Sunday, December 17, 2017
By SAMANTHA PHILLIPS
sphillips@vindy.com
YOUNGSTOWN
Lashanda, 30, has been at the Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley with three of her children, age 5 to 7, for about two months – escaping the violence and exposure to the heroin epidemic at their last apartment complex in Warren.
“There was too much happening. I didn’t want that around my kids,” Lashanda said. She decided to leave
after one woman overdosed and another woman near their room was killed by her boyfriend at the complex.
Staying at the shelter is safer but still a frustrating experience for Lashanda and her family. She said her kids are constantly bored.
Tension builds, which leads to fights at times, she said, because the families are in close quarters in the common rooms.
“It’s frustrating. To keep me positive, I pray constantly. I pray for my kids and my family. You do get down and discouraged sometimes,” she said.
Lashanda wants a better life for herself and the children, so she is enrolled in state-tested nurse assistant classes at Flying High Inc. in Youngstown. She is striving to get new housing for her family.
“To provide for my kids, that’s my goal,” she said.
Each family gets its own room, and coordinators put a lot of work into helping clients, Lashanda said. But the limited space and lack of activities present challenges.
The mission’s goal is to help clients find employment and housing, and connect them with local agencies that can provide any service they need to help with mental, physical and financial problems they face.
Now, the mission is turning to the community for help to build a new shelter.
John Muckridge, the mission’s CEO, said its location on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is nearly 125 years old and isn’t adequate for the care the mission wants to provide clients. It was deeded 17.5 acres on the South Side from the city in 2010 for a new mission, but still needs more than $1.6 million to get the new shelter up and running. The total cost will be $4.25 million.
“This building is literally falling apart. Bricks are falling off, showers need to be fixed, and we’re looking to increase our number of beds,” Muckridge said.
With the increase of families comes overcrowding for shelters that are used to house individuals.
Donna Wells, coordinator of the mission’s Family Services program, said the family section stays full, and people call every day wanting to be admitted. “I am just so amazed at the number of families, the calls we get,” she said. “When I first started as a volunteer, there weren’t as many families.”
That includes older generations, such as grandparents coming in with their children and grandchildren. Wells said she also sees young parents coming to the shelter.
“A lot of people don’t realize the diversity of people who come here. It’s not just men. There are a lot of families, a lot of children. They’re not necessarily people off the street. There could be abuse, a lost job, death. There are all types of reasons that all types of people are here,” Wells said.
Muckridge said the mission uses its local and regional partnerships to house people if the mission is full or if people need help for problems such as addictions.
“We definitely use other agencies and other shelters – New Castle [Pa.], Akron, Warren, Cleveland and other partnering agencies such as Beatitude House,” Muckridge said.
Bob Altman, who was the director of Shelter and Support Services at the Help Network for several years, said he has noticed an increase of women and families seeking help.
“It used to be the homeless person that you saw was the typical older gentleman who looked like he was an alcoholic,” he said. “But now you see a lot more females. In the past, you saw 80 percent males, but now you see more women, a lot with families.”
Help Network has an outreach program called PATH, where trained
volunteers try to find homeless people in the city and direct them to shelter and services.
“We’re seeing younger people,” Altman said. “The majority of individuals we would see in our outreach program were 50 to 65. We still see a lot of those, but we also see a lot in their 30s or 40s.”
Altman said the transition to a shelter is hard for parents, but it’s even more difficult for children who are expected to behave in a small space. “The shelter isn’t the place where you can bounce off the wall and do things you would do at home. There’s a lot of people there, and not everyone wants to hear it in those close situations,” he said.
Colleen Kosta, program manager of the Mahoning Valley Continuum of Care, coordinates local agencies that provide services for homeless clients. She said parents have a harder time finding temporary housing because they need to establish a job and benefits for their families, but with that comes the need for day care.
Wells said the mission has programs that attempt to help women and men get job-ready, but hopes to provide more services and a day care for parents while they go to work or school.
In Warren, Jessica Wood, director of the women and children program at the Warren Family Mission, said she, too, has noticed an increase of women and children. One pregnant woman who needed a warm place to stay had to be transferred to a shelter in Cleveland until there was a vacant bed at a local shelter, she said.
Wood suspects many of the women who are seeking shelter are aging out of foster care and don’t have family support.
Her clients seek jobs, but the jobs they are qualified for are low-paying or aren’t suitable for women.
Emily, 19, has lived at the Warren Family Mission for a few months and has been homeless for about six months. She described the mission as a home-like setting, and she appreciates the help she has received from the coordinators.
While staying there, Emily works two jobs and may go through the college application process.
“The coordinators push us to do more,” she said. “They help us improve ourselves. When I look back and see how far I’ve come, I appreciate them so much.”
The heroin epidemic also has made an impact on the number of homeless people in the area. Not just those who are addicted, but their children. Wood said she used to work at a rehab center, and she gets clients at the shelter who she recognized as children of her old rehab patients.
“These women who are 18 or 20, they don’t have their family to help them. Their moms have problems themselves,” Wood said.
Dominic Marrari, public relations director at the Warren Family Mission, said it sees overnight homeless stays jump from about 1,100 a month to more than 1,500 once winter sets in. In the future, he would like to build a bigger shelter with more educational programs available for women and children.
Marrari agreed addiction affects the rising number of families that end up in a homeless shelter.
“Families may be lost on knowing what to do with a loved one struggling with addiction. So maybe they tell them they can’t live there anymore, which puts them on the streets,” he said.