Shelter Happens -- Picking Up Where The Local Shelter Fails

Letter to Disabled Veterans of America

2008-07-27T01:26:00.002-07:00

Dear Members of the Disabled Veterans of America:

I am concerned about the poor treatment of some of our veterans at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter. Please bear with me as I shed some light on this concern, and seek your help in righting this wrong.
As you probably know, the Veterans Administration Medical Center leases one of its buildings to Volunteers of America, which operates its own independent community homeless shelter. Volunteers of America is under contract with the VAMC to provide at least 16 beds to serve homeless veterans in our area.
I worked at the homeless shelter for one year as the service coordinator. During my year of employment there, I witnessed unfair, improper and poor-quality treatment of disabled veterans – mostly through the director and another disabled veteran on staff at the shelter (both employees of Volunteers of America).

A veteran was dismissed from the shelter because he said, “I am not like the other people here” . . . The director talked about charging a veteran for the food he ate at the shelter because he had a job at the VA . . . Veterans are placed on the shelter’s Not Welcome Back List for no more reason than that the director is tired of them . . . A veteran’s diabetic diet was not followed by the shelter . . . A Black Beret Veteran with PTSD was accosted by staff and this brought on a difficult episode on the part of the veteran . . . A veteran was promised a bed upon his return from taking care of personal business in another state, but, when he returned to the shelter, he was told he was not welcome back . . . Veterans are routinely told by the director that they are mentally ill, and are ordered to treatment they do not want or feel they need . . . Veterans are told they can help shape their goals while at the shelter, but, in truth, they are told what their goals will be and must follow directives accordingly or be kicked out . . . Veterans are arbitrarily dismissed from the shelter by the director, who gives them no more reason than, “This is not working out.”

In general, veterans and civilians at the shelter are treated in an authoritarian, dictatorial manner. They are scolded like children and brow-beaten as though they were incarcerated. (Veterans have personally told me they feel that they are either in kindergarten or prison during their stay at the shelter.)

I could go on, but I hope that these examples will suggest to you that there is a problem in the way disabled American veterans are being treated by the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.

I discovered, and you probably know, many of our disabled veterans do not feel empowered enough to register an official complaint about their poor treatment. Some of them have even become accustomed to poor treatment at shelters and elsewhere.

I have continued to work on my own time with disabled veterans who have been kicked out of the shelter, or who have found places to live in the Sheridan area. This is follow-up that the shelter is supposed to provide, but does not. I have worked with enough disabled veterans in Sheridan to know that the quality-of-care problem persists at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Shelter.

I am personally outraged at the shoddy treatment that our injured protectors have had to endure at the hands of a few poorly-trained and authoritarian individuals at the shelter.

So concerned was I about this treatment that I angrily confronted my supervisor about this back in December, and she saw to it that I was fired. I wanted you to be aware of this because VOA tends to vilify me as a man who is merely angry about losing his job. I am still angry about the same thing that angered me in December: The poor treatment of homeless individuals, especially disabled veterans, at this shelter.

I suggest that it could help improve the quality of care at the shelter if the DAV were to offer itself to the veterans in the Sheridan shelter in the following ways:

Advertise that any veterans with concerns about their treatment at the Sheridan Community Shelter may be addressed to the DAV, or an individual or committee of the DAV.

Secondly, I advise that you set up a monthly meeting with the veterans at the shelter where vets can safely air their concerns by meeting one at a time with a representative or a committee of representatives from the DAV. I am honestly concerned thatthe social workers who act as liaisons between the VA and the shelter have a tendency to dismiss vets’ concerns and look the other way when serious questions are asked about the shelter. They are good people, but they tend to “side” with the shelter.

I suggest a monthly meeting, because there is a certain amount of natural turnover in the veteran population there, and because different issues regarding poor treatment of people at the shelter crop up fairly routinely. The information obtained in these meetings should be forwarded to someone trustworthy at the VA.

Your presence as something of a quality-control entity I believe would greatly reduce the uncalled-for treatment of disabled veterans at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter, as the corporation is extremely image-conscious. This slight pressure from you could make the director think twice about her treatment of disabled veterans at the shelter. The director is a responsive person, but I don’t believe she realizes how difficult and dismissive she is being, nor the anxiety she is causing some vets at the shelter.

Please advise me as to your response to my concerns and suggestions. I would be happy to meet with anyone who wishes to follow up on this with me. I hope it is clear that I do not intend to ask to be a part of whatever process the DAV wishes to implement in this matter. I just wanted to bring it to your attention and suggest a means by which the DAV could make a significant difference.

Thank you for your time and your attention to this matter.

Welcome to the Shelter! Welcome! Did We Say 'Welcome?'

2008-07-20T22:33:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
We are glad you are here, but, please don’t bother us while we are working.
We realize that you might be from a background that makes it difficult for you to follow every little rule. In order to make your stay here as short and un-troubling as possible, we have a spate of rules that we show you on paper, another rash of additional rules scotch-taped to the walls and doors, and a flood of decrees that are hidden in the recesses of the shelter director’s mind.
We will make it so difficult and so weird for you to be here that you will want to leave by the time we kick you out, and you will embrace the underside of a bridge or the opportunity to sink unnoticed into the silent, homeless mob.
We fire the staff members who believe you are a miracle, and prefer to consider you somehow involved with drugs.
Those big hugs we give you are just our way of searching for weapons and detecting beer on your breath.
We are really looking for 30 or 40 perfectly behaved, well-groomed, rule-abiding and cowtowing homeless people.
If you are not such a one, don’t let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya.

– Management

Why Leadership Resents The People They Are Supposed To Help

2008-06-08T01:42:00.000-07:00

The other day a friend of mine rhetorically asked, “Why is it that you find so many people in the people-helping professions the most cynical and bitter toward the people they are supposed to be helping?”
I don’t know, but he got me to thinking.
In my own experience, I have known a teacher who disliked children, a businesswoman who disliked customers, a welfare worker who resents the poor, a pastor who had no patience with people who had spiritual problems, and, now most certainly, a homeless shelter director who treats homeless veterans and non-veterans as though she despises them for their need.
By comparison, she makes Cinderella’s step-mother seem like Jesus.
By contrast, I know Jesus to be one who will peel away the rotten and base things within us to find in us his image, and dignify us with his love and care. Even laying aside one’s religious views, we have a certain onus upon us to take care of the people who edge into our line of sight. This is the very essence of compassion – strangely absent in a place where compassion would be the most healing, the most helpful, the most human response to individuals suffering from many losses, including a certain perceived disenfranchisement from the norms of society.
I am very disappointed to report that compassion is discouraged at the Volunteers of American Sheridan Homeless Shelter, and that people are routinely questioned, accused, brow-beaten, scolded and kicked out for no reason – all from the director’s office
If there really is such a thing as client resentment disease, the CDC would have a heyday here.

Investigation Complete: VA OKS VOA

2008-06-01T22:22:00.001-07:00

I am disappointed, but not surprised, that the Veterans Health Administration has reported back that the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter is considered “in compliance” with the VA Per Diem Grant Program.
On May 30, I received a letter from U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, in which he forwarded to me a copy of the report he received from the VA.
The gist of the report is that the shelter is fine, and that I am more than likely unstable. They discovered that I am not a veteran, which, apparently makes me much easier to dismiss.
Of course, there is no department of quality of care to go to in the system, otherwise many of the abused veterans in the Sheridan shelter would have contacted these. If there is such a place, it is a well-guarded secret.
If you will recall, I made the following list of issues of non-compliance to the VA:

1. The “reasonable assurance” that not more than 25 percent of participants at any one time will be non-veterans was not attempted in the calendar year of 2007. The per diem “assurances” were consciously ignored.
2. There is certainly nothing being done to establish transitional housing outside of the walls of the shelter. If the per diem grant assumes progress in the area of transitional living, no such progress exists.
3. There is no follow-up on the part of the shelter with veterans who have acquired permanent housing. Once they leave the threshold of the shelter, they are left out of contact, unless they have to return to the shelter because their living situation failed somehow.
4. Programming and goals for are dictated to the veteran by the shelter director. Most of these vulnerable individuals simply accept their fate at the shelter, because they need a place to live. Also, veterans are routinely kicked out of the shelter and placed on a “not-welcome-back” list, which certainly stops the flow of care, while the grant monies continue.

The report to Enzi did not address any of these issues.
My letter to the VA included this question: “I am writing you to find out whether the items above, which I consider improprieties with regard to conditions expected from the per diem grant award, are in fact improprieties. If so, how will your office address these? If not, please assist me where I am misunderstanding this.”
Obviously, the “reasonable assurances” included in the grant program are not “serious reasonable assurances,” as the VA disregarded the fairly substantial items 1-4 above, and spent more time figuring out ways to discredit me as the person asking the questions, to whit: “Mr. Cummings was not a veteran and had acted repeatedly in a hostile manner toward VOA and VA staff involved in the project. As a result Mr. Cummings was asked not to return.” The VOA is ticked that I won’t be quiet, so they are adding a dash of vilification. I expected as much.
True, it may be too optimistic to expect the VA to take upon itself a quality control issue in a tiny shelter that has a contract for 16 veteran beds. Fortunately, this is only one of the many trees I intend to bark up.

He Lasted A Week, Then Wanted Escape From Her Clutches

2008-05-23T16:03:00.001-07:00

The young man who I reluctantly took to the abusive VOA Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter called me last week and asked for help.
I had left him my card when I let him off at the shelter, telling him that there would come a day, soon, when he could no longer bear the director and at least one of her staff.
The day came, and he called from the library last Saturday.
I met him there and drove him to the bus station for a ticket to Rapid City.
When I asked him what had happened at the shelter, he told me, “Things got weird up there pretty fast.” He didn’t seem to want to elaborate. I didn't press him for details, as much fun as it would have been to blab it all on my blog.
I am not one to believe that my helping a person gives me the right to pry information out of them, or tell them what they should do, or attach rules to my help.
This is one of the places where the director of the abusive shelter and I part company.
Among the inappropriate meddling that I have observed at the shelter include:

Obstructing residents from obtaining spot jobs.
Asking residents whether they are having sex downtown.
Demanding that residents not eat meals at local bar-and-grills.
Threatening to kick out residents who take jobs with employers of which the director does not approve.
Demanding that residents get costly mental health evaluations when they don’t think like she does – or get kicked out.
Demanding that one resident not spend time with another resident’s friend.
Insisting on knowing the resident’s living situation when he or she finds a means to leave the shelter.

This kind of behavior ought to offend every individual and business owner who has supported “the homeless” by giving time, money or items to Volunteers of America and/or the shelter. Any support directed to VOA helps prolong and tacitly supports this kind of behavior against people experiencing some of their most vulnerable moments.
Any support given to the VOA condones this outrageous and manipulative behavior.

'I Am Used To Being Treated Like Crap'

2008-05-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

A while back a friend called me to say he had met a guy at a gas station who was looking for the local homeless shelter.
“He needs a ride up there,” he said.
My friend didn’t have a vehicle. I have given him a few lifts, and he opted to call me to help out this other guy.
I met the guy that wanted to go to the shelter, and talked to him for a while.
I told him I really had mixed feelings about taking him to the shelter because the director is a mean-spirited megalomaniac, and he was unlikely to be treated very well, or fairly, or nicely, or compassionately.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I am used to being treated like crap.”
That doesn’t say much for our culture.
Well, I told him if he expected to be treated like crap that he was headed to the right place. I drove him up to the shelter, explaining that they won’t let me on the property because I blog about their poor treatment of people, their disorganized organization, and the fraudulent ways they perpetuate grant money from the federal government.
Anyway, I gave him my card and dropped him off.
His words, “I am used to being treated like crap,” still hum in my head. The shelter in my town perpetuates the crappy treatment of people.
Anyone donating money or materials to Volunteers of America and its Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter is supporting thugs in their thuggery.

New Drug Test Office Beats VOA Hands Down On Ethics

2008-05-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

I see where a former Volunteers of America program director of the local drug testing division is forming her own drug testing services.
She is actually going to certify her people according to Federal Department of Transportation regulations for the use of breath test equipment. This is something that Volunteers of America has not gotten around to doing. It was deemed too expensive.
I mentioned this to the DOT, and we have been emailing back and forth for some time. Apparently, the DOT is concerned that Volunteers of America is not holding up its end, which is just another day at the office at VOA Wyoming-Montana.
When I worked in the drug testing division at VOA, we were “certified” as technicians to use testing procedures with Redwood labs of California, and MedTox labs. Our certification required that we take a written test, and it with our administrator’s permission, we did so with the answer sheet in front of us. To do otherwise was deemed too much fuss.
Certification for breath tests was non-existent. Certification for specimen collection/preparation was bogus. Still, on we tested.
It sounds to me like this woman who is starting her own business might have ethics that are missing from the VOA work culture.

Oh My Heavens, There She Is!

2008-04-30T01:24:00.001-07:00

It finally happened.
I saw the woman who directs the homeless shelter face-to-face at Wal-mart Saturday.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, as Sheridan is not a vast metropolis where you can get lost in the crowd. Someone in the crowd usually knows your mom, taught you in school, knows your daughter, or just knows your car.
It was she and her husband and maybe an offspring.
She was all smiles and said, “Tim, how AAARRRE you.”
“Fine.”
“We sure miss you at the shelter.”
“Oh, you do not,” I said, smiling (or sneering, I can’t remember).
“Of course we do,” she said.
“Well,” I paused to decide whether to argue, then said, “That’s nice.”
“I really do wish you the best,” she said cheerily.
Since that isn’t a complete sentence, I am supposing she meant “funeral you’ve ever had,” or, “case of some quick and lethal disease.”
At any rate, even a crude, horrible man such as myself can appreciate her civility, even though it was an opaque façade. Even psychos can be nice sometimes. She might have been in a good mood because she just kicked somebody out of the shelter. That really gets her endorphins going.
Had I had the presence of mind (never happens when it needs to) I could have asked:
1. Does this mean you are going to pick up the telephone now, when your caller ID says it’s me?
2. Are going to allow staff to talk to me when I call?
3. Are you going to call the resident to the phone who I want to talk to?
4. Are you going to allow me on the property at the shelter without calling the VA Police to escort me away for trespassing?
5. Are you going to stop grilling residents about whether they have been in contact with Tim Cummings to cause trouble?
Naw, she doesn’t miss me THAT much!

The VOA Sheridan Shelter Song

2008-04-29T17:14:00.001-07:00

Sheridan Shelter Song
To the tune of “The Beverly Hillbillies”

Come and listen to a story
‘bout man named Fred,
Asked the Sheridan shelter
if they could spare a bed.
He was told he could stay
and could eat the shelter food,
but from that point on he was treated pretty rude.

Like soil, that is. Vexed was he.

Well, the next thing ya know
He was treated less than fair.
The director always spoke
With a condescending air.
She tripled his load
Of his worries and his strife,
He didn’t know that her ‘help’
Meant she’d overtake his life.

Meg’lomania to the gills, that is. Thinks she’s God. Grooves on pow’r.

His stay wasn’t long
‘cause he couldn’t acquiesce,
when accused of a crime
she demanded he confess.
He was kicked down the road
Cuz she was in a bad mood,
And no one would know
Cuz her actions aren’t reviewed.

(End theme, accelerando)
And now it’s time to say goodbye,
Cuz Fred could never win.
The tilted box that was her world
He could not quite fit in.
Underneath a bridge, he figured, was a better place to be,
Than to put up with the Sher’dan shelter’s ‘hospitality.’

Bye now!

No Follow-Up From Shelter; VOA Guilty of Grant Abuse

2008-04-20T00:06:00.002-07:00

A former homeless veteran called me last week and said he needed help in his apartment.
I was happy to oblige ...
... But I also wondered where the VOA Homeless Shelter was with the follow-up on veterans who leave the shelter and find appropriate housing. Their Per Diem grant requires this kind of follow-up. Not happening.
The Federal Government grants them more than $26 per day per veteran. The average vet-per-day count is supposed to stay around 16. Where's my calculator ... that's more than $416 per day. The grant contains certain expectations from the grantee organization, and, try as I might, I can't find where it says, "Sit on your a-- and enjoy the free money."

'Human Dignity of Every Person' Not On The Menu At Local Shelter

2008-04-17T21:35:00.002-07:00

I have noted during Pope Benedict XVI’s papal visit to the United States, that he has referred several times to “the human dignity of every person.”
It might be thought that it is safe to assume that we do not live within reach, out here in Wyoming, of lapses in this particular area. This is a false assumption.
Our nice town has the potential, or, in the case of the homeless shelter, human dignity issues already in need of addressing.
Any time we care for the vulnerable in our midst, we must hold up the doctrine of the dignity of every person as the standard. Our shelter does this lousily, very lousily.
We must also hold up this doctrine in our nursing homes, our day cares, our medical facilities, our rehabilitative services, the special education components at our schools, our mental health services, our correctional facilities, our alternative schools, our addiction treatment facilities, our youth homes, our probation and parole offices, our courtrooms, our recreational facilities and our social services providers.
Obviously, this doctrine goes wherever people go.
As members of a healthy community, we must be on our toes to guard this human dignity of every person, and not go the way of the Volunteers of American Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter, with its smug dismissive, authoritarian, intrusive, manipulative, counter-productive and controlling ways, which in only the most distorted and twisted of minds would be considered “helping people.”
There is no agency more undignified than the shelter. Any individual or group supporting this shelter is aiding and abetting.
Plenty of dignified works in Sheridan can use your gifts, and will not toss them by the truckloads into the landfill as the shelter did last summer, or make the residents feel like they are either in prison or kindergarten.

Still Here ... Still Noting Weirdness At VOA

2008-04-15T12:01:00.002-07:00

1. I have a life … that’s my story and I am sticking to it.
2. My daughter is getting married next month, so we are cleaning the house until the day of.
3. I have had a touch of “blogger’s block.”
4. My temporary job has been kicking my butt.

Please chose one of the numbers above to explain the preceding season of quiet on this here blog.

While I was away …
It seems the Department of Transportation is looking into what looks like a breakage of the law due to a poor management decision by VOA. To save money and avoid inconvenience, the then supervisor of VOA’s Supervision Services (the pee-test people) decided not to certify any of the employees for the use of the breathalyzer.
The DOT apparently thinks this certification is needful, as it is the law.
We mentioned the needfulness of this certification to the supervisor (then the COO) while working there (2006). The matter was let drift away into Don't-Worry-About-It Land.
Last I heard, DOT was looking for names and addresses of all companies using VOA for Commercial Driver’s License testing.
When I was with Supervision Services (before my stint at the homeless shelter watching people get kicked around by the director and staff) we discovered by trial and error that ambient alcohol in the air from cleaning supplies could give the next breath-test person a false positive. Also, one of the Willy Wonka candies will give a false positive. Lord knows what else could pose problems. I bet certification training would have been helpful. It would have been lawful, too.

What Are You Supposed To Do About All This?

2008-04-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

All of this material I have been sharing is just dandy to know, but what are you supposed to do about it?
I suggest any of the following:

Stop donating to the shelter.
Your used clothes, household items, your gift cards, your cash, your time – all of these things are converted into matching fund money for grants that perpetuate the oppression of the homeless in our own backyard. The thrift shops, the Salvation Army, the Advocacy Resource Center, the Lunch Together program, and local churches with outreach ministries to the needy all have a great need for help. None of these is oppressive or abusive toward the people they help.

Write your concern.
If you work with senior citizens, you need to know that plenty of the abused at the shelter are older people.
If you have a heart for military veterans, old and new, the shelter always has a number of men from at least the Vietnam era, if not Korea, and now young guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. They get pushed around at the shelter as much as the civilians.
Young families? They come through the shelter, and find themselves held hostage by the director telling them how to raise their children, and added threats to call the Department of Family Services.
Young people trying to get their life on track? These get kicked out rather quickly, I suppose because the director believes they are robust enough to sleep under a bridge without too much damage to health.
Writing the VOA won’t do any good. They still get paid whether you like them or not. Write the Senior Center, write Disabled American Vets, write the VA, write friends in the business community, write your pastor or priest, and write your city councilman or county commissioner, and the mayor, and tell them no more support for authoritarian manhandling of the homeless at the shelter.

Make a move against homelessness in your own way.
You don’t have to undo the shelter in order to make a difference for homeless or under-sheltered people in our town. Try to think in terms of direct help. How can you help someone else? If you spend time with this question open in your mind, the answers will come swimming up to you. I promise.

Senator Enzi Responds To My Letter

2008-04-04T20:02:00.000-07:00

On March 6, I posted here a letter written to the Veterans Affairs contact office for a large grant the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter gets each year, even though VOA fails to address itself to the expectations of the grant.
This letter caused enough of a ruckus at the main office, behind Wendy’s, that the organization thought it prudent to ban me from setting foot on any of their properties.

On March 12, I posted a letter I sent to U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo), requesting he do what he could in light of my concerns.

Here is Senator Enzi’s response to my letter, which was postmarked yesterday and received today:

“Dear Tim,

“Thank you for your recent letter concerning your complaints against the Volunteers of America Wyoming-Montana operation of the Sheridan Community Shelter. I appreciate hearing from you.
“In an effort to be of every possible assistance to you, I have contacted the Department of Veterans Affairs asking that they review the situation you described. As soon as they have responded to me, I will be in touch with you again.
“Thank you for giving me this opportunity to be of service to you.
“Sincerely,
“Michael B. Enzi
“United States Senator”

I appreciate the Senator’s responsiveness.

Shelter Features Oppression, Residents 'Pay' By Putting Up With It

2008-04-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Don’t think I haven’t wondered if I should have kept my mouth shut at work at the homeless shelter.
Maybe I should have stood idly by for longer than I did while the shelter director imposed her bizarre brand of behavior modification via control and fear and veiled threats.
It does something to your spirit when you see this day after day – people treated poorly by an authority-addicted crazoid. There is only one word for it: Oppression.
Hit your thesaurus key on Microsoft Word (shift F7, I use mine a lot) with “oppression” highlighted. You will see these synonyms: Domination, Coercion, Cruelty, Tyranny, Repression, Subjugation. Not a very friendly list. Other words in this family include Intimidation, Bullying, Meanness, Duress and Defeat.
Business-As-Usual persists at the Volunteers of American Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter, even though this dysfunctional family of words describe the reality with which vulnerable people live at the shelter.
Don’t get me wrong – homeless persons are not weak or puny underlings. They are fabulous people with deep spirits and a great deal to offer the world around them.
They are, however, vulnerable, as they are in the midst of a critical need for a place to live, a job, a safe place, some stability. They are made all the more vulnerable because they must pay “rent” at the shelter by obeying and bending to the whims of a capricious director and at least one of her staff.
“Oppression” as a word is ugly, but you should see it in action at the shelter.
Usually, oppression of the poor is something folks around here would have to see on the news. But thanks to the shelter, all we have to do is walk up the hill and peek inside.

Shelter Wants Authority Over Medications, But Not The Responsibility

2008-03-30T11:12:00.002-07:00

I will try to keep it short. How about a Haiku version?

Shelter locks your drugs,
Then your drugs turn up stolen,
Irresponsible.

Shelter residents who have “controlled” medications with them (mostly prescription pain killers) must turn in these and all other drugs to the shelter for supposed safekeeping.
“Controlled” medications are placed in a small lock box with the resident’s name taped onto it. The two keys to this box go to the shelter director and the resident. The lock box is then placed in a filing cabinet drawer that only shelter staff have access to by key.
The filing cabinet is kept in a locked room. Note, the locked room has only a half-wall. The wall separating the room from the outer office area does not go all the way to the ceiling.
Once the resident turns over these medications, does it not make sense to you that the shelter becomes responsible for the security of these drugs?
A resident called me some days ago and said his lock box had been broken into, and his painkillers stolen. He suspected one of the staff, and let this be known. Of course, from that point on he wasn’t exactly the Man of the Hour as far as the shelter was concerned. He was even grilled by the shelter director as to whether he had been talking to me about this. Apparently I am the least likely to ever be Man of the Hour at the shelter. Maybe they will name a men’sroom stall after me someday.
So, the room was supposedly locked, with staff having the key. The cabinet in the room was supposedly locked, with staff having a key. And, the lock box in the cabinet was broken into, as staff did not have access to a key. This mystery certainly walks and quacks like a duck.
Anyway, the resident was advised by the director to stay “hush-hush” about this. He told me he was led to believe that if he notified the police that a felony had occurred at the shelter, his time there would be significantly and immediately foreshortened.
I advised the shelter director’s boss about this, as the director has a history of telling her supervisor only what she wants them to know. It turns out, she had told Pam about this, which is a step in the right direction. Pam is not a supervisor one can easily sidestep.
Pam wrote me an email and said I only had half the story.
I am sure I missed the usual deception, denial and manipulation of facts.
I asked Pam if all future felonies that occur at the shelter are going to be investigated by the shelter director, maybe with a funny hat, big spy glass and a false mustache as well.
Might as well. The place is a mockery of responsibility and respect for people in need.

PS: The resident, who went without pain pills for days, left the shelter the day after he called me. Apparently, a staff member was “out to get him thrown out,” so he left without that additional affront.

A Backward Look, etc., Continued ...

2008-03-28T21:23:00.002-07:00

In Feburary, “Shelter Happens” continued to enumerate offenses against homeless people and problems in the management of the VOA Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter:

Shelter staff harass a resident who was waiting for a technical job; said he would amount to nothing; accused him of “shelter-hopping.” Man gets job he wants in Sheridan and lives happily ever after, but to do so had to ignore shelter “support.”
Resident on probation in court succeeds with job and begins GED; is harassed by staff for being at the shelter for so long.
Shelter’s “Not-Welcome-Back list is as thick as the phone book, and goes back years. One Sheridan woman didn’t think she could return because five years ago she had said a bad word at the shelter.
Shelter takes control of all medications, and, as we will see later, becomes responsible (if not liable) for missed doses, over-doses and loss through theft. Shelter director pretends to be doctor and pharmacist.
VOA pays itself $60,000 per year for “administrative costs” skimmed from donations from well-meaning people. Local execs enjoy fat wallets; shelter residents sometimes don’t get seconds on noodles because of “costs.”
VA Domiciliary does a better job in caring for veterans. Why do we have a vets program that doesn’t work in the shelter?
VOA National website says, “We stay with (the homeless) for as long as it takes to return them to self-sufficiency.” I write to the executives to point out that this is a lie in Sheridan. No response.
Shelter residents are expected to spy on one another when they are not at the shelter.
A woman resident is made even more miserable by the manipulative, control-oriented “care” at the shelter. Now “free,” the woman say she would stay under a bridge before ever returning to the shelter.
A female veteran gets kicked out of the shelter on Christmas morning.
Shelter welcomes only the well-behaved, the polite and the mannerful. Lack a refinement and pack your bags.
Shelter is a bad neighbor to fellow human beings who have hit hard times. Just what they need – a condescending, cruel, threatening, intrusive environment to add to the weight of their already-difficult struggle.

That sums the list from January and February. I hope this catches you up if you haven’t been reading for long, or if you visit once in a while.

All readers, friend or foe, are appreciated.

I repeat my guarantee: If there is anything untrue on this blog, let me know and I will remove it immediately.

A Backward Look O'er Traveled Roads (Thank You, Walt Whitman!)

2008-03-26T21:24:00.000-07:00

Blogs are a little difficult to read. As much as it makes sense to place the most recent post at the top, it also makes sense to read things from the beginning. As you scroll down some of my old posts, you run into “Part II” of something first, and then “Part I” underneath it.
With this difficulty in mind, I thought it would be a good time to review what has transpired in this blog since it began on January 17.
We have found much amiss at the homeless shelter, mostly due to the authoritarian and dictatorial ways of the director. The presence of cruelty where compassion ought to be is the main reason I started asking the Volunteers of America Wyoming-Montana Board to set up some measures for accountability and quality of care at the shelter. These seem very rational requests, but for some reason VOA refuses to look at its problem. They instead choose to make me the problem.
Here is a list of the problems pointed out in this “Shelter Happens” blog:

· The shelter condescends to residents, and operates on a control-by-fear premise.
· The shelter further dis-empowers vulnerable people, treating them poorly and unfairly.
· The shelter fails to uphold the dignity and respect due every individual.
· The shelter unreasonably placed a needy Sheridan resident on its “not-welcome-back” list.
· A veteran was kicked out for saying, “I know what these people are like. I’m not like them.”
· Last August, the shelter sent at least four dump-trucks full of donations to the landfill.
· A resident who got a job on his first day the shelter was later kicked out for being too chipper in the morning, and landing a good deal on a rare motorcycle. I know. It doesn’t make sense to me either.

Well, that’s just from January. I will revisit February soon. Even these seven show that there is some kind of problem (or freak show) at the shelter. There’s more in Feburary, and of course this month … and more stories not yet written. Stay tuned, as they say.

Horrible Headmistress In Dahl's Book Is Imitated In Life By Shelter Director

2008-03-22T11:28:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I alluded to a Roald Dahl character, Miss Trunchbull, in the book, Matilda.
In case you haven’t seen the movie or had the book read to you, or read it to your kids, I wanted to give you a little taste of this horrible schoolmaster, who believes that the “perfect school is one that has no children in it at all.” (Page 159)

The attitudes of Miss Trunchbull and the director of the VOA Sheridan Community Shelter toward their charges are remarkably similar:

“Now most head teachers are chosen because they possess a number of fine qualities. They understand children, and have the children’s best interest at heart. They are sympathetic. They are fair and they are deeply interested in education. Miss Trunchbull possessed none of these qualities and how she ever got her present job was a mystery.” Page 82

“‘I am never mistaken, Miss Honey!’” Page 86

“‘No, I don’t think she’s mad,’ Matilda said. “‘But she’s very dangerous. Being in this school is like being in a cage with a cobra. You have to be very fast on your feet.’” Page 118

Miss Trunchbull to Matilda’s class: “‘Not a very pretty sight,’ she said. Her expression was one of utter distaste, as though she were looking at something a dog had done on the floor. ‘What a bunch of nauseating little warts you are.’ . . . ‘It makes me vomit,’ she went on, ‘to think that I am going to have to put up with a load of garbage like you in my school . . . I can see that I am going to have to expel as many of you as possible to save myself from going round the bend.’” Page 141

“‘I suppose your mothers and fathers tell you you’re wonderful. Well I am here to tell you the opposite …’” Page 142

“Nigel spelled the word correctly which surprised the Trunchbull. She thought she had given him a very tricky word . . . and she was peeved that he had succeeded.’” Page 146

Other recommended Dahl reading includes James and the Giant Peach, with two despicable aunts last seen directing other VOA homeless shelters, I would suppose.

Weird-But-True: Donations Help Shelter Continue To Hurt People

2008-03-20T03:35:00.003-07:00

I see one of the organizations in my town is having a fund-raiser and giving part of its cash to the homeless shelter.
I am pleased that my community gives evidence that it cares about the homeless in our area. A healthy community reaches out to its own.
Any thinking person who wants to help the homeless in their community would conclude that donating to the homeless shelter would be a logical step.
There are a couple of things wrong here, however. First, this particular shelter has such a bizarre and destructive approach to people that it is worse than having no shelter at all. We would be better off as a community to halt any further support until the innate dignity and worth of the individuals seeking assistance there is restored, and people are no longer dismissed by the whims of the director, or discounted as valuable people, or told to their faces that they are mentally ill.
Of nearly every male in the shelter, while I was there, the director would remark, “There goes a sad, sick little man.”
Also wrong in this scenario is that the shelter is the stopping place for thinking about the homeless.
Because of the shelter’s poor and erratic treatment of people, the community is flooded with individuals who are making do in motels, a friend’s couch, or settling for meager shelter sometimes in rooms no bigger than a bed. These people are not being cared for, and any monies given to the shelter will not reach the under-sheltered and the under-assisted who are trying to kick-start a life here.
Our worse-than-nothing homeless shelter is not the only way to reach out with donations. In fact, giving money to this shelter is ultimately like giving away free packs of cigarettes in the name of cancer research.
Some of these people eat at the Lunch Together soup kitchen program in the basement of one of our downtown churches. Some of these people are a month’s rent, or less, away from acquiring a decent apartment. Some of these people are short the few dollars to get an ID card, or to get a certified copy of their birth certificate, or to restore a driver’s license.
Why not work with a property manager to provide a needy person or couple or family with the first month’s rent and/or deposit required to get into a place. This alone stops many from going any further in their quest for a place to live. Why not give money to Lunch Together, which does not have a multimillion-dollar budget, the bulk of which is made up of grants.
My community needs to realize that the homeless shelter in this town does not help the homeless. Although it truly feels good to give money to such a cause, in reality, donations help the shelter continue to hurt people.

Sick Management Culture Induces Pukey Organization

2008-03-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

Management culture or workplace culture has been emphasized here and there in businesses and corporations, including those in my town.
Defining or describing the management culture at Volunteers of America, Wyoming-Montana, with offices in Sheridan, Wyoming, is slightly less easy than nailing Jello to a tree.
Maintaining the image of the organization has taken over the management style of the CEO and one of his VP’s such that anything of real concern or value must pass muster with the organization’s image. Even their image of the community’s image of them is distorted.
In this kind of culture, it is no wonder that valid questions about the treatment of vulnerable people at their homeless shelter would lead to defense and denial. It is not possible in their wildest dreams that they have a shelter director who shreds people like no-longer-needed documents.
“Bad things just don’t happen in this organization,” I can hear the CEO beaming at his leadership team all cherubic and artificially comfortable.
I attended a leadership retreat of VOA, and should have known then that the shelter director’s take-charge, interrupt and mow-down style had some sort of validating source. When you ask someone to give a presentation to the group, you shouldn’t interrupt them and help them make their points. When someone raises a concern, you should not turn your back on them and treat them as though they had not spoken.
His veep is worse. I will never forget the forgettable meeting we had with him in Buffalo where he spent a good 20 minutes telling us we were not a non-profit organization, but a not-for-profit one. (I may have reversed these, as the nonsensical blathering never quite solidified in my head.) While there is a distinction in the terms, we were forced to watch and listen as he slowly descended into lunacy. You get used to that after a while.
The integrity of an organization starts at the top and is directed by administration. Integrity asks what part of your organization melts like wax when heat is applied. Integrity asks whether you comply with all protocols for certification in all of your programs; do you comply with the demands and expectations of grantors who provide you funding; do you know where the men’s room is in the shelter you supposedly operate.Or, do you prefer to look like you are in charge and hoist your ego onto the table in front of you, which blocks your view of the valid perspectives of others.
The answer is obvious from an organization that does not train its staff to certification standards, does not comply with grantor expectations, and says it serves the homeless, when instead it floods the streets of Sheridan with people who have been kicked out rather than assisted, and placed on the “Not-Welcome-Back” list rather than given a toe hold on hope.
The easiest and best way to appear to be a good organization is simply to be one. VOA has lost its way thanks to its management culture and “creative” integrity.

My Letter To U.S. Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY)

2008-03-14T01:47:00.001-07:00

March 6, 2008

Dear Senator Enzi,
I wish for your office to know that I am concerned about the undignified treatment of American veterans who seek assistance from the homeless shelter in Sheridan, Wyoming, and the shelter’s failure to fulfill its obligations with regard to its award of national VA Grant Per Diem Program monies.
The latter concern is my most salient, as I realize it is not against the law to be mean-spirited or to manage poorly.
Volunteers of America Wyoming-Montana owns and operates this shelter on the grounds of the Sheridan Veterans Administration, under the name of the VOA Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter. This grant is administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Health Administration.
Enclosed, you will find a letter dated Feb. 14, 2008, to Roger Casey, a contact person for Grant Per Diem Program issues. In this letter I have detailed what I believe to be the failures on the part of the VOA Sheridan Community Shelter in following through with the “assurances” that are required by all grant awardees.
I have also enclosed a copy of the Feb. 26, 2008, letter I received from Grant and Per Diem Program Acting Director Chelsea Watson, in which she acknowledges my letter to Mr. Casey, and indicates she has forwarded my concerns to the appropriate VISN coordinator and liaison.
I seek your help in seeing to it that this review is a fair and accurate one, and to see that corrective measures are taken by this shelter to bring its quality of care up to the levels I am sure we all want for our defenders.

My sincerest thanks for your help in this matter.
Best regards,
Tim Cummings
Concerned Citizen

Acting Director of VA Per Diem Program Responds To My Letter

2008-03-13T01:06:00.001-07:00

Department of Veterans Affairs
Veterans Health Administration
Washington, DC 20420

"Dear Mr. Cummings:
"Thank you for your letter dayed February 14, 2008, expressing concerns with the Volunteers of America Wyoming, Inc. project number 03-53-WY. Your concerns will be forwarded to the VISN Homeless Coordinator (Mr. Richard DeBlasio) and the VA Liaison (Mr. Will Banks) for review. If you have any questions concerning this letter, please contact this office (toll-free) at 1-877-332-0334.
"Sincerely,
"Chelsea Watson
"Acting Director, Grant and Per Diem Program"

Note -- The VISN is the region of which the Sheridan VA is a part.

Letter Points Out VOA's Failure To Comply With Grant For Care Of Homeless Veterans

2008-03-12T05:30:00.002-07:00

Mr. Roger Casey
VA Homeless Providers Grant and Per Diem Program
Mental Health Strategic Healthcare Group (116E)
VAHQ
810 Vermont Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20420

February 14, 2008

Mr. Casey,
I am concerned about the viability of an awardee of one of the per diem program grants.
The Sheridan (WY) Community Shelter, operated by Volunteers of America Wyoming-Montana, has not, in my opinion, followed through with the “reasonable assurances” clause in the grant.
Nor has the shelter provided any transitional housing as part of its program.
Nor has anything been done to provide follow-up services to help veterans achieve stability once they have acquired permanent housing.
Nor does the shelter director allow veterans to make their own program decisions regarding individual goals. They are bullied into accepting conditions forced upon them under the constant threat of being kicked out.
The “reasonable assurance” that not more than 25 percent of participants at any one time will be non-veterans was not attempted in the calendar year of 2007. At the time, I was assigned as the per diem service coordinator at the Sheridan Community Shelter. I was initially told, in November 2006, that I would be in charge of consulting and programming with veterans only. By January of 2007, this had been abandoned, and I was placed in charge of seeing to the programs of all shelter residents by my supervisor. Fully half of my time in the per diem position was spent working with non-veterans. I enjoyed the work, of course, but I believe the per diem “assurances” were consciously ignored.
Transitional housing, if it exists at all at the Sheridan shelter, is only on paper. One room with two beds in it at the shelter was designated “transitional,” but the residents there are given no additional responsibilities or training for moving into their own living situation. Their program is no different from anyone else’s back in the men’s dormitory. There is certainly nothing being done to establish transitional housing outside of the walls of the shelter. If the per diem grant assumes progress in the area of transitional living, no such progress exists.
There is no follow-up on the part of the shelter with veterans who have acquired permanent housing. Once they leave the threshold of the shelter, they are left out of contact, unless they have to return to the shelter because their living situation failed somehow. They are placed in a sink-or-swim situation with no further assistance offered through the per diem awardee.
Programming and goals are dictated to the veteran by the shelter director. Most of these vulnerable individuals simply accept their fate at the shelter, because they need a place to live. Also, veterans are routinely kicked out of the shelter and placed on a “not-welcome-back” list, which certainly stops the flow of care, while the grant monies continue.
I am writing you to find out whether the items above, which I consider improprieties with regard to conditions expected from the per diem grant award, are in fact improprieties. If so, how will your office address these? If not, please assist me where I am misunderstanding this.
I contend that the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter is not a viable recipient of per diem grant money based on the abuses of conditions as listed above. The shelter is out of compliance, and should either stop its pretence or comply.
I realize that care for the homeless veteran population is currently a public issue and an emotional one. In light of this, I question whether the duplication of services between the Sheridan VA Domiciliary and the Sheridan Community Shelter should result in a rating high enough to award per diem grant funding to a corporation that also does not fulfill the apparent expectations of the grantor.
Sincerely,
Tim Cummings
Concerned Citizen

Attention To Social Injustice Growing, But Not As Fast As Social Injustice

2008-03-11T01:57:00.001-07:00

Early today it was announced that the Vatican has “updated” aspects of sin with fresh attention placed on, among other things, a persistently broadening gap between the rich and the poor.
The Associated Press story from Vatican City was fraught with an undertow of an attempt a light humor, and not very graciously done. “The Church has announced a list of new sins,” nudge, nudge, har har.
Stupid journalists. I used to be one. I have repented.
The AP reported on Sunday’s edition of L’Osservatore Romano, which quotes Monsignor Giafranco Girotti on what amounts to fresh attention, or emphasis, on issues that are considered offensive to God (and therefore, sins):

VATICAN CITY (AP) - In olden days, the deadly sins included lust, gluttony and greed. Now, the Catholic Church says pollution, mind-damaging drugs and genetic experiments are on its updated thou-shalt-not list. Also receiving fresh attention by the Vatican was social injustice, along the lines of the age-old maxim: "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer."
… "If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a weight, a resonance, that's especially social, rather than individual," said Girotti, whose office deals with matters of conscience and grants absolution.
… "The poor are always becoming poorer and the rich ever more rich, feeding unsustainable social injustice," Girotti said in the interview published Sunday.

This last, about “unsustainable social injustice,” certainly applies to the homeless anywhere in the world. Their plight is not well-understood. Their existence is only absently noted by the passing world. Their innate dignity and worthiness as persons is somehow in a weird discount bin in our minds.
The homeless are spoken of as people who have other options, so they have an obvious need to get smarter, or get motivated, or just get on down the road and don’t embarrass this or that community with your want.
In fact, the vast majority of homeless people in America have played out all their options, and they need a hand, or an advocate.
In my town, all the social agencies are bumping into the emergence of a housing shortage caused by a certain amount of economic booming in the area. Although we are a small community (15,000) we have seen up-close and personal the effect of our own “unsustainable social injustice,” as some few get on the gravy train of progress, and many others are left at the station to decide where to sleep tonight. Many of our households have had long-term guests staying on couches, sparerooms, basements and vehicles of friends and relatives. I have a son-in-law-to-be living in my basement while he and my daughter search on for an apartment to live in after the wedding in May. Technically, I have a homeless young man living downstairs where we keep the cats’ food … and box.
We have come to depend on agencies and corporations and even churches to take care of our poorly-housed. The problem is pervasive enough that each of us is going to have to lend a hand.
This could mean a shift in attitude is the first order of business.
The question is not, “What is wrong with those people?”
Noted author (and Catholic convert) G.K. Chesterton was among several writers of his time who were asked to submit an essay on the subject, “What is wrong with the world.”
Chesterton’s response was succinct: “Dear Sir, I am.”

Trying To Be Nicer, But So Difficult To Turn Away

2008-03-10T02:28:00.001-07:00

As a man who feels deeply and thoroughly commissioned by God as a missionary of Divine mercy, I recognize complications in my role as a “foul-caller” regarding the pathetic treatment of people seeking assistance from my town’s homeless shelter where I worked for a year and saw ridiculous undignified and disrespectful treatment launched against scores of people, and tried to tone down the impact of this offensive conduct against vulnerable people.
You see how easy it is for me to use “Divine mercy” and “ridiculous” “offensive conduct” in the same sentence.
That is, indeed, the complication. On the one hand I am bound by faith and conscience to express the mercy of God. On the other, I am bound by faith and conscience to speak up when I observe injustice against another. The former involves the sanctity of my responsibility to God, and the latter involves my responsibility to the sanctity of life as flows out of my relationship with God.
These don’t ride together very comfortably in the backseat of my car.
Some of my advisors – very helpful and wonderful people in my life – want me to nicen things up. I like being liked, but this wrong-doing at the shelter is too horrible to turn away from.
I still need to deal with a question: What is the role of a man of mercy who sees Person A beating Person B? Stop the beating? I think so.
I believe that the person or people responsible for bewilderingly poor treatment of people at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter have perhaps slowed down and thought twice before treating vulnerable people dismissively, patronizingly, and even unauthorizedly and unadvisedly diagnosing people as being mentally ill … to their faces.
They are being watched. This is a good thing. Maybe 2008 will only be half as cruel as was 2007, or 2006, or 2005, or …

The Third Homless Person I Ever Met -- Part 2

2008-03-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

I was 25, and all the college kids with me were 19-23. Kyle was just a little older than I was, but he was certainly the interesting person among us. The students really had no idea that people lived like Kyle did. The kids were all career-bound, taking a big break out of their summer to spend a month in the mountains at Bear Trap Ranch.
My carload of people thought it was pretty neat that we had brought Kyle with us. The manager and staff of Bear Trap Ranch were not as impressed.
I was hauled into the office and exposed to words like “dangerous,” and “quiet,” and “unpredictable,” and “shouldn’t have.”
I said I would take full responsibility for Kyle’s behavior for the days he would be with us (Saturday evening through Friday morning).
I advised Kyle to relax and to try to absorb the scenery and the kind spirits of the people around him. He was welcome to attend our Bible studies and worship times, most of which he elected to bypass. I also told him that if he became uncomfortable with anyone or with the camp in general, I would run him back downtown.
The Old Stage Road, which was in fair shape for a dirt road, didn’t make this a very easy trip, but it could be done with good shocks on a dry day.
We did all we could to learn what had caused Kyle’s situation, but it was a real tangle of bad luck, irresponsibility, the wrong friends, drug abuse, parents washing their hands of him, lack of communication, and, ultimately, no one who was good for him in his life.
In a few days we were to drop off Kyle in the Springs, and in a few more days, all of us at the camp would be packing to return to where we came from.
I wanted to see Kyle’s life get turned around in less than six days, and knew it was impossible. What was a young man like me, who carried with him the mercy of God, to do in light of Kyle’s very foreign-seeming and broken life. My answer was, “everything I can,” even though the “everything” didn’t come in a very big container.
We all pitched in some cash and I was to give it to Kyle when I dropped him off. I had called several social services to see if anyone could follow up with this guy. There was a shelter of some sort operated by a big man who bought his T-shirts too small.
I was alone with Kyle when I took him to this shelter.
He said he didn’t want to go there.
I didn’t ask why. I just said, “Where to, then?”
“Bus station, I guess.”
“The kids have $200 for you,” I said.
Back then that was a month’s rent.
Kyle said thanks, and I drove him to the bus station. I went in with him to say goodbye.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “I never know.”
We shook hands and I stepped back to leave.
“You’ve been good to me,” he said.
“You’ve been good for me,” I said.

The Third Homeless Person I Ever Met -- Part I

2008-03-07T00:06:00.002-07:00

The third homeless person I ever met was Kyle.
It was 1982. I was two years out of college.
I was working at a month-long Christian discipleship camp for college students in the mountains west of Colorado Springs, Colo. Not far from Cripple Creek.
We spent some of our time talking to people in town. My group usually went to the town center – at the time a small park square, where a lot of drugs were dealt. Among us, we called it “The Pharmacy.”
You could watch kids with thick rolls of cash being passed to a guy who gave a nod to a guy on the other side of the park, etc.
Kyle wasn’t dealing, as he had no money. I talked to him behind a smoky sandwich grill and he told me he was homeless.
“What do you mean you are homeless?” I asked.
“I got no place to live,” he said.
“Well, where do you stay?”
“Me and some friends are staying in a vacant house right now… We broke in.” He answered my next question.
“What if you get caught?”
“Then I will stay in jail for a while, I guess.”
I have to admit, I was still naïve on the issue of homelessness. I had parents and grandparents and cousins and a girl friend and friends all over me, and none of them would let me drop to zero as far as living options. Didn't everybody have this?
I understand that, in the Orient, people who fall into the cracks for whatever reason are not expected to “insult” or “inconvenience” their family by seeking assistance for them. In their culture, this is not an acceptable option. Many of the homeless I have worked with have a similar situation – families and personal relationships are so broken up that no help is available from home. The situations are very different, but the outcome is the same.
Kyle was such a one. His “family” was made up of the strangers with which he shared a vacant house.
Kyle and I spent most of the afternoon together. I introduced him to some of the kids in my group. There was some level of trust built between Kyle and the group, such that I told him we were living at a lodge and some cabins in the mountains, and would he like to come with us and spend a few days.
Kyle said yes.

Continued tomorrow …

Glimmer of Hope: VOA Replaces Director's Supervisor

2008-03-06T00:29:00.001-07:00

Volunteers of America made a good move recently by putting someone else in charge of supervising the director of the homeless shelter.
The former COO, happily, is no longer overlooking the shelter, and is off overlooking other aspects of VOA’s many programs. Good luck to those poor devils.
Pam, the new supervisor of the shelter director, is a strong manager, good communicator and personable. I have previously hailed the work of the WySTAR substance abuse treatment program in my town, and, you should know that Pam has been (and continues to be) at the managerial helm of this program, which is successful and meaningful to a lot of people who have sought help to get away from alcohol or drug abuse.
So, this is a good thing. Yay.
Also, Pam is the only Volunteers of America officer who will give me the time of day. Everybody else is either pretending I don’t exist, or hoping I go away. Pam actually called today and wanted to talk AND listen.
I think I was heard. Good heavens, a new experience! A thank-you to Pam.

Lack of Supervision Gives Director Free Reign

2008-03-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

You wouldn’t think that something like a shelter director’s position would be under-supervised. Unlikely as it is, in these litigious days when everyone is watching everyone else, the shelter director’s position in my town is practically unsupervised. The director had “weekly” meetings about two or three times a month with her supervisor. She told him stuff, and that was it. His understanding of the shelter was based only on the information she gave him, rendering him completely unaware of problems, the like of which I have made record on this blog.
And, by the way, if anyone finds a word untrue on this site, let me know and I will remove it immediately.
The director’s supervisor, then known as the Chief of Operations, or Chief Operations Officer, or something else that spells coo, was onsite at the shelter only three times in 2007, by my own count – once to fire me, once to get his picture taken with the donation of a dead animal, and once possibly to be seen being there (I don’t know).
Plainly, the man was in no wise supervising and hadn’t a clue about the shelter’s operation. He had seen a few numbers on columns, though.
I think you have probably seen this kind of “administration,” where someone is left in charge, and as long as the place doesn’t burn down, it is assumed that all is well.
All is not well, as I pointed out to my supervisor, her supervisor, the board and CEO, and the national office of the Volunteers of America. Link by link this was my chain of command. Each time the response was either denial or silence … or deftless attacks on me.
I don’t personally need any attention. I like the life of a quiet, shy person. However, I am duty-bound by my faith to draw attention to injustice foisted upon vulnerable souls; to the sanctity of life and basic human dignity being toyed with by people who say they like to “help,” when they mean they like to “control.”

'Homeless' and 'Hopeless' Only One Letter Apart

2008-03-04T00:06:00.000-07:00

Hope is a casualty of homelessness.
The photograph to the right, under the word “Broken” is worth the 1,000-plus words it would take to describe what the downcast, ashamed, lost look that this young man expresses with his face and body language.
Yet, in the face of homelessness, all is not lost. Hope does not have to throw itself under a bus. Jesus Himself was homeless for a time, and in His experience is the implicit statement that He knows the ills and the hollowness and the pain of belonging nowhere and to no one, except His Father in Heaven.
I know a man who lost his home in the Katrina storm. He told me, “Once I got through that, I figured I could get through anything.”
Then, his wife died of cancer. Again, “Once I got through that, I figured I could get through anything.”
Then, with everything he had left in a van, while driving in Florida, he was in an accident and the van caught fire.
He stood on the roadside with nothing but whatever was in his pants pockets.
“Now that I have gone through that, I can go through anything,” he said.
He had the faith and the character to embrace something larger than life as an anchor.
He had, and still has, the understanding of God’s presence, which supercedes all losses. With this, he was able to keep a hold on hope. He could have given up, but he didn’t, because he was aware of something, or Someone, larger than all his misfortune.
It is often true that someone else must come along and provide hope for the one who cannot muster it. Each of us has enough hope in us to share. No hoarding, now!

The Second Homeless Person I Ever Met

2008-03-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

The second homeless person I ever met was in Chicago in the summer of 1980.
The numbers seem small and my recollection good because I grew up in a small Wyoming town of no more than 2,000 people. If you were homeless in Greybull, you would have stuck out like paisley on stripes. Everybody had a place to stay, except for the occasional hobo, who would drift into town from the railroad tracks that defined the west edge of town, and maybe knock on a few doors for something to eat or some spending money.
Meeting someone with nothing to their name was a rarity for my time and place.
So here I was on Evans Avenue in Chicago at age 23. I was visiting a friend who worked during the day, so I did a lot of exploring along Evans, which was just a couple of blocks from my buddy’s apartment.
As a small-town kid, I enjoyed the thrum of the vast numbers of people all around me, and the persistence of normalcy I noticed along Evans. I remember the “Major Café,” with the “r” missing on the sign. I called it the “Majo” in my journal. There were small shops and people everywhere.
At one point, as I was walking along on my fourth or fifth day there, a shirtless thin black man with some gray in his beard walked toward me from the opposite direction. It would have been natural for us to pass.
He stepped gradually into my “lane” and we stopped, facing one another on the sidewalk; me feeling nothing other than curious.
“Hello sir,” he said to me. “You wouldn’t have any cash you could spare, would you? I am in a bad way.”
As a reflex I stuck my thumb in my hip pocket where my wallet was, but then realized I had no cash.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I only have traveler’s checks right now.” This was the truth.
“Alright,” the man said. “At least you talked to me.”
He gave me a quick embrace and said, “Thank you, anyway.”
I have never forgotten how deeply those words descended into my heart: “At least you talked to me.”
Hungry for food, but starving for kindness.

Once upon a time there was this homeless shelter, ruled by an unkind queen

2008-03-02T14:31:00.003-07:00

’T is a cruelty
To load a falling man.

The Bard of Avon’s observation can be cut and pasted into the crux of my concern about the poor treatment of the vulnerable at my town’s homeless shelter.
I grew up with fables about cruel kings and their unfortunate people; a merciless step-mother and two mean-spirited step-sisters; a malicious being forcing a princess to guess his name or else … and many more.
Later, reading some of the works of Roald Dahl to my older daughter, I once again ran into fictional persons with an affinity for cruelty who were put in charge of others – most notoriously, Miss Trunchbull, the school-master in Matilda, who behaved despicably toward children and kindly teachers, whom she considered weak.
It is, as Shakepeare points out, cruel to add misery to a person in dire straits (the circumstances, not the band). It is sad and wrong-headed to bring anguish to people while telling them you are only trying to help, and that you know what is best for them.
The Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter would make a great fictional tale, but, is instead a sad reality.

All She Wanted Was For His Things To Help Others

2008-03-01T00:35:00.001-07:00

When I moved to Sheridan in 1986, he was one of the first people I met who made me feel welcome.
He was a retired Army colonel; a gentle, deeply devotional man.
He always had a cheerful, thoughtful comment. We often talked of faith.
He wore out dozens of rosaries while praying in church. When I joined in my 40s, he helped sponsor me, and he gave me a big black rosary as a welcoming gift.
I knew him for almost 20 years before he died three years ago, at age 89.
It took his wife two years to summon the courage to depart with some of his things.
She called me one evening and asked what would happen to her husband’s clothes if she donated them to the shelter. I told her it was my understanding that they would be given to people who needed them.
“As long as they help someone else,” she said. “I think he would have liked that.”
She asked me to come by and pick up the things she had made ready.
She would not let anything go that was damaged in any way. I filled up my car with boxes and armfuls of jackets, shirts, pants, shoes, hats and coats.
Some of these I recognized as his.
I took these to the Sheridan Community Shelter where I worked.
As it happened, this was the same time that the inadequate storage for donations was in serious need of organization. We were, the director decided, too full. As a result the donations in storage were trucked to the landfill in at least four huge loads.
I thought about his wife, and her hopes that his things would do someone else some good. We failed her, big time.
Thoughtful donations were shrugged off, much like many of the people who stop at the shelter for help. They, too, are discarded.
Which is easier to throw away? A jacket or a person. At this shelter, both are treated the same.

Volunteers of America Is Lying About Its Care For The Homeless

2008-02-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

The answer to the question of quality care for the homeless in my town is not the homeless shelter. The Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Shelter does not offer quality care. Residents are expected to act forever grateful that they are not being kicked out, or they will be kicked out.
Quality care of the homeless and the under-sheltered in my town is dependent upon one person helping another person. It involves one investing oneself into the well-being of another. The selfless and caring attitude and behavior of the Good Samaritan story, as told by Jesus, gives all of us something of a template to follow for the quality care of another.
The Samaritan finds a man who had been beaten, stripped and robbed, left at roadside to die. The wounded man has already been seen and ignored by two other men who found religious and societal reasons to leave him to his fate. The traveling Samaritan sees the man, binds his wounds and puts the fallen man on his mount. Thus, the Samaritan walked his animal to the nearest inn. There, the Samaritan kept watch over the man for a day, and tended to him. Next day, the Samaritan gave the innkeeper two days’ wages and instructions to take care of the fallen man. If the innkeeper spends more on the man than the money given, the Samaritan will return on his way back and make it right with the innkeeper.
There is a great deal of personal involvement, self-forgetfulness, compassion and trust in this brief but powerful example. Recall that, after Jesus told this story, he said to his listeners, “Go and do the same yourself.”

The Volunteers of America national office website says this in its “homeless” section: “Once Volunteers of America engages homeless individuals, youth, and families with children, we stay with them for as long as it takes to return them to self-sufficiency …”
This, of course, is a lie in Sheridan.
I know. I work daily on my own at no cost to help the people the shelter has wadded up and tossed out.

Shelter Tolerates Only Perfect Guests

2008-02-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

If you were to be of enough bad fortune that you had to stay at the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter, you would sign an intake document that states that you will abide by the rules in the “Rules and Guidelines.”
This, of course, does not make you safe from the random reasons that the director and staff will come up with to manipulate you or kick you out. It does, however, obligate you to become a perfect guest.
Regardless of your past experience, regardless of some organizational flaws in your life, regardless of the rolls and pitches of everyday life, and regardless of the already too-stressful circumstances that have rendered you homeless, you will adhere to the rules or you will be asked to leave.
What is wanted at this shelter is 30 to 35 perfect homeless guests with no discernible issues that need to be addressed, no behavioral irregularities, and no noticeable emotional scars or mental illnesses. If you are not such a one, you will be better off elsewhere.

'Merry Christmas, Now Get Your Butt Out Into That Cold and Snow!'

2008-02-26T00:21:00.000-07:00

Nothing gets in the way of kicking someone out of the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
They advertise case management, but it doesn’t take much program development to learn how to say, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
I am hopeful that not very many people know that Volunteers of America, the managers of the shelter, is listed as a church. It is not exactly the hallmark of the Gospel that people in need are readily dismissed, with no concern about where they might go from here.
For example:
It was a cold Wyoming Christmas Day when a female resident, a veteran, returned to the shelter. She had stayed the night with a friend in town. The rules say that residents have to get permission to be gone overnight, otherwise be in by the 10 p.m. curfew.
This young woman said she wasn’t aware of the overnight rule.
This is quite likely, as no staff at the shelter has ever been trained in how to do an intake. Each one does what he or she thinks is right. During the calendar year of 2007, the staff never had training on registering residents, to get everyone on the same page.
The shelter dictator told the woman she would have to leave.
Christmas morning she was kicked out into the snow.
“They didn’t care whether I had another place to go or not,” she told me.
Out! Out! Out! This is how my local shelter treats people in need.
Nothing in the policy and procedures of the shelter indicates that a resident must be kicked out if they are absent overnight. It may be done at the pleasure of the director. And what a pleasure it apparently is for her.
The shelter gets federal per diem grant money to take care of veterans. The story of this woman’s treatment is offensive on so many levels.
I can’t believe this is allowed to go on.
If you would like to voice your concern, click on the little envelope below and email roger-casey@mail.va.gov This will send this post to Roger, and gives you a chance to comment to him. Roger is the initial contact person for the VA Per Diem Grant Program.

Shelter Usually Eats Dignity For Lunch

2008-02-25T12:39:00.002-07:00

She couldn’t believe she was in a homeless shelter.
At 30, she had a college degree in business, a daughter in elementary school, and an ex-husband.
Circumstances sometimes twist, as they had with her.
She came to the shelter with nervous, defeated tears.
For many people who are unaccustomed to requiring the use of a homeless shelter, the entrance and the first few days are emotionally devastating. Adults feel like they are admitting failure, that there is little or no hope, that the simplest choice or activity is overwhelming.
She came to my office fraught with these difficulties. Her daughter was in her ex-husband’s care.
Her own homelessness was too much to bear at the time, so I suggested she relax for a day or two, and get herself used to the people and the schedule of the shelter.
From the first day, she made it clear that she “hated the shelter.” I understood what she meant – this was the worst that things had ever gotten.
She put up with a lot while she was at the shelter – her own feelings, arguments with other women in the facility (lots of gossip and snippiness in the women’s area; men’s area too for that matter), the occasional bullying of the director, job-seeking (and job-finding!) and a trip to jail because she missed a court hearing because the notice was sent by mail to an old address.
She worked days at her new job. She still didn’t have a place to live.
The director asked me how come I hadn’t met with the woman in a while. “She is at work during the day,” I explained.
“Well, she needs to work on her program.”
“She is working on her program, most of which is getting and sustaining a job,” I said. On I talked to the wall that was herself.
When the director heard this woman say she “hated it here,” she was ready to kick her out at once.
I tried to explain what the woman meant, but it was more wall-talking for me.
The director left it to me to kick the woman out.
Somehow, I never got around to it, and within a few days, she found a place to live for a while. A place that wasn’t the greatest, but, it also wasn’t the shelter.
The woman somehow escaped with her dignity in tact. That is a rarity at the “Her Clutches Homeless Shelter” in Sheridan.

Part 2 -- The Day I Met My First Homeless Person

2008-02-24T00:50:00.001-07:00

We still had 150 miles to go – another stretch of Wyoming real estate with civilization poorly represented. The route took us past Shirley Basin, Medicine Bow, Rock River, and then to Laramie.
The elevation at Laramie, which hosts Wyoming’s only four-year state college, is 7,186 feet. A trip to Denver, the Mile-High City, is 1,900 feet downhill from Laramie. In mid-March, old snow is still clutching at dead lawns, and new snow via blizzards thick as bricks remains a possibility until sometime in May.
I felt lost and responsible with Ralph. He was physically a weathered old man, but gentle and vulnerable in his bearing. He told me he trusted God. When he first got into the car in Shoshoni, I remember him saying, as if to the dashboard, “I’m a Christian person, actually.” I think he was telling me not to be afraid. I wasn’t scared of Ralph, but I really didn’t know what I was going to do with him.
I drove to Hill Hall, parked, and asked Ralph to wait in the car. One of the guys I played Risk with on the floor above mine was a member of the Salvation Army Church in Laramie. I asked my friend what I was supposed to do with Ralph.
At this time, the Salvation Army operated a shelter in the downtown area. It was recommended that I take him there. I got the address and got back to the car. I turned the key to get us downtown, but my Vega was dead, electronically speaking.
My Risk playing friend didn’t have a car, so my next option was a friend, Dave, in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house on campus. Between the two of us, we got Ralph to the downtown shelter.
I was focused on introducing Dave to Ralph, and telling Dave what all we had done that day. I don’t remember the look of the shelter, but the feel of it is still with me – more like an alley than a street. A broken, lonely atmosphere.
“Thank you very much for the ride and everything,” he said as he gathered himself and stepped to the curb. “You’re a very kind young man.”
Dave walked Ralph into the shelter. I stayed in the car. This didn’t feel right. It seemed like we were putting him in storage.
“Do you think he’s gonna be alright?” I asked Dave.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Hope so.”
“Yeah. Me too.”

The Day I Met My First Homeless Person

2008-02-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever met a homeless person I was driving back to the University of Wyoming after spring break, 1976.
I had just turned 19, and was in the middle of my second semester of a fairly directionless college education.
During school, I drove my parents’ Chevy Vega. At the time, $5 in my pocket was enough for the 350-mile trip from my hometown in the north part of the state to Laramie in the south. That $5 was enough – $2 for gas, and $3 for lunch at McDonald’s in Casper. The trip took seven hours, no matter how fast you drove.
The town of Shoshoni marked the end of the first 100 miles of the trip. I had to turn left at the 76 station, drive past the best milk-shake shop in the world, and scoot southeastward out of town to endure the next 100 miles of nothing before reaching Casper.
Standing at a turnout just on the outskirts of Shoshoni, there was a grandfatherly man holding out a piece of cardboard with too much writing on it to read, and too faintly printed. I drove past him and it struck me to stop. I pulled around and got out to talk to him. It was windy with nips of winter still persisting in the air.
His name was Ralph.
He was, I’m guessing, 65.
I told him I was going to Laramie, and he said that would be fine with him.
Dry weeds waggled by the wind on the roadside as we drove along the chipped and weatherworn two-lane highway.
Ralph used to have a wife and some kids. He owned his own paint store somewhere in the Midwest. Now he didn’t have anyone and no place to live. I remember being confused by his story. How did one go from having to not having. How do you lose people, and how is it that a person could not have an address?
Sure, mine was 216 Hill Hall at the time, but my permanent address was the house I had lived in since age 6.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with Ralph when I got to Laramie. He couldn’t stay in the dorm with me and my upstate New York recreation major roommate. I hadn’t a clue.
First, though, was a stop for lunch at the Casper McDonald’s. Ralph had never been to one. He tried to sit down in a seat, expecting a waitress to come to the table. I explained that we ordered at the counter. I let him order first.
“Do you have any Russian tea?” he asked the girl at the counter. She pointed to the menu overhead, which he had not seen, and he stepped back to decide what to get. Coffee and three cheeseburgers. That still left me enough for a Big Mac and a Coke.
He licked the sandwich wrappers clean. Melted cheese and a few smears of catsup from the sandwiches.
“I think I’ll keep this cup,” he said, after he drank his coffee.

(Continued tomorrow)

Shelter Residents Expected To Spy On One Another When Away

2008-02-22T00:34:00.002-07:00

Should you become a resident at the Sheridan Community Shelter, you could be manipulated into spying on your fellow shelter dwellers against your will.
I have seen the director haul people into her office and grill them about what another resident was doing while in town, and who they were with.
“Was he with a woman?”
“I think so. We were just driving by.”
“What did she look like? Who was she?”
“I don’t really know.”
“What were they doing?”
“Just sitting on a bench.”
“Ah! Aha!”
Good lord.
One of our female residents had lunch with a friend in a downtown tavern, and was read the riot act for calling public transportation from “a bar” for a ride back to the shelter.
The director fretted over the absent residents, about whether they were having sex, getting drunk, using drugs or causing trouble in some way. Not a very positive outlook.
She once forbade one male resident from talking to another male resident’s girlfriend on shelter property or anywhere else. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the two men were good friends. In fact, the two left the shelter and still share an apartment. I reckon both of them are talking to the girlfriend again.
I often told residents that it was none of our business what they did during the day. “Just be in by curfew.” I never could quite grasp the amount of control that she wanted over the lives of people who could use a boost at the shelter.
Maybe the Volunteers of American Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter could shorten its name to, “Her Clutches.”

Don't Miss Added Link 'Profound Message Of Hope' -- Very Cool

2008-02-21T00:24:00.004-07:00

This morning I added a link to a great 5-minute video piece set to the song 'Everything,' by a Christian band called 'Lifehouse.' Over on the right. See it? Profound Message of Hope.
Please feel free to comment after you view by clicking right below here somewhere; where it says comments. 6

Still A Conscientious Objector to Shelter's Poor Treatment of Homeless People

2008-02-19T10:23:00.001-07:00

You might be wondering when I am going to get past my objections to the poor treatment of people at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
So am I.
I confess there is no little conflict within me between wanting to be seen as a nice guy by everyone, and feeling obligated by conscience and faith to call fouls in order to set things right.
There is no doubt in my mind that the abuses at the shelter continue as a natural mode of operation. There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t wonder whose innate dignity, self-esteem, or value is being crushed under the jackboots (or tennies) of the director and her well-curded staff.
If an outfit is operating under the premise of a compassionate and kind response to people in need, but, actually operates with a stunted lifeless pretense of compassion and kindness, there will result four characteristics as this outfit – let’s call it “the shelter” – attempts to bridge its pretense with reality:
1. Hypocrisy. You say you do one thing, but you do another.
2. Deception. You have to find new ways to keep up the façade to gain and keep the trust (and the cash) of the community.
3. Manipulation. The people you supposedly serve find themselves lorded over and controlled by fear.
4. Dismissiveness. Dignity and respect that are due every person is consciously withheld. The person him/herself is tossed out like used tissue when they will not submit to #3. The CEO of VOA seems AOK with this as long as he believes the crinkled tissue “only” represents 10 percent of the residents. I think one person so treated is too many.
This, then, is no time for me to fold my hands and bless the endeavors (“E for ‘effort’” rather than “O for ‘odious’”) of a work-gone-sour in my community that is clearly hypocritical, deceptive, manipulative and dismissive. That may be the quiet “nice guy” thing to do, but, it requires a good man doing nothing to allow the triumph of evil. Thanks Edmund Burke.
So, this is still me, blowing my little trumpet.

Less Than Six Percent Homeless By Choice

2008-02-17T16:04:00.002-07:00

Okay, my first-ever poll has closed.
Of course, this blog is young enough that almost everything is first-ever.
According to a support center for people who are homeless, less than 6 percent of the homeless are homeless by choice.
This matches my own experience at the homeless shelter I worked at for a year. We saw about 370 people, and about 20 of those were people who were not interested in programs and services. They were just stopping off on their way to no place special.
When I asked on guy where he was from, he said, “The highway.” He said he had been on the road for 50 years.
Next time someone tells you people are homeless because they want to be, you can tell them that isn't true for 94 percent of them. Even those in the six-percentile are due dignity and respect. Let him among you who have always made perfect choices cast the first stone.

'Good money' -- Money That Makes A Difference

2008-02-15T18:38:00.002-07:00

There is good money and bad money spent on people in need.

Here is an example:

A guy is living on a front-room couch in a friend’s apartment. This is a person who can be considered “precariously housed.” He is under some pressure from his friend to hurry up and find a place of his own.

The guy has already been to the homeless shelter, and he doesn’t want anything to do with the weird ways by which this particular shelter is directed. He makes a rare find: an apartment that is available. The property manager has agreed to hold it for him for just a few days.

The problem is, to get in, he has to come up with $135 up front. He won’t get paid for 8-10 days. This is a pretty typical situation for anyone looking for a place. He is $135 away from a missed opportunity, with darn few other options.

This particular $135 is “good money.” That is, this money is going to perform well. It is going to bring a young man out of homelessness, and into an apartment so he can gain some ground and get his life settled down.

I consulted a pastor about helping me get some money to this guy. The pastor said that his church does not help people with rent. In other words, if I come up short during the month, I can’t go to this church to help me make rent. Different churches and outreach groups have different means whereby they serve the community. It will be a project of mine to try to put these together so I can match the need to the appropriate helping agency.

At any rate, I gave the pastor my “good money” speech, and he liked it. So, the guy got his apartment.

Another example: A friend who doesn’t have two nickels to rub together is lacking $40 for a physician’s physical as a requirement to get into an effective alcohol treatment program. That $40 is good money.

Other examples: The cost of a set of work clothes for someone’s new job is good money. The cost of sending a wayward kid home to his parents in the South is good money. The cost of the fee for a new birth certificate that got lost or stolen is good money. Circumstances many times place different values on money. Sometimes ten bucks is just ten bucks. Other times, it could be the difference between making or breaking someone.

The Risk Of Showing Kindness

2008-02-14T11:18:00.001-07:00

It is difficult for me to give money to a person who asks for help without the thought, “He’s just going to buy beer,” flitting through my mind.

I don’t let this stop me, but it shows me that I am still “trained” to think along the lines of a culture that has grown cynical and weary from real abuses of kindness that all of us are aware of.
There are what are called “pros” in the begging business – some making a pretty good tax-free income by deceiving the kindhearted. There are shysters in every field. We all know stories about lawyers, doctors, ministers, loan officers, public officials, accountants, personal assistants, etc., who have used dishonest means to get into the conscience of the nice person and abuse that trust.
Anyone trying to lend a hand to someone in need is risking, to some extent, the possibility that they are being fooled.
In my own heart, I have come to terms with this by admitting that I could be ripped off a time or two, but the vast majority of people who seek help or hold signs over by Arby’s in the warmer months are not con artists. They may be stretching the truth a bit, or have their “pitch” down pretty well, but, as a matter of survival rather than trickery.
If we let the shysters stop us, kindness and compassion will freeze in our chests, and beware how dark is that darkness!

My Letter To The National Office of Volunteers Of America

2008-02-13T15:14:00.002-07:00

I write to inform you, as a matter of conscience, that you have a blot on your record out here in Wyoming.

The VOA Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter is treating the poor and the vulnerable who seek services there with a brusque, dismissive and depersonalizing air. I estimate that about one-third of the people who enter the shelter are either kicked out or leave on their own because they can no longer tolerate the intrusion and bullying that goes on toward them by the director and staff.

I took it upon myself to advise the local board about this. The vice-president, in the local newspaper, said there was “nothing to” my concerns. The CEO of the Wyoming-Montana VOA disagreed with my statistic, and said it was more like 10 percent. He said this was “a pretty good success rate.” I fail to see how a dismissive and over-lording attitude toward 10 percent of your clientele is “pretty good” in anyone’s world.

I was fired from my job at the shelter just a few days before Christmas because I passionately objected to the treatment of others at the shelter. I am a former minister, and I can tell you that I have never seen a human service program that rides so thoroughly roughshod over its homeless residents. I was extremely bothered by this, and ended up speaking quite boldly and firmly to the director about her unseemly ways. She didn’t take it well. My concerns have been dismissed by VOA board and administration because I am now perceived as merely a disgruntled former employee.

Details about this misshapen program are available at my blog at http://www.helter-shelter.blogspot.com/ This includes the letter I wrote to the board, and many examples of poor treatment. I am not guilty of exaggeration, but even if one were to believe only half of what I wrote, it is clear you have a problem that no one in the local VOA will face.

Your own website on “Working to End Homelessness” says, “We stay with (the homeless) for as long as it takes to return them to self-sufficiency.” In Sheridan, this statement is not truthful.
Sincerely, Tim Cummings

Hoping That, As I Hurl Eggs, None Gets On WySTAR

2008-02-11T04:48:00.001-07:00

Of course, I haven’t been very complimentary to the Volunteers of American Wyoming-Montana mis-administrators and the malanthropic tendencies of the overlord at the homeless shelter.
I am duty-bound by my conscience and my faith to call out the abuses of the needy and the abusers. The abusers don’t seem duty-bound to do anything about it, so I play my little trumpet as best as I can.
It may seem strange, then, that today I added a link to WySTAR, Wyoming Substance Abuse and Recovery Center, located in Sheridan.
When you click on the link, you are taken to a Volunteers of American website! I know! Weird, isn’t it?
As an organization, WySTAR just recently moved under the umbrella of Volunteers of America. I hope WySTAR can stay out of the rain. I fear this move may have doubled the reputation of VOA, but halved that of WySTAR.
I am familiar with WySTAR as an effective program. I am familiar with some of its staff (some of the best people I know, including Mark, Beth and Pam). I am also familiar with some of their clients, current, pending and past. I have nothing but good to say about WySTAR, and I hope that my deepest concerns about the failures at the homeless shelter and my offense taken by the smug and self-congratulatory management will not in any way be construed as being aimed anywhere else – particularly, not at WySTAR.

Homeless Vet Kicked Out Of Shelter Gets Second Chance From VA Dom Across The Street

2008-02-10T01:57:00.001-07:00

My wife and younger daughter and I went to McDonald’s last night.
While we were ordering, one of the guys who used to be in the fancy homeless vets program at the Sheridan Community Shelter came in with a friend.
Need I mention that the director kicked him out of the shelter? Uh-huh. About three months ago.
Fortunately, the guy got shelter through the VA’s domiciliary, which is right across the street from the homeless shelter. Everybody calls it “The Dom.” Kind of makes you wonder why this duplication of services is there, especially since the specialty of the homeless shelter is kicking people out.
Once across the street and in the Dom, this guy is getting his life straightened out – something I was unable to get going with him because the director had her face in the rule book so much, she forgot the guy was a person.
I was so happy for him – he said he is on track, and things are working out with his girlfriend. He looked good, and said he felt great.
The shelter didn’t give him enough time. You have to succeed quickly at the shelter or you get the boot. Fortunately, the Dom is more patient and caring.
This guy is on his way to better things, no thanks to the homeless shelter’s short-sighted concept of care.

Local money for homeless goes to maintain high lifestyle of local VOA officials

2008-02-09T02:49:00.001-07:00

It feels good to support causes that are important to you – the ones that pull at your heart or your conscience, and cause you to want to make a difference somehow.
This is a tremendous human brotherly impulse. Whether we personally reach out and help someone nearby, or send a check to a project, we are tapping into this very basic human facility – good will.
Many fine people in my town give money, food and clothing to the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
Most people don’t require that their donation go to a particular thing – like computers, or children’s toys, or new pillows. They just cheerfully give and assume that their charitable donation will be used to support the homeless.
I am afraid that the cheerful, generous giving of my townspeople would not be so cheerful and not so generous if they new the abuses of their donations.
As I mentioned in January, truckloads of physical donations (clothes, dishes, furniture) were taken to the city landfill. Ever single pair of jeans and every plate and every stuffed animal was donated by the great people in my town.
Not only by the truckload, but sometimes an armload of stuff is brought to the shelter. The nice people are thanked. After they leave, the staff joke about the “crap” people bring, and take the stuff across the street to a conveniently-placed dumpster.
On paper, the donation is written down as an “in kind” donation, which means the monetary value of whatever the items were can be used to match grant funds. In effect, the shelter converts physical donations to cash, and then toss the donation in the landfill.
It is legal, but it is hardly ethical, and lacks the character that one would expect from a religious organization that relies on its neighbors for support.
Sometimes, the shelter receives good old hard cold cash. They get $40,000 a year from some great people who operate a foundation.
Thing is, VOA pays itself $60,000 per year from shelter funds. The local VOA office skims $5,000 per month from income for the shelter. This money is “administrative costs” – not the shelter’s, but the officers of the local VOA. This particular $60,000 does not even pay the salary of one of the top five officers in the local VOA office.
It is my informed opinion that once the top five fill out their expense vouchers for travel and food, there is much more than half a million dollars of the organizational budget.
There is enough financial smoke and mirrors in the organization that it should give anyone pause before they grant thousands of dollars, or take a used pair of shoes to the shelter.

Great work being done for the homeless

2008-02-08T00:52:00.001-07:00

This is a great article about a guy in Atlanta who is doing what he can for the homeless in his community.
Notice how he talks about the homeless, about blaming, and about dignity.
If he saw our shelter, I don’t whether he would laugh or cry. Well, probably cry:

http://gtalumni.org/StayInformed/magazine/win98/homeless.html

Shelter Holds Your Medications Hostage

2008-02-06T22:27:00.001-07:00

I am soon to be 51. I never thought I would make it to this number. It is darn near exhausting being 17 three times.
Each year, on Ash Wednesday, the priest has an increasingly vaster canvas on which to draw the ashen cross above my eyeballs when I present my ever-baldening head for marking. I hardly need a reminder that I came from dust, and to dust I will return. (Where is Kansas when you need them?) My feet and my knees and my hips and my back are always singing their painful refrain.
As I get older, I am adding prescriptions to my medicine cabinet at the rate of about one per year. I am up to five, and soon will have to move my stuff from the cabinet to the cedar chest or something.
Many zillions of us are taking medication – for pain, for moods, for a sagging endocrine system, for blood pressure, for fungus, for tumor shrinkage – name the part of the body, and there is an industry our there to support it, correct it, enlarge it or tenderize it.
Our homeless brethren are no different. Many come to the shelters with a bag of prescriptions. One guy who came to the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter had emptied all of his prescriptions into a one-gallon freezer bag. He must have had 2,000 pills in there, of 20 or 30 varieties, from psychotropics to vitamins.
The question of one’s personal prescription use, as you might imagine, is a large one in the context in a homeless shelter – in a worthy one, much less the Sheridan one.
As you might guess from the tenor of previous posts, the dictator at the Sheridan shelter uses strict controls to limit access to medication. Not only is it highly unlikely that anyone else would get to your medications, you yourself could have a difficult time as well.
Imagine being accused of drug abuse because you want to take a pill an hour early so you can make it to town for a job interview. (One of the shelter staff claims near psychic powers in 'knowing' who has a drug problem. Turns out, his answer is 'everybody.') Imagine your head throbbing for two hours after you asked for access to your migraine-strength Tylenol because the staff and director are too busy.
The last time anyone kept you waiting two hours for your as-needed (PRN) pain medication, I will bet you were angry as well as hurting. Unfortunately, the shelter dictator not only limits access to a homeless person’s own medication, but she often counsels people on what they should be taking, or when they should be taking it. This direct control and major intrusion on one’s privacy and one’s condition is yet another way that the resident is lorded over and depersonalized by a megalomaniac behind a desk.
“If they don’t like it,” she says, “they can leave.”
Many have.

'Welcome' is a funny word at this homeless shelter

2008-02-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

About one-third of the people who seek assistance at the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter are either later kicked out, or leave on their own because they can’t endure the contortions of living in the tilted chicken-wire hutch that is the director’s world.
Not only is the revolving door at the shelter spinning fast enough to affect the weather, those who are whisked away by the breath of the dictator’s nostrils are placed on an ever-thickening stack of pages known as the dreaded “Not-Welcome-Back List.”
It was, in fact, my job last year to dream up a written policy on this list. For nine years the shelter had been operated (yes, by the same director) without a set policy on how one got one’s name on “The List.”
Worthy shelters have a policy backed with a process by which an applicant can request a review. Worthy shelters let their resident know that this process exists.
As you might guess, policy or not, names are added to the list based on the whims and distortions of the director. If you are difficult to work with, disorganized, unsociable, or if she missed lunch that day, you are sure to go on “The List.”
To be included on this list is the director’s way of saying, “We Will Not Help You,” unless you consider a referral to the next shelter 100 miles down the road as “help.”
She has even talked about veterans in the contractual program with the VA, saying, “If he leaves for any reason, he won’t be welcome back.”
I know what you are asking. The answer is, “Because.” That’s how the “Not-Welcome-Back List” policy works.
Just last month, a Sheridan woman was found to be camping out by Interstate 90, and a certain amount of public brouhaha was raised.
In the newspaper, she made it clear that she could not use the Sheridan Homeless Shelter as a resource because “five years ago I got kicked out of there for using the ‘F’ word.”
Incidentally, in the written policy, there is no reference to the use of the “F” word, which I presume to be “Forbidden.”
This woman knew she was on “The List.” For five years.
This comment from the woman made the shelter look bad, so there was a scurry within Volunteers of America to nip the appearance of poor service in the bud, even though t’was true.
“Our image!” came the howl from local headquarters. “Our sacred freaking image!”
Much ado occurred in the office, and a lot of coffee was likely spilled in the effort of VOA officials to lunge at whatever was close by to use as covering for their asses, which were, to some extent, hanging out.
“Oh my,” cried the director in the newspaper. People can always come back to the shelter and, she said, if they have made some changes in their lives, they can come back. “We love to help people.”
Two problems: First, not a single individual in 2007 who was asked to leave, was told they could check back later to revisit their “status” on “The List.” Second, the shelter stance on the homeless is, “We love to help lovable people. Others, not so much.”

Problem smaller, responsibility larger in rural America

2008-02-04T00:22:00.001-07:00

Comparatively speaking, my town doesn’t have as big of a homeless problem as some of the larger communities within an afternoon’s drive from here: Billings, Rapid City, Casper and Cheyenne.
Certainly, we in rural America do not come even close to seeing the numbers of homeless in metropolitan areas – the makeshift homeless “camps” on the fringes of the cities; the alleys, bridges, the curbs, the parks, the hallways all populated with people who have no other place to go.
You have to be wary of statistics when talking about homelessness, because a nose count is impossible. One source estimates that 750,000 people per night are homeless in America, and also estimates that 9 percent of the homeless are in rural areas.
That is 67,500 people. This number is just over 12,000 more people than are estimated to live in Wyoming’s largest “city”: 55,314.
Statistics tend to make the issue of homelessness unwieldy and impersonal.
If someone in your immediate family is homeless or becomes homeless, this personalizes the issue fairly quickly. It is a big deal.
In many families, the family itself comes to the rescue and brings its beloved member back into safety and stability.
Sad to say that I have spoken with dozens of homeless people who have told me that they have family in another town or another state – sometimes even in Sheridan – but staying with them is not an option. I guess it has been a long time since ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ was on TV.
It is, however, true that the basic social units that we find ourselves a part of, can and should adequately serve, sustain and assist the homeless persons we find within those units. For example, a neighborhood. A rural neighborhood might have one or none homeless person – a guy who sleeps at the park, or holds a sign on the street.
If it is my neighborhood, I share some kind of responsibility for answering to this need.
If it is my community, the number of homeless person will go up, and so does the number of community members who share some kind of responsibility for answering to these needs.
From here, of course, we can go to county, district, region in the state, the state itself, and the state’s region in the nation, and the nation. As the perspective broadens, my individual responsibility shrinks. In rural America, the homeless are not necessarily more evident, but our individual responsibility is much greater because there are fewer of us.
Rural communities do have their own-sized homelessness to resolve. We are going to have smaller works, making huge differences in the lives of our relative few homeless and under-sheltered people. In so doing, we heal the hearts of people. What greater work is there?

Faith In Others Is A Casualty Of Homelessness

2008-02-03T01:03:00.001-07:00

I talked to a guy in front of the Edwards Hotel the other day. I knew him from my shelter-working days. I hadn’t seen him in a while.
I was looking for another homeless man who had been kicked out of the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter (like so many others) several months ago. He is often walking along the main drags of Sheridan. Since he got kicked out, he has been living in a room about the size of two double beds. I walked up the narrow claustrophobic staircase and paced up and down the hallway a couple of times, hoping to spot the guy.
No luck.
I came downstairs and out on the street in front was this other guy – a veteran, a musician, an alcoholic, a thinker.
We surprised one another. Neither of us expecting to see the other, and especially not in front of the pawn shop on the ground floor of the Edwards Hotel.
“I was hoping to bump into you sometime,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“I just wanted to touch base and see how you are doing.”
“Really?” he said. “What’s your agenda. I mean, are you just a nice guy, or are you doing this for some reason.”
I am still getting used to the natural mistrust that seems to be more apparent among the homeless. He had had so many things stolen from him, so many fights on the highways and by-ways, so many promises not kept, so many assurances not followed through.
I smiled and looked at him through the corner of my eyes.
“I am just a nice guy,” I said. “C’mon. You knew that.”
It is hard to trust yourself into the care of another, especially when care has had a history with you of halting starts and frequent sputters. Comprehensive care and an unbroken continuum of care are still at the dreaming stages, but I am convinced if we keep paddling our little boats, we may one day reach shores only heretofore dreamed of. Feather those oars, lads, lest we shorten our carry! Nautical talk, that.

No affirmation here, just down words

2008-02-02T00:37:00.001-07:00

Legal trouble pushed him to the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
He had been placed on probation for a non-violent crime, and his probation officer had given the young man specific and limited latitude on where and with whom he could live.
Housing was tight in Sheridan then, as it is now.
He could not have a roommate, and he had to have a place with a landline phone. He had to maintain employment and pay regularly on his fines. He could not leave the county, nor have his probation transferred to his home county in another state.
He was required to make three job applications per day until he got a job. I advised him to take no less than $10 per hour, so he could pay fines more quickly and save for the initial expenses of renting an apartment.
He was never trouble at the shelter. He did his chores, met with me to make sure he was on track, and ignored a staff member who often taunted him by saying, “What are you doing here?” or, “Why are you still here?”
This staff told me he believed the young man was a drug user, and would come to nothing during his stay at the shelter. I, too, ignored the staff member.
Of all the things that a homeless person needs when they get up enough courage to enter a shelter is personal affirmation – someone to believe in them – someone to believe in them for them. Of all the needs ignored most at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter, it is this need of affirmation. One of the staff and the director are quick with criticism and belittlement and bullying – the exact opposite of what one expect from a supposed Christian-based work.
It is in the “Rule of St. Benedict” (the founder of the Benedictine monastic order) that each stranger is to be treated as though he were Christ in disguise. At the shelter, each stranger is treated as a suspect, a sore festering with dereliction, a problem, a threat and a pest. The Rule of St. Benedict is not spoken here.
The young man stayed a long time with us, given his constricted situation. Eventually I suggested he ask his PO if he could have an approved roommate, and said I would attest to his good behavior, hard work and pleasant character.
He just barely made it out of the shelter before he was to be kicked out. The director was very concerned that we had helped this guy out. Apparently, she doesn’t like to see people succeed outside of her control.

Shelter's status quo hurts good people

2008-02-01T03:42:00.001-07:00

He had become a little disconnected from life.
He came to the shelter, alone, with a vague idea that he was going to head east and make amends with his parents and siblings.
He was just on the other side of middle age.
Once at the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter, as sometimes happens, he decided to try to drive a stake in the dirt and call Sheridan his home.
This meant finding a job.
He had a technical background in his work history, and wanted to pursue jobs specific to his knowledge and abilities. Jobs, at this point, were hanging on trees in Sheridan. Employers were falling on the feet of anyone who would come in and apply for work.
The process of applying and acquiring a technical job would take a little longer than running downtown and nabbing employment in the food service, construction or sales industries. We both knew this.
He started the application process and got a lengthy spot job pulling weeds in a field for a nice lady who paid $100 per day, which, good Lord, was more than I was making at the shelter.
Meantime, a staff member bet me that this guy was a “shelter hopper,” and that he would not amount to anything. I begged to differ.
The shelter director decided, on a whim, that the shelter would no longer “support” spot jobs. She was bound and determined to push this man to get a “real” job.
I defended his choices, believing that in time he would get a good job in his technical field, once the application and waiting process had run its course.
The staff member one day announced to the man that he had “three days to find a job, or you are outta here.”
They especially like saying “outta here” at this shelter.
The man came immediately to my office, and said, “Tim, what am I going to do.”
“You are going to get a great job in your field,” I said. “I am going to tell so-and-so to stop mindlessly threatening people.”
Honestly, I don’t think I even slowed him down.
The man got a great job in his field and a place to live. Sheridan is his home.
The status quo at the shelter would have bumped him down the road.
There is a vast difference between making a person someone else’s problem, and working on solutions for that person. The shelter director and some of her staff must have missed school that day.

Shelter Motto: 'Conform Or Get Out!'

2008-01-31T02:03:00.001-07:00

Some people are more difficult than others. Some are better organized. On the topics of manners, appropriate language, and personal hygiene, no two are alike.
No two of us have the same life experiences – losses, failures, frustrations, injustices – that uniquely wound us. Charlie Chan once said: “School of experience good, but sometime fees high.”
Add to these experiences the wildcards of health, addiction, disability, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and (add your own here), you begin to see how unique each one of us is in the way we hurt and in our way of being.
Each homeless person has become so for reasons that are unique to them. Each requires a unique restoration.
It seems understandable that the very things that can contribute to someone’s homelessness would also create in them a hardship when it comes to succeeding in social situations, such as a homeless shelter.
Unfortunately, the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter demands that everyone who comes into the shelter must instantly become organized, mannerful, pleasant, and easy to work with.
“Conform or Get Out!” is a suitable motto.
When employed there, I was told by the shelter dictator that I was “getting too close” to the residents.
My reply: “You’re not close enough!”
Boy, I learned my lesson. Never tell a megalomaniac they could use some improvement.

Even If You Succeed You Are Kicked Out

2008-01-30T00:29:00.001-07:00

He came to the Sheridan Community Shelter on the fly.
Some of the homeless do this – they move around, scouting for a good place to stop for the season, a year, or the rest of their lives.
This particular guy was looking for a place to start settling his life down.
He came in at about noon, and by 3:30 p.m. had been to town and back with four job offers. The problem in Sheridan is: Lots of jobs, no place to live. Waiting lists for apartments are long, and it can take three to five months to emerge at the top of any of these.
His priorities were to get a job, acquire his own transportation, and maybe find a room to live in for a while until the apartment market simmered down.
He was of the gregarious type – very talkative, animated, would burst into song for no apparent reason, and smart.
Only a week went by before he landed an irresistible deal on a rare Harley-Davidson (and I couldn’t begin to tell you the bike details). He was extremely pleased with what he considered a “steal,” and managed the payments within his budget.
When the shelter director heard about this, all hell broke loose.
He was hauled into her office and accused of putting on airs of superiority around other shelter residents (who didn’t care for his singing, as it turns out). And, he was really in trouble for purchasing the Harley.
“This is not something the shelter can support,” she said.
“Why?” he said. “Look, I got a job the same day I got here, and I need some transportation to work, and I am waiting for housing. I did all this while checking in with Tim.”
Apparently, he was supposed to have bought some kind of clunker that can barely run, and he certainly needed to curtail his naturally chipper outlook.
I knew right then he was doomed.
She didn’t kick him out that day. She waited a few days.
I guess the shelter doesn’t “support” success, and a lucky break on a good bike.

The Shelter That Trashes Donations By The Truckload

2008-01-28T09:30:00.001-07:00

‘Sheridan Community Shelter Dumps Truckloads of Donations in Landfill.’
As unlikely a headline as this might seem, this was the case at the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter last August.
I think everyone feels good that we have a homeless shelter in this community in northeast Wyoming. Naturally, such a place would tug at the heart of just about anyone. Many local people, businesses, groups and organizations donate items to the shelter.
People bring food, used clothes, sometimes new clothes, toys, books, bicycles, furniture, dishes, TVs and many other items. This is no surprise, coming from a responsive town with a strong sense of kinship and brotherhood.
What is a surprise, is that the shelter administration decided last August to load four dump-trucks full of donations in the Sheridan landfill. They threw away everything but cash.
The shelter uses a next-door building, an old non-functioning two-lane bowling alley on the Veterans Administration grounds, for storage. As can happen, this area became untidy.
Rather than organize; rather than the Volunteers of America seeking appropriate storage for the many donations given by good-hearted people; it was decided to chuck everything.
The shelter needs to apologize for literally trashing the goodwill of the people who support the needy among them.

St. Benedict Joseph Labre -- Saint for the Homeless

2008-01-27T03:29:00.001-07:00

Moved and challenged by the words of Jesus in the Gospel - 'the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head' - Benedict Joseph committed himself to perpetual pilgrimage, wandering from church to church to worship Jesus. He never begged, but depended upon strangers who were moved to help him. Whenever he had more than he needed, he shared this with his fellow homeless. His clothes were tattered and he was often asked to leave churches due to his odor. These were forgotten or forgiven in light of his holy life. He died in a hostel in Rome in 1783, at age 37. Was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church on Dec. 8, 1883. His memorial day in the church is April 16.

Prayer to Saint Benedict Joseph Labre
Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, you gave up honor, money and home for love of Jesus. Help us to set our hearts on Jesus and not on the things of this world. You lived in obscurity among the poor in the streets. Enable us to see Jesus in our poor brothers and sisters and not judge by appearances. Make us realize that in helping them we are helping Jesus. Show us how to befriend them and not pass them by. Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, you had a great love for prayer. Obtain for us the grace of persevering prayer, especially adoration of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, poor in the eyes of men but rich in the eyes of God, pray for us. Amen.

The Working Homeless

2008-01-25T12:23:00.001-07:00

It is probable that many people in and around Sheridan are under the impression that homelessness is a big-city problem.
Not so.
I can count one person, an old veteran, in the past year who I have seen pushing a grocery cart on Sheridan’s streets. We have no one sleeping in our post office, and all other public nooks and crannies are devoid of sleeping or passed-out people.
We have had two people in the last year camped out at an exit off Interstate 90. Both incidents drew a lot of attention.
Because we have a homeless shelter, such as it is, in Sheridan, it could also be presumed that all the homeless in Sheridan are taken care of.
Not so.
The homeless in Sheridan are unseen, and many have jobs.
They will be in front of you in line at Wal-mart, and you won’t know they are homeless. They work behind a desk in a nice facility, but they are homeless. They are on your construction crew, but they can’t find a place to live. They are janitors, mill workers, the people who take your order at a fast-food restaurant, cooks in nicer sit-down places, CNAs, small-scale contractors, painters, your cashier at Kmart – homeless. Lost between the cracks.
Most are not without shelter. They are living on the couch at their brother’s place, or crashing at a friend’s place subjected to a lifestyle involving drugs or other weirdnesses. They may be one of eight people living in a two-bedroom trailer house. They may be staying with a different person each night.
God help them, some of them are staying at the Sheridan Community Shelter. They will either endure the director’s intrusive, authoritarian ways; leave because of same; or get kicked out for reasons undetectable with a good microscope. Not a good option, in any case.
They are the working homeless.
They are here.

The shelter that kicks 'em out for saying "these people"

2008-01-24T02:05:00.001-07:00

He had been staying at the Sheridan Community Shelter for a couple of weeks.
He was a veteran, just shy of middle age.
He had worked on ranches most of his life, and almost immediately got a job on a ranch in the county.
He was such a quiet person, and was away at work so much, that he was not noticed that much by the other shelter residents. He kept to himself, followed the rules, and was working toward self-sufficiency.
Veterans at the Sheridan Community Shelter are allowed to stay up to two years. His time was foreshortened.
Here is why:
In casual conversation with the shelter director, he said, as reported by the director, “I know what these people are like. I am not like them.”
The director replied, “Pack your bags.”
No warning. No comment that his words could possibly be considered offensive in any way. Just, “Pack your bags.”

And she wonders to this day why residents seize up when she asks to see them in her office!

Stunned and stung by this sudden reversal thrown at him, the resident said as he left, "I sure don't have any bad feelings about this place. I would like to make a donation as soon as I can." Nice guy.
Me? I stood there working on my ulcer.

The Shelter That Didn't Care

2008-01-23T01:13:00.002-07:00

He came to the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter absolutely desperate. He is an alcoholic and had been self-anaesthetizing since a family tragedy near Sheridan five years ago. The alcohol doesn’t help. He knows it. He still hurts.
He told me he was afraid that if the pain goes away, he will forget his teenage daughter, whom he lost when she was a passenger in a car accident.
He fights every moment to stay away from alcohol. When he came to the Sheridan shelter, he had been on a three-day drinking binge. He was shaking so bad it was hard to understand his part of a conversation. He needed to go to detox.
Anyone who knows anything about Detox 101 knows that the body’s attempt to filter and purge can, itself, be a fatal exertion.
He was advised to accept an ambulance ride to the hospital.
He resisted, saying he had no money, no insurance, and believed “they don’t like me over there.”
After persistence, he agreed to go. I walked him to the ambulance and promised to be with him at the hospital. The Memorial Hospital of Sheridan County graciously accepted him at their ER, and admitted him that same day. He was assigned a very caring doctor, and the staff treated him cheerily and efficiently.
This all happened on the day before Thanksgiving. I sat with him in the ER, and I visited him in his hospital room. He was very freaked during the first two days. I never saw someone so uncomfortable in their own skin.
A few days later he was finally discharged and came to the shelter. I consulted with him, and found that he had no other viable option for a living situation. It takes four to six months to find a place to rent here and two-bedroom lean-to’s are starting at $600 per month.
He immediately asked about AA meetings, and was set up with someone to pick him up (the shelter skirts the extreme north edge of town, so it is a two-mile walk to the nearest pack of cigarettes, and much farther to meetings and services offered by the Sheridan community).
One night he and another resident stayed out past shelter curfew. The other guy told him they had permission. They did not. He decided to stay somewhere else that night.
After an absence of some days, he returned to the shelter. The director was confrontational with him (as she is with all), but he came back in with us.
You might wonder where he stayed those nights away. He has friends, “but they all use,” he said. He stayed with them, with drugs and alcohol all around him. He knew no good could come of this for him. These places, these people, were not viable options.
After his return, he had an opportunity to perhaps kindle a relationship with his real father, whom he had never met. He went out that night to seek this man, and ended up out past curfew.
As you can see, he was erratic.
The director said he was no longer welcome back to the shelter. Rules are rules. He was seen by the shelter dictator (edit) director as an abuser of the shelter. He was never drinking, never posed a threat, got along with everyone. He was just difficult enough that he got the boot.
The Sheridan Community Shelter has a pages-thick list in tiny print of individuals who are no longer welcome back at the shelter.
He called a day later and said he needed to come back to the shelter. I had to tell him that the shelter was no longer an option. I felt my soul twist nearly in half. We had six male beds available.
“Please, Tim, please! Can I come up, please?”
Not an option. Sorry.
I alerted staff that he was not to allowed in the building, as I was afraid he could get into trouble and the director would somehow get him sent to Siberia or something.
“I don’t understand how they call this a homeless shelter when I am homeless and I need to be there.”
I was silent, but miserable. I didn’t understand it, either.

Next thing I knew, he had been arrested. DWUI (Wyoming has driving while under the influence, and adds the extra letter).
Last night I visited him in jail. He had no one on his visitor’s list. I wrote him first, and asked him to put me on his list, if he wanted to. I couldn’t see him unless on the list.
Last night we talked by phone through a thick wall of glass separating us.
He was concerned about me getting fired from the shelter.
He’s the one in jail, I thought. Yet, his first concern was me.
We had 15 minutes to talk. He told me he had of few drinks, got in his car and turned himself in at the Sheriff’s Office. This he did in desperation because he had no place to live, and had not eaten, he said, in five days.
He is going to get treatment for his alcoholism. I was very pleased about that. He awaits $40 for a physician’s physical and then he has bed space waiting.
I asked him what he was going to do when he got out of treatment. He doesn’t know. I told him I would help him.
“I won’t go to the shelter, though,” he said.
The Sheridan Community Shelter is no longer welcome in his life.
I don’t blame him. Not one little bit.

Sanctity of life flows through all the moments of every person.

2008-01-22T03:57:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow, Wednesday, pro-lifers have scheduled a silent memorial to the children lost since Roe Vs Wade (35 years ago). I will be there, not as a protest, but as a testament to life.
Those of us who recognize the sanctity of life from the cradle to the grave must recognize that poor persons, weak persons and homeless persons share fully this sanctity.
Our acknowledgement of the worth and nobility inherent in each person brings with it a responsibility for a continuous stream of care that flows through all the moments of every person.
We do not, then, turn away because a person is difficult, angry, fails to meet our expectations, relapses into addiction, or falls back into a cycle of failure. We are expected to be patient, relentless and care-free in our caring. We cannot let our disappointments stop us from giving, or kink the hose of our graciousness. Freely we give. Fully we love.

Dignity is not earned, it is inherent

2008-01-21T14:22:00.001-07:00

On this observed birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., which in Wyoming we call “Equality Day,” it is good to consider the innate dignity of every person, and the respect that each is due merely because they exist.
This is not an easy concept to handle, even though it is a basic human capacity. Some people behave or dress or don’t bathe often enough, and this makes it more difficult for us to see the dignity and to offer the respect due. We don’t all wear our dignity on our sleeves all the time.
True good will – the good that we do for another person to improve their life – starts when this sometimes-hidden dignity is nonetheless recognized. Whatever good will is expressed is energized by our getting in touch with the respect due.
This is especially apparent in the way we treat the poor and the weak. This includes the homeless, the unwed mother, the pregnant teen, the addict, and the unborn child. Some of these are culpable for their own situations, but they are no less due respect, and they have no less dignity as a person than any other person.
Let our eyes be opened to recognize the inherent worth and nobility of all others, especially the person next to us.

Psalm for those with a heart for the homeless

2008-01-20T13:47:00.001-07:00

Psalm 41

"Happy the man who considers the poor and the weak.
The Lord will save him in the day of evil,
will guard him, give him life, make him happy in the land
and will not give him up to the will of his foes.
The Lord will help him on his bed of pain,
he will bring him back from sickness to health."

Another nudge in the ribs for shelter oversight

2008-01-19T23:52:00.001-07:00

In my weekly church page column in The Sheridan Press, today, I continued my nudging of the ribs of VOA's shelter featuring poor treatment of its residents. We need to remember that homelessness is the enemy, even though boards and administrators don't help matters by looking the other way.
Here is that part of the column, in the context of Christian unity:

"Even my frothy-mouthed confrontation with Volunteers of America’s poor treatment of the poor at the shelter is not, in the end, for the purpose of one destroying the other, but in ensuring that the dignity of each and of any is held as high as possible as they are cared for.
"Obviously, we have different perspectives. I think they are wrong and mean-spirited, and they think I am a dork who should have called the whistle-blower number. But still, there are people on that other team whom I admire and with whom I am tied by the unseverable bond of faith.
"So, we even poke one another in the eye as brethren. Some day there might even be a celebration of our unity, after I am done being offended and they quit treating the homeless at the shelter like kindergartners. Probably not today, though."

My letter to the board that overlooks the shelter

2008-01-18T10:59:00.001-07:00

I realize that it is possible to consider me an angry former employee of Volunteers of America. Please consider that I write to you without malice, but with a deep personal concern for the unsuitable treatment of individuals seeking help through the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
I cannot in good conscience not write you about this.

Briefly, here are my concerns:

Thirty-five percent of the people who were admitted to the shelter in 2007 were later kicked out of the shelter by staff or the director. A slim minority of these were understandably kicked out because they had broken “no-tolerance” rules, such as possession of alcohol, violent/threatening language, actual violence or thievery.
In 2007, the vast majority of the incidents that led to the dismissal of residents were indefensible on the part of the shelter’s own printed guidelines, on the part of the VOA Mission Statement, and on the part of anyone upholding the dignity and responsibility of a person. Obviously, this has an abusive, disempowering effect on residents.
Neither the staff nor the director is asked to answer to anyone with regard to the dismissal of a homeless resident. Even the number of those kicked out is not reported. Persons in need of help are released to the wind, some of whom couldn’t tell you why they got kicked out.
A resident veteran named Craig was kicked out for saying, “I know what these people are like. I am not like them.”
A resident was kicked out for failing to show up at a Saturday spot job, even though he had volunteered at a church on Friday to help pay for the bus ticket they provided, and worked a spot job Sunday. Monday morning he was kicked out. The guidelines say nothing about spot jobs.

Residents are bullied by staff and the director.
A veteran named Bill with a painful foot ailment was ordered by the director this summer to “get out of the shelter and take a walk downtown.” He complied, because he did not wish to be kicked out.
A veteran named Mike was told by staff, out of the blue, “You have two days to get a job, or you are out of here.” This resident had employment prospects in a technical field well on the way, and was eventually hired in his field and lives in Sheridan. I was put in the position of defending Mike against this bullying.
A resident named Charles was told he was mentally ill based on his religious beliefs, and was ordered by the director to see Mental Health or get kicked out.
A resident (name escapes me) was severely questioned because he bought a motorcycle while staying at the shelter. The resident had found a job the same day he registered at the shelter, and was awaiting housing. He was later kicked out by the director for a reason that the director could not articulate. “This isn’t going to work out,” is all they are told.
A staff member said in a meeting with myself and the director that he was going to do everything he could to kick a resident out. “I am going to get him today,” he said. The director made no comment about this irregular and unacceptable attitude from shelter staff.
In groups (meals or meetings, even devotional times) residents have been scolded like children.
Any resident at the homeless shelter knows that he or she can stay only as long as they are “allowed” to, putting them in a disempowering position when bullied. This goes on so routinely that the resident that is called into the director’s office is usually afraid that he or she is being kicked out. I can think of 10 (and there must be more) incidents when a resident was asked to see the director, and the first words out of their mouth were, “Are you going to kick me out?” Dozens more have asked, “Am I in trouble?” The director has said she doesn’t understand why the residents feel this way.
I have witnessed he worst kind of bullying – the smiling, “I am your best advocate,” sort that manipulates and intimidates. Residents were constantly harassed by the spoken or unspoken threat of being kicked out.

Residents are asked to spy on one another when not at the shelter. The director has called residents into her office to question them about the whereabouts and actions of other shelter residents while downtown in Sheridan. Residents have not wanted to do this, but were afraid or obligated to comply. Many referred to her as a “control freak” (not to her face).

I will summarize my other concerns: Staff training (all staff do intakes, no training was provided in 2007), residents are limited to access to their PRN (as needed) medications and sometimes forced to wait an hour for a pain relievers (director and staff decide when they can have them), residents are disallowed from taking spot jobs, the director’s immediate supervisor was only on site three times in 2007, the grievance procedure stops at the director’s desk, meals were refused to residents who had failed to sign up, an employee living at the shelter was allowed to stay in the shelter while inebriated off-duty (anyone else would have been kicked out), and one of our staff was working 16-our days (may still be doing so) – a shift at Supervision and a shift at the Shelter, back-to-back.

I was witness to all of the above and could not in good conscience leave these matters unsaid. These are not things that anyone would see on a usual tour of the shelter, or a usual report.

The poor, the unfortunate and the vulnerable are subject to harsh and unfair treatment at the shelter – treatment not in keeping with the VOA mission statement, not on par with my perception of the excellence of the youth home, foster parenting and WYSTAR programs, and not in keeping with what any person in good conscience would deem appropriate. I am personally embarrassed that the shelter has the word “Sheridan” in it, and you should be, too, that it says “Volunteers of America.”

I suggest all residents be given an exit or commenting form to be sealed and mailed to a board member.
I suggest that the shelter report to the board on the number and reasons for all dismissals of residents.
I suggest that the director keep detailed notes and on the reason for each dismissal.
I suggest that the quality of care at the shelter be supervised by a board sub-committee.
I suggest that the shelter staff keep track of, but not limit access to residents’ medications. This is a sticky situation, and a workable solution has yet to be found.

In sum, I submit that the dignity and restorability of each individual has not been given consideration at the shelter. This deeply troubles me. Administrating a homeless shelter and caring for the homeless are not the same things. I am afraid Volunteers of America has only succeeded at the former.

Poor Treated Poorly at Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter

2008-01-17T23:56:00.001-07:00

We have a problem at the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter in northeast Wyoming.
I worked there for a year as the second-in-command, and the director had me team up with her during most of her conversations with shelter residents throughout the year of 2007.
I watched her condescend to our residents, create almost universal fear of being kicked out among them, and encroach on their personal lives when they were away from the shelter, all in the name of "helping them stay on their program."
People were kicked out for no defensible (and sometimes no defineable) reason.
I was put in the position of defending our homeless residents against the director and one of the staff (who saw a drug addict in every new resident).
I found the whole ordeal very unpleasant, undignified and offensive.
I was told I was "too close" to our homeless guests, and when I had a casual conversation with one of them, the director told me I was "counseling," and that I should "leave that up to mental health."
I was fired a couple of days before Christmas.
I raised these concerns to the board of Volunteers of America, which replied in The Sheridan Press through its vice-president, that there was "nothing to" my concerns.
The homeless in and around our community deserve much better than this.