Moderator Debra Jeffries-Glass What is one success you have had here or something that you would describe as having made your day?
Noel Sierra & Jake Leibovitz. I can jump in on that one, and I’m going to be vague here to respect the privacy and confidentiality of the people involved, but when I first started here about four years ago, on my very first day, I met an individual who was doing quite poorly, who appeared to really need a lot of help, but wasn’t really ready yet.
And then a long time passed, and maybe about a year, year and a half later, I saw him again, and then the next day I saw him again, and the next day I saw him again, and we started working together. And then I come to find out he was connected with some of the other people, services on this stage, and we did a lot of really great work together, and then he went on to become involved with other services, which he’s still connected with right now, and just seeing this person today and seeing where he is and the night and day difference between the person that I saw four years ago, which was really made possible by the community here in this room and the importance that we all put on working together and not staying within our silos, but really making an effort to make the best use of all the resources that we have here. And it doesn’t always work out this way, but it worked out really, really well in this case, and so that’s one success that really made my day.
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Wei Tchou I’ll just say that as a person who’s in the park, all of the work that you guys do is so incredible, and one of the reasons that I can see the work flourishing is that just as a pedestrian who goes there all the time, I feel the community within the unhoused population. There is a community. I feel like I have gotten to know some of the unhoused people who live around my block, and there is just a sense of a kind of spiritual wellness that I don’t necessarily feel in other neighborhoods.
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Mason Crawford: One of the successes that I can identify is, like I was mentioning, we run like a youth-led peer model where we’re employing youth to go out to the parks to meet their peers or other young people, and something we’ve learned with young people who are experiencing being unhoused or unstably housed is that it’s hidden.
You never really know about it. There’s a lot of stigmas about what an unhoused person is, and they try to avoid that at all costs, and so as young people come to our program, they’re really eccentric. They have big hair, big colors.
The Lower East Side, you can see the fashion in the Lower East Side, and they really uphold that, and so when we were employing young people and I was going with them in the parks, they were easily recognized really fast. They were like, oh, that person right there is going to either be able to give me water, give me food, do syringe exchange, tell me where somewhere to go, or even at one point bringing other young people back to the program, and I think it’s about, what I’m trying to get at is maybe a little bit of consistency, recognizing that this person is going to be the person today, right now, who can get me to this resource, or at least can help me in this moment.
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Marcellus Valentin For me, what made my day is being able to put names to faces for some of the people I’ve met at work, being that I grew up in the area. Growing up, I saw people in their struggle while I would be going to school and just going about my day, and now having the chance to see them in their humanity and see them and get to greet them by their name, not just just walk by them. So that’s been really warming for me.
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Jeff Cohen I think one of the big ones that we have is our corner, it’s a safe spot. We had a client (who contemplated suicide, had a plan, had everything.
We gave the person services, was able to ) calm her down. That person comes every day because she says this is the only place in the city that she can receive proper care. She in turn brings two more people.
Those two people bring two more people. Now we’ve got people who are coming every day, feel safe, and even if they’re under the influence, they know that they can come there, be treated, treated fairly, and we will try our best to do whatever we can. So that’s my big take home.
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Carol Prudhomme Davis Last year we did an event with the Remote Theater Project, our Artistic Director is here, Alex Aaron. They wrote a play about the community, and about some of my unhoused artists, one of my unhoused artists led an entire mural, zine-making and chess-playing event. He was in charge, and we had our food equity team, [Kele NKhereanye in the back, who’s a gardener in (this neighborhood. We served healthy snacks, smoothies and apples, and that didn’t seem like much, but every single unhoused person said, “boy, this is good, thank you” and I got to see our community together. Some of y’all were there, I recognize you. Some of our immigrants and asylum seeker families were there, and our unhoused population, and we had a ball, and I think it was about the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
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Brian Crozier One success…there’s a few things, but one thing that I think that speaks to me in outreach, harm reduction outreach: the best work is not always immediate. It’s a slow build.
It’s relationship build, right? Sometimes we see a lot more of the concerning or problematic behaviors, but we don’t get to see these good things that are built up over time. We have a Hep C patient navigator who goes on walkabout outreach with our outreach team, and they can do rapid testing in the field, right? They can do rapid HIV and Hep C testing. A lot of times our outreach clients are almost completely separate from our syringe-exchange clients – due to negative experiences in programs, right? People tend to (not only just enjoy the weather and want to spend time outside), but sometimes it’s a choice to not go inside because of bad experiences.
So we go to them where they are, and our Hep C navigator tested somebody in the field. They tested positive. Through relationship building and coaching, she was able to connect them to the medication treatment plan, built enough trust for them to come to the program (to pick up their medication) because they had no place to keep it outside.
So they started to build trust to come inside, right? They were able to complete their regimen. They are now free of Hep C, and they are now connected to medical care, right? Those kinds of things I think are important, because they tend to be a little more invisible than some of the other stuff, but that’s something that really always sticks to me … those slow builds to get people into care when they’re ready to do it.
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Bob Humber There are many success stories that I could tell you, but I’ll just pick out one that I think is dear to my heart.
During 9/11, the people were coming up from the Wall Street area up here. Their heads [were covered in dust and] all over their bodies. They were tired from walking.
They needed water, and the garden provided them with water, and I was really glad that we were there to help them. That’s one of the success stories that I want to tell you, but there are many, many more.