitcase to Briefcase, and helped recruit participants.
“Their model and mission fit with our model and mission,” Wood says. “We put the word out. I reached out to some of my clients, other staff reached out to people they know.”
While the program ran independently, Wood says The Haven supported it through each step. It provided a home for participants to meet in, as well as let them use resources like computers at the shelter. The program’s orientation was held in the sanctuary room, and open to anyone who was interested. The rest of the classes were held in the lunchroom.
Durovy says the first session was the most nerve-racking. “I was hoping at least one person would come, and we had about 10 people show up. Of that group, all but three joined the class, and right off the bat my expectations were exceeded.”
The outline of the class was simple, Durovy says. It was loosely based on Blanton’s book, but they followed some of the ideas that CIC uses. They planned field trips and had local community members come in and speak.
“Mostly, we were trying to create a foundation so we could get some of the basic mindset in place, and an understanding of what they are getting into,” Durovy says. “[Focusing on] more of the soft skills, which are working on business ideas, learning their pitch.”
During the course of the eight weeks, Suitcase to Briefcase connected with various organizations and businesses in the community. Nursing students from the University of Virginia came every week to take basic health stats. And during field trips the group visited a local glassmaker, as well as the i.Lab incubator at UVA’s Darden School of Business, among other places.
“We went to the i.Lab coffee espresso event one morning, which is filled with professors and entrepreneurs and students,” Durovy says. “To have us walk in there was just a treat. Being able to take these folks places that normally they would be shunned, but all of a sudden they were starting to appear places and be recognized and addressed by people with a whole different level of respect.”
Originally they wanted the class to be three hours long, but there were some concerns about keeping people’s attention for that long. But they quickly discovered two hours wasn’t enough. Once the conversations got going, participants would hang around afterward talking.
“At first, folks were just getting used to the class, their classmates, Becky and David,” Wood says. She sat in on about half of the courses during the eight-week program. “Sometimes with our folks, they’ve been burnt so many times, it may take them a little bit to gain trust. They can be a little skeptical. It took time to warm up, then it started to feel like a cohesive group, very supportive of each other.”
All of the topics covered were focused around the basics of business. A couple classes dealt with money and finance. Some of the participants’ ideas included an online gaming website, a T-shirt business and an urban fashion line.
“We emphasize that they are responsible for themselves,” Blanton says. “They can make poor choices or wise choices. We’re there, not to rescue them, but for advice. We’re mentors, not social workers.”
Durovy says the passion and commitment of the entrepreneurs inspired him. “Right up to graduation and continuing on—the desire to do something with their lives was evident, obvious and they were motivated.”
Success story
The first time Robin Houser was homeless was as a 29-year-old college student in Alabama in 1986. After getting her GED, she headed south from her parents’ home in Stafford County, and enrolled at Calhoun Community College with funds she received from the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services. She worked on the weekends as a certified nursing assistant for hospice patients, but found that the money she made was not enough to pay for housing, so she slept in her car. Eventually, she also began taking classes at Athens State University and qualified to live in a dorm room, but her college experience wasn’t all positive. She discovered that she had severe learning disabilities—which had gone previously undetected in high school—and after five quarters she had a C+ average. After needing to go back to work full-time, she quit taking classes and moved north, back to her parents’ home, and worked as a home health nurse.
Fast forward a couple decades, and Houser again found herself living in her car—this time a van, from which she had removed the seats to allow herself more room. She had been living in Section 8 housing in Charlottesville, and had applied for a housing transfer to Waynesboro. She thought the process would take 30 days or less, but found herself without a home and nowhere to go. She would park her van at various places: a campsite in Waynesboro, Walmart parking lots in Charlottesville, Ruckersville and Waynesboro. She moved around because she didn’t feel safe staying in one place. It was wintertime, and she kept warm by covering herself with several blankets. Soup kitchens became a source for food.
Last November, two years after her five-month homeless stint, she was back at the First Baptist Church which runs a soup kitchen, not out of necessity but out of fellowship. She had loved listening to the sermons and music and talking with other people. It was during this visit that a church staffer told her about the Suitcase to Briefcase program, and that she thought Houser would be a great candidate for it. Although the class had been in session for a couple of weeks, and although she lived in Waynesboro at the time, Houser decided to join.
The best part of the program, she said, was the guest speakers. She especially remembers Paul Yates, Gordonsville branch manager of Woodforest National Bank (which also has branch locations in area Walmarts), who opened a checking and savings account for every program participant—the checking accounts each had $9.50, and the savings accounts had $10. Beyond the money, Houser appreciated Yates’ tips on how to manage money, and even how to use the accounts. Walmart also gave each attendee a gift card with $10. Houser used hers to put gas in her car so she could keep attending the sessions.
Houser plans to open her own lawn care business. But first she needs seed money for items such as a hitch for her car, a trailer to house her equipment and tools like a lawn mower. To get the money, she wants to make and sell wooden boxes for kindling. She’s bought the boards and nails, but is now looking at ways to trade items or work for tools—such as an electric saw—to make the boxes.
Houser looks at her time being homeless not as something to pity her for, but something that has made her stronger. She uses the analogy of weathering a storm, and how you can be changed by the experience for having endured it. She says she has met homeless people throughout her life who see themselves as victims, and it’s those people who are difficult to help, because they are not actively doing anything to get out of their situation. She says action is paramount—which is why she is confident she’ll have her lawn care business operational by the spring. She works every day at getting what she needs to move forward, she says.
“It will happen,” she says. “There is no shame in being homeless; the shame is staying there.”
Continuing education
Blanton says the graduation ceremony in December was bittersweet. The participants were proud of themselves but were sad to see the course come to an end. But she says she and Durovy are committed to the group for the next year. Everyone is still active in developing his or her business—Blanton says she receives calls, texts or e-mails almost every day. They let her know how they are doing, or how the business is going—just recently someone reached out with questions about a potential logo.
Each received a special gift when the class ended.
“They don’t have anywhere to hang a certificate, so we created these 3-by-4-inch certificates with inspirational sayings on the back and a certificate of completion on the front,” Blanton says. “We laminated them and three-hole punched them so they could hang them from their backpacks.”
Blanton and Durovy have also learned a lot, and plan to make the course a little different the next time around.
“We’re trying to get a spot on the Downtown Mall,” Blanton says, “where our entrepreneurs can sell their wares. Instead of all these homeless people sitting around with cardboard, you can go to a stand and say, ‘Tell me your story,’ and you can buy their products.”
This experience has also taught the pair that the program needs to be longer. The idea is to extend it to an eight-week boot camp, followed by a six- to 12-month follow-up program. Blanton says approximately 30 people have said they are interested in a future program, and Wood says she has been approached by almost a dozen people at The Haven for more information.
Blanton says there’s no concrete start date for the next program. She and Durovy are still waiting on funding, and they both have full-time jobs. Blanton is a ghostwriter and Durovy is president and partner of the Post Institute.
Right now, Suitcase to Briefcase has a number of sponsors, such as Best Western Hotels and Dollar Shave Club, Blanton says. They’ve been in talks with Piedmont Virginia Community College about scholarships and free classes for course participants. And there is talk of expanding the program to different cities.
“Being homeless is not who you are, it’s where you are,” Blanton says. “You are who you think you are, and you can do anything you put your mind to.”
Caleb Fox works at The Haven to get veterans housed.
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It’s been almost one year since Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that Virginia was the first state in the U.S. to functionally end homelessness among veterans—and while it may not seem that way when residents drive through Charlottesville and see people begging, evolving housing programs are having positive effects on the city and surrounding counties.
Partnerships between Veterans Affairs medical centers, programs that support veterans families and local homeless organizations such as The Haven continue to piece together a complex, and often sensitive, puzzle.
Functionally ending homelessness does not mean it is eradicated. It means programs are in place to ensure a veteran’s experience with homelessness now—or in the future—will be “rare, brief and non-recurring,” according to McAuliffe. Rapid Re-Housing and Homelessness Prevention are two examples of programs available.
The Haven is often considered the homeless point of entry in Charlottesville and its five surrounding counties: Greene, Nelson, Fluvanna, Louisa and Albemarle.
Situated in a former multi-story church donated by Evan Almighty director and UVA alum Tom Shadyac on the corner of East Market and First Street North, The Haven has been addressing the needs of the area’s homeless community since opening its doors in 2010.
Caleb Fox, veterans case manager for The Haven, says the change towards housing programs has been monumental.
“The Rapid Re-Housing program is based on this notion of housing first,” says Fox. “In the last three years the approach to homelessness has really shifted on its head. It used to be getting folks into a shelter, addressing their physical and mental health, substance abuse, income issues and then getting them into a house. Now it’s get them into housing and then working on the other things through individual case management.”
Former Charlottesville mayor Dave Norris is another influential figure in the fight against chronic homelessness. During his time in office from 2008 to 2011, he was instrumental in getting The Crossings—a permanent supportive housing community for formerly homeless people—funded, developed and officially launched. He’s witnessed firsthand the changes to the system.
“There’s been this real focus nationally of addressing homelessness,” Norris says. “The consensus was that we were doing a decent job of putting a Band-Aid on homelessness, but not doing a very good job of actually ending it.”
He attributes a lot of the progress in reducing veteran homelessness to the Rapid Re-Housing thrust. “We saw a considerable increase in both state and federal resources that funneled through organizations such as The Haven and others,” says Norris.
The increased funding for these programs is based on statistical data, says Fox. Evidence suggests that getting someone off the street and into a stable situation generates better outcomes—and there are only slight differences between the programs for vets and non-vets.
The VA-funded Rapid Re-Housing program is more time-limited, providing a maximum of nine months of rental assistance, compared with two years for non-veterans, says Fox.
Since 2015, Fox says 54 veterans from the Charlottesville area have been enrolled in vet programs. He estimates the local homeless population at 185 to 220 people, which means about a quarter of them are veterans. Of the 54 veterans, 13 were enrolled in the Supportive Service for Veterans Families Homeless Prevention Program, which is intended for people who are not homeless but are imminently at risk, and the remaining 41 vets were enrolled in the SSVF Rapid Re-Housing program.
Fox says the support service programs spent approximately $79,000 to assist 24 veterans in these two programs with security deposits, rental assistance, utilities and deposits, transportation costs and moving expenses.
For the 30 remaining veterans, some decided to leave the area. Others declined services. Fox says he continues to work with the veterans who have not yet been housed to address any barriers they might have, including criminal background or credit issues.
“The goal the VA has set is that it’s a handup, and not a handout,” Fox says. “We send veterans on their way once they are in a stabilized situation, and ready to pay their own housing costs.”
While the need and desire for more funding are ever-present worries, he credits the increased focus on veterans over the past several years for some of the positive changes across the nation.
“Officials have spent a lot of money since the start of the Obama administration to address veteran homelessness, and it’s working,” says Fox.
Norris concurs that the cooperation across party lines really propelled the fight into the national spotlight. Getting vets into homes was a rallying point in Washington, and beyond.
“The least we can do is make sure our men and women who served this country in uniform never find themselves out on the streets,” Norris says. “In a city like this, in a state like this… we are showing that we can honor that commitment.”
