We never lose. Sometimes it just takes us a while to win. It’s the same tired refrain I often use when a long week has thoroughly kicked my ass, leaving me contemplating my career ambitions and wondering if full-time bartender would be a more fulfilling vocation. ...
The answer is 232. At least it is for Coleman. It’s the question I get every time I present at conferences about outreach: “How do you get people into housing who have been on the street for years, even decades, who just don’t want to...
“What we got next?” Travers asks. It had been a long day and night as we scratched off a rather substantial list of abandoned buildings, musty underpasses and urine soaked doorways on our clipboard. We’re rubbing our tired eyes and cautiously monitoring the digital clock on...
Every day I pass the intersection of Opelousas and Newton. There’s a roof there with a hole carved out the top, shingles tossed to the side. It’s where someone was pulled from the depth of their Katrina hell sequestered in a dark attic waiting for...
I can personally verify Mr. Sullivan’s homelessness going back 13 years. When I first landed in The Crescent City I used to work at a bar on South Peters Street. It was in the Warehouse District before the area became an address or a destination; before...
Technically it’s not homeless; at least not tonight. Instead of steering our blue outreach van toward the abyss of vacant buildings and into the darkened neighborhoods of New Orleans, we head to the neon glow of the West Bank Expressway. Our guy has hollowed out...
It’s the most physically demanding, mentally challenging and exhausting kind of social work there is. While the greatest occupational hazards of a lot of my colleagues are the occasional paper cut or the draining hum of overhead florescent lighting, I managed to stab my foot...
I’ve got a headache. It all started with a conversation through the threadbare screen door of an abandoned house. A week ago myself and Clarence scampered over a chain-link fence, trail blazed through an overgrown side yard, pushed open a crumbling back door falling off the...
