Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Two Cape Cods: Hidden Poverty on the Cape and Islands - Part 8

The NOAH emergency shelter in downtown Hyannis is a warm blessing for the more than 500 people who stay there each year. There are showers, a coatroom, and everyone gets a set of fresh sheets each week. Dinner is served around 5:30pm.

Each afternoon, around 4pm, clients arrive and things start to get busy. When it's cold outside, procuring one of the shelter's fifty beds becomes a pressing issue for each client in hope of shelter. The staff has to be diligent, says Deputy Department Director Tom Brigham.

Tom Brigham: "Every night, the foyer fills up with people coming in. And because of our numbers, we actually try to do a lottery program to make sure it is fair and the strongest don't get to the front of the door, and we try to do as much as we can to keep a nice quiet environment as we are trying to make people feel safe as they are coming in."

Some of the people who come in smell like booze. But Brigham says the assumption that the majority of the Cape's homeless are alcoholics and addicts, is simply false. Brigham estimates that about 30% of shelter clients have substance abuse problems, and those individual tend to be chronically homeless.

Tom Brigham: "Substance abuse is such a difficult issue to deal with, even when you're housed, that it becomes even more difficult to deal with when you're on the street. When you think about it, there are a lot of alcoholics who are housed, so homelessness itself isn't a substance abuse problem. But if you have that issue, it becomes almost impossible to get out of that situation when you're dealing with it."

Sam Creney is an artist who used to own Atlantic Sam's Taxi Company in Provincetown. (She added "Atlantic" in order to get a better spot in the phone book.) After her partner died, Am was swindled by a local lawyer. She came home one day to find her condominium sold and her belongings in the street.

Sam Creney: "I lived in Provincetown for over thirty years. I had a partner for thirty years. She died overnight of an asthma attack. She had asthma her whole life. She had a big asthma attack and died. And I had a condo, I had a taxi business, you know, I had a life down there and ... I lost everything. I ended up homeless. I was at the shelter. I was at the NOAH shelter."

Homelessness blind-sided Creney, although in Provincetown, it was a circumstance she had seen others find themselves in before.

Sam Creney: "Life changed with AIDS. I watched them. They were on our couch. 'We can't go home. We have no home. Our parents said go away.' It was weird. We were right on the front lines. It was the women that took care of all the guys. They were your friends, they were dying. They were dropping like flies."

Creney left NOAH two years ago. She found a home in Hyannis through CHAMP Homes. CHAMP Homes is an example of what homeless advocates call the Housing First model. It's a place to regroup and recover, a place where everyone is considered family. Residents can stay as long as they want, and they don't have to win a lottery each afternoon in order to get a bed to sleep in.

At CHAMP Homes, Creney found art again. She now runs an art studio there, which is used regularly by about a dozen residents, many of whom are still teenagers.

Sam Creney: "A lot of people don't think they are worthy, they don't think they are good enough. They don't think they can do anything, except get in trouble. They're all like, I'm not an artist, and I say everybody is. Well, when I was in the third grade, they told me I stunk. And I'd say, well, that was then, and this is now. You don't stink."

Paul and Caroline Hebert founded CHAMP Homes fifteen years ago. Before that they had a hand in opening a soup kitchen, as well as the NOAH shelter. Now they help people with another basic need ? housing. The Herbert's run three properties with a total of forty beds. Opening the art studio was Paul's idea. An artist himself, he knew such a place could be powerfully therapeutic.

Paul Hebert: "Before we even had it opened, one of the young men who I gave a pad and some pencils to, drew a suicide painting that we were able to find and get him some help. As a result of giving him that ability to express himself. It was a painting of a cemetery, of a graveyard with his tombstone, with his name on it, with his death day on it, and we were able to respond to that."

The Heberts are pursuing a new project, one that would open a restaurant with worker housing and daycare near Barnstable High School. The goal is not only to provide housing, but also training in one of the few professions where employment is fairly steady on the Cape and Islands. Meanwhile, a much-heralded plan to relocate the NOAH Shelter and its Duffy Health Center from downtown Hyannis to a new location near the airport, was put on hold in 2005 and is now in limbo.

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