MS.
HUFFINGTON: Thank you, Bob.
And, now, our third panelist, Lou Nanni, serves as Executive Director
of the Center for the Homeless in South Bend, Indiana. He has been in
this field for many years in one form or another. And last month, he actually
became a first-time father. He has a one-month old little girl called
Isabella, a wonderful name, shared by my five-year old. So, probably last
night was the first good night's sleep he had away from home.
Welcome, Lou.
[Applause.]
MR. NANNI: Thank you.
Arianna is exactly right that it was the first good night's sleep, I'm
just sorry that it's not more apparent by looking at me.
It is a pleasure to be here and I want to thank our good friend, Senator
Dan Coats, for inviting us and Representative Kasich for this very important
piece of legislation.
First, I would like to tell you a little bit about who are some of the
homeless people that we've seen over the past year at the Center for the
Homeless. The Center was home to a first round NBA draft pick. In 1981,
he was the 17th draft pick overall. He played four years in the NBA and
two years in the CBA before dragging his 6'8" overweight frame through
the doors of the Center for the Homeless due to a cocaine addiction and
a trail of bad decisions.
The Center was home to a Catholic priest who, in his early 30s was a pastor
of a large parish in the Ft. Wayne/South Bend area. But due to a mental
illness, specifically paranoid schizophrenia, which can impose the fears
which will, in fact, estrange somebody from the most loving of families,
the most supportive of networks, found himself at the Center for the Homeless.
Or an 89-year old man, actually pictured on the wall over here, who exhibited
a work ethic that I've seldom seen in my life anywhere. He was a quixotic
figure. You'd see him in the middle of abandoned parking lots on his hands
and knees pulling weed-by-weed, one-by-one until he fell down and broke
his hip and then broke his other hip and has been in a rather deplorable
public nursing home since.
Or, a 12-year old girl who gave birth to a child at the Center making
her 29-year old mother a grandmother on the spot.
A number of people who are middle-aged, middle-class, never been poor
a day in their lives. Perhaps, the age of 45 or 50 and all of a sudden
the children have grown up and one of the spouses takes off with another
lover. And for a period of time they lose the mental edge that it takes
to carry on. And they ask themselves at 45, what do I have to go on? There's
nothing to show for my life. And things begin to spiral downward to, when
they're more shocked than anybody, when they have to walk through the
doors of a homeless shelter.
Or, oftentimes, we'll see somebody in the face of a 41-year old woman
who looks like she's 60. From the ages of five to 15 she was sexually
abused by her father. At the age 11, she began to abuse alcohol and became
chemically dependent and the last 30 years of her life, before walking
through the doors of the Center, she's never had more than two consecutive
months of sobriety. She has sold her body on the streets for booze and
drugs. She has been raped and raped on repeated occasions. And she has
committed more than a few acts for which she feels she simply cannot forgive
herself.
And the term, rehabilitation, in her case and in the case of so many others,
is a misnomer. Because it implies restoring her to a condition she's never
experienced in the first place.
And so many people that we see on the streets, they have not fallen through
cracks of society, they were born in the cracks of society.
Our challenge is, what we're about here today, let no one doubt, is formidable.
We, as a society, have made great progress in communication and space
exploration and so many different fields but we have made little dent
in the last century, perhaps, in trying to rid ourselves of poverty, to
help the addict recover, to really treat people who are indigent and mentally
ill and this is why we are gathered here today. The challenges are formidable,
to many they appear to be overwhelming, but they are never hopeless.
Five points that I would like to just briefly cite that are part of the
Center for the Homeless' equation in trying to help people break the cycle
of welfare dependency and overcome their condition of homelessness.
First, is our continuum of care model. What we are doing here is simple,
yet, revolutionary. We are trying to take the best services that the community
has to offer and to make them inclusive of the people who need them most.
Simple, but revolutionary. And we do so by pulling upon the expertise
of the community and having those entities which best deliver services
be located in this 50,000 square foot building to help people whether
it's through a mental health clinic, a drug and alcohol rehab clinic,
a Montessori pre-school for children, whether it's through having South
Bend school system people on site and adult basic ed and childhood ed,
whether it's the medical clinic and dental clinic that are on site and
the eye clinic, as well, that are located there, and the many other different
areas, the certified therapist that provide family counseling, hours and
so forth on site. It's bringing them together so that, in fact, the left
hand can know what the right hand is doing.
And that their staffing occurs when so and so refuses to take a shower
at night instead of just kicking him out on the street, perhaps one of
the counselors says, wait a second, this is his paranoid schizophrenia
that's acting up. He's probably terrified of the shower scene. In fact,
let me see if we can work with his medications and get him into more intensive
therapy and address it from that end.
And then the school representative pops up and says, he's been going to
literacy classes, reads and writes at a third-grade level, he's probably
not going to improve that much but he's feeling engaged by the programs.
The medical clinic says, also, I want to tell you that he also has a problem
with diabetes. We're working with the kitchen to make sure that his diet
is regulated more properly. That he's following these rules. All of a
sudden, all these people are coming together to best advocate for Elroy,
so, that he can, in fact, look to move forward given his own multiple
and complex problems.
We have put together this six-phased continuum of care. Phase one is crisis
intervention, assessment and primary treatment. Phase two is a five-week
long personal development and education program. Avis referred to it.
It's around the curriculum of MEPS, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual.
Looking at a person at a holistic level and helping them to work on all
four planes to discover themselves and move forward.
The third phase is a job training and preparation program which focuses
on attitudes. We believe that it's easy to get people jobs in this society,
the challenge is to prepare them to be successful in the work place over
the long haul.
Phase four is a job retention program, after they're placed into the work
force. They stay at the Center for at least the first three months and
they go through support groups and we work with the employers and so forth
to keep things going forward.
Phase five is supportive housing and then Phase Six is homeownership.
And you saw Roger, who is in the homeownership phase, and Avis, who is
in the supportive housing phase, tell their stories a little bit today.
It takes an intensive investment of resources and time if you're going
to break the cycle. In fact, in the short run, it's a greater investment
of resources than I think many of us are willing to admit. But the savings
in the long run, when a woman like Carnell, with her four boys or three
boys, breaks the cycle we have to ask ourselves the question, what are
the savings to this society over the next decade or over the next generation?
Not just financially, but morally and spiritually as well.
A second point is that we operate on a tough love praxis, one which engages
a service ethic, from both the heart and the mind. And we need the best
thinkers of society, not just the most caring persons, to bear their resources
and talents to these problems before us.
But on this tough love equation, we try to combine the best from the religious
model of social service and the social science model of social service
because, in and of themselves, both those models, while very strong, are
limiting. The religious model focuses on spirituality, it focuses on love,
it focuses on the dignity of the individual and it focuses on, most importantly,
building community.
But I don't know that you can love a paranoid schizophrenic into recovery.
The social science model focuses on providing the types of programs to
meet the needs of those specific individuals with their problems. But,
again, if you do so in a dehumanizing way, which neglects the spiritual
part of our being, which is always the most fundamental, then recovery
is not within sight.
So, in as much as we're able to combine the best from those modalities,
we're able to do something very special.
And I want to tell you one story about a man--when we were talking about
welfare reform, every Monday night I would meet with all 100 adult guests
at the Center--and he said, Lou, I just wanted to tell you one point:
I lived for three years on skid row in L.A. I have been homeless the last
decade of my life and have been in and out of dozens of different homeless
shelters. And you can come up with whatever tough rules you want to come
up with here, at the Center, and I'll be able to slip and slither through
and around them because that's what I'm good at, that's what it takes
for me to survive every day in the streets. The only way I'm going to
change is if you can help me believe that change is possible and begin
to want to make those changes in my life and that's what's starting to
happen to me here at the Center.
Community is always fundamental. The love is the most important thing
that we do. The toughness is critical but it's peripheral to what is core.
And we do drug testing and alcohol testing and mandatory savings and so
on and so forth as people move on.
The third point is a private/public partnership. Eighty percent of the
funds that run the Center come from the private sector.
And while we could easily access more, we have philosophically said that
we do not want more than a 20 percent match from the public sector. I
believe that the public match is critical but it should be on the lower
side of the end and most charities of any size are the reverse. They are
80 percent at least public and 20 percent private. Why? Because when's
the last time you heard of somebody volunteering at the welfare department?
We pull upon 450 volunteers a month who volunteer in more than 26 different
capacities. And not only do they bring their resources to bear but they
bring their talents and, most importantly, their time and compassion.
Through volunteers in the community, the wide-spread community, taking
ownership of the project, all kinds of magical things happen.
The fourth point is guest ownership. The most important leadership that
we develop here is the leadership from within. If you talk to a coach
about a season that's going to begin he or she is going to tell you that
the most important leadership is the leadership on the court or on the
playing field.
And, just like you saw before with Avis and Roger, developing people so
that they can be the role models, people who have broken the cycle that
are giving back, not only is it critical to those people who are reaching
the shelters or the welfare rolls in the first place, but it's critical
to them to move forward, as well.
And, finally, the fifth point is that really what our mission's about
is not just helping the homeless, it's about restoring the torn fabric
of our society and building more meaningful community. The mission in
the Center for the Homeless is two-fold. We believe that we need to bring
together the two disparate worlds of the haves and have-nots so that we
can discover each other's worth, dignity and God-given potential.
I believe that I need the homeless just as much as the homeless need the
larger community or need me. Because it's also when I get caught up in
pride, possession and prestige and start to go off-track that people like
Avis and Roger, people who are broken and know the importance, bring us
back. What we're trying to do is stay connected. And it's just as important
for the volunteers as it is for the guests and those who find themselves
homeless as well.
Thank you very much.
[Applause.]
