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Today’s Thanksgiving blog is by Angela Patterson, M.S.W., M.P.C., UNITY’s Director of Programs and the inspirational leader of UNITY’s outreach team. [caption id="attachment_162" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Angela Patterson, UNITY Director of Programs"][/caption] No one knows what really happened that first Thanksgiving. Important details seem to include a story...

[caption id="attachment_151" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Ms. Louis' Flooded Trailer"][/caption] It’s a little off the radar, tucked between two abandoned salvage yards littered with rusting hulks of Cadillac’s, Fords and Chevys.  The nearest neighbor is almost a mile away and that is the rabid-looking mutt that guards a distant...

Today’s post is by Cynthia Mitchell, who recently began working as UNITY’s Director of Intake, in charge of helping homeless and at-risk people requesting assistance to access the many housing and service programs of UNITY and its member organizations.   [caption id="attachment_147" align="alignleft" width="384" caption="Cynthia Mitchell, Director...

Sitting on a sidewalk outside one of our emergency shelters, I’m trying to complete an intake packet on a man who tells me he’s been hospitalized in at least 40 hospitals for bipolar and major depressive disorder, including many suicidal episodes.  Tonight, though, he appears...

[caption id="attachment_130" align="alignright" width="300" caption="UNITY outreach worker Clarence White searches abandoned buildings to rescue the homeless"][/caption] God bless Clarence White.   Seriously, may God bless Clarence White and I’m not even religious    If you had a chance to read his post you got about half the man’s...

We listen to stories, personal biographies, all day long.  We sit on porches, stoops, flea-infested couches, under bridges, inside cardboard boxes, next to bucket toilets, and listen.  It’s what we do.  Sometimes what we are listening to is psychotic ramblings and sometimes they are stories...

Today's post is by Clarence White, a Unity outreach case worker who is no stranger to homelessness.   Four years after the levee failures, he lives in his flooded-out house in Gentilly, a house that was inundated in water for three weeks, leaving it uninhabitable.  Four...

200 people are in the school HELP!  This is the graffiti I saw on top of a school building in a section of the 9th ward that flooded deeply. This graffiti looks little like the stylized wording of taggers, and more like the haphazard distress signs...

I’ve had some discussions about anger lately.  I am fortunate to have a lot of people in my life who care about me, and who check in with me to see how I’m doing periodically.  Often they ask how the job is affecting me –...

Dead houses come alive at night.  When the rest of the world is safely tucked into their beds, our clients begin their desperate stroll toward their nighttime dwellings.  They leave the train station or the ferry landing.  The homeless easily wear out their welcome at...

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