 Good evening and welcome back to Byline. This is a public affairs show here at Amherst Media and still working collaboratively with the Amherst League of Women Voters. Although we've changed our format, having gone into 2020, the new decade, last year we did a show every week, now we're doing them every other week, but we're still going to be bringing interesting people into the studio to talk about the work that they do, whether they're in the government or do things that can connect and touch our new local government and town council. So we're going to keep following the transition here in Amherst to our new form of government. Today we have two guests with us and these are people who have been working really hard in the community around homelessness and housing, and of course this community has made a priority over time of trying to live by this idea that we're all in this together and we have responsibility to help and care for each other, especially those who find themselves on hard times or have difficult situations that they have to deal with. And so Wayling is very well known here in town. How long have you been in town? Twenty-five years, exactly. Twenty-five years. I'm well known, but I am not on the most wanted list. Thank goodness for that. Well known because you've been active in the community. So tell us first how you got to Amherst, what brought you to town, and then we'll talk about what your passions are. Well, I came here with my husband and four children from Tennessee, and we moved up here because Amherst has excellent school system, and they have a wonderful orchestra program. So all my children had gone through the school system orchestra program, and they all received wonderful excellent education. For that I'm just so grateful. And so that, if I'm remembering correctly, four children. Yes, we have four children. They went through the Amherst school systems. They went off to college. Do I remember that two or three of them ended up in the big Ivy League school? Yes, I'm very proud to say. You should be. Three graduates from Harvard and the fourth? Oberlin College. Oberlin. Pretty good. Okay, absolutely, especially for music. And was that one of the children who was really good at music? He didn't play music. He ended up going to economics. Interesting. And now working as the chief economist for the state of Maryland. Wow. The chief economist for the state of Maryland. Wow. It's a nice title, but he said to me, I only have one person in the office, myself, and others who help me. So he's the chief of himself. He's the chief. Very good. And we also have Tom Fair with us today. Tom, tell us how you found your way to Amherst. I was farming in Montague. And the land that I was farming on was going to be used to build houses. And so I was asked to move. And I never quite successfully found another good piece of land. So after I moved that from that piece of land, I tried two or three other places in it. It was never as successful as it was. So I ended up coming to Amherst because I got a job working at All Things Local, which was a year-round indoor farmers market in downtown Amherst. And that promptly closed about after a year I was working there. And then that's when it really got difficult. And I found myself being without a home. And I just stayed in the Amherst area because it was, I had a car at the time. But the reason I stayed close to Amherst is because I think Amherst has solved the food poverty issue. I mean, if you're hungry and you're in Amherst, then you're just not paying attention because there's at least 20 places during the week where you can get food. So you can get meals. You can get meals. You can also get food products. Yeah. And so that was, I stayed in Amherst because of my basic needs. And then I went back to UMass in 2015, from 2015 to 2017, to get my bachelor's in agriculture. And that was quite expensive thing to do. And after I graduated, I just really found it difficult to find good work. And that compounded what was going on. So that was how I got to Amherst, yeah. And your connection, and the reason you're here is because you met Wei Ling and her colleagues at Amherst Community Connections. And that was because you first needed food. And Wei Ling, your first work in town as a volunteer and as a community activist, was around food. And remind us about that. Oh, that was back in 20, well, since 1996, I started working as an operator for a local soup kitchen called Not Bread Alone at the First Congregational Church. And for a dozen plus years, I cooked, cleaned, worked with volunteers, prepared gorgeous, nutritious, delicious meals, Wednesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. And it's always wonderful lentil soups with garlic bread and Italian, you know, cuisines not as good as yours. But we have a good crowd. But at the end of the day, I noticed all those wonderful guests, 60, 70 of them, would come and went. And when they left, I knew that they were still going to be on the street because they were homeless. They had no place to go. So after some thinking, I realized I could be of more service to them if I could help them get housing when they can make a nice meal for themselves if they have a place to call home. So instead of coming to the soup kitchen, they can cook for themselves, have friends over, and have a really normal life that we are all entitled to have. And so your work then progressed from food to shelter. Yes, food, shelter, and housing. And housing because ultimately the solution to homelessness is a place to live. Housing is the solution to homelessness. And so tell us what your observation and experience has been working in this community around homelessness and housing. Well, I have to say the town of Amherst and the people of Amherst have been very mindful and generous. I will talk about the town over the years when Amherst Community Connections apply for grant funding to provide temporary vouchers for the homeless. Every time when we ask, the town would give us money for housing vouchers. So that shows the town is really mindful of the homeless issues. And our agency is very small. We rely on 100 percent volunteers. So with such a small budget, the public over these 10-plus years has been donating generously every year to our agency, Amherst Community Connections, such that we can meet our repayment. We can pay for the internet connection that we can buy paper to print documents. So the support of the community and the town of Amherst not only support us financially, but there are organizations such as the Affordable Housing Trust, the town entity, and they really put their stamp on many issues, whether it's making it easier for people to access public housing by streamlining the process or coming up forums to really hear from the homeless community their plight and their solutions. So they are really a very on the ground workforce that we see. Do I recall that at one point the town had a homelessness task force or committee that you were a member of and one of the leaders of? Oh, yes. And that was an interim step between the work on food and the formation of Amherst Community Connections. Is that correct? Right. That's correct. That was back in 2010 when I was the chair of the Committee on Homelessness, which is a town committee. And working with the committee members, including Mr. Kevin Noonan, who used to run a shelter in Springfield. In Springfield, yes. Right. So through the work of the community members and the help of Mr. Noonan, he had become a committee member as well. So through all of us work, the town gave us the blessing as the committee that we went out looking for a site for shelter. And with all the churches that we went to, there were three of them say, yes, we want to be part of the solution. But at the end of the day, when analysis is done, the first Baptist church was the church with the best condition in terms of the sheltering space available. So then in 2010, the first Baptist church became a warming center that Mr. Noonan and other volunteers and myself, we were there making soups, making grilled cheese sandwiches. And that was the first winter when the shelter was started. In a typical year, how many people come through Amherst Community Connections looking for help with housing? Oh. For most recent statistics that in 2019, this past year, now we are hitting almost 800 unique individual households. Some of the households have two people, children. Some of the households has one person. So almost 800 unique individuals. Here in this little town? Believe it or not, you might think Amherst is a quite wealthy, you know, fluent town. But of those 800 people, 800 households who came to us, 90% of them, either they are homeless or they are facing eviction or they experience inability to pay rent, behind on rent, about to be evicted. So almost 90% of the 800 households who came to us have this issue. And we seem to be the only agency in town focused strictly just on housing. But anything touches on housing, we would try to help. So Tom, you connected with Wei Ling around your homelessness. You were homeless for a period of time. Yeah, a co-worker of mine told me to go to the Amherst Housing Authority and see what they had for housing. And then they sent me over to ACC one rainy morning and I just, I did it because I said I would. And then it was how I was welcomed that I knew I had come to the right place. So you were not hopeful at first, but you thought you got to do it. Indifferent. It's not that I wasn't hopeful. I was just, my co-worker said to go over there and I said I would so I did what I said and I didn't have any preconceptions of what would happen. And I was surprised by what did occur and I graduated very quickly through the programs and the paperwork, the mountains of paperwork. That's the one thing and you just, you know, you shake your head and you do it. But I think the biggest reason why it worked for me was that I cooperated. I didn't go in there with any preconceived notion of how it should work. And over the time you were connected with them, what were the things that they worked with you on? Organizing my debt, trying to find me more work, just supporting me with the very little things on a weekly basis, sometimes twice a week. And that makes all the difference in the world, you know. Sometimes you think you have to start with all the big, difficult things. But if you organize and all the small things like getting your Social Security Guard and having the right identification and then having all the paperwork that you need to verify other paperwork with. Those are the really important things that I think that go unseen. So they became a partner for you, a guide and a partner in helping you go through all of the little steps leading to the big steps. And where did it take you? I felt good being organized, you know, nothing was going to be as a prize. I wasn't going to get a phone call saying there's this emergency, you know, I have to come up with $500 for this or that, as there was no surprises after a certain time. And I was still in my car. I converted my car into like a camper, so it wasn't incredibly uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. And then I got into a transitional room, and that was two months of that, and then another two months in a different place. And I finally got my Section 8 voucher, and now I'm in a place that's mine. My name's on the lease, I'm not part of any program anymore. And you're employed? I have steady work right next door at the Jones Library, so I don't need transportation. But if I did need transportation, the bussing in Amherst is exceptional, you can get anywhere you want to go anytime of the day. So you feel a real part of the community, and this is your home now, and you might prefer to be farming, but you need to go in a new direction, and they helped you find that new direction. Yeah, it's like there's a confidence now that I'm not really looking over my shoulder anymore, and I have to get used to that, because when I finish work, and I go home, and I'm cooking dinner, I'm like, what's the catch, because I still have that feeling that something is amiss, but it's not. You have to get used to the fact that you are now, who you really are, and you're able to support yourself, and you're a productive member of the community, and you just have to get used to that idea again, because you were before, and you hit a hard time, but you're back. I don't think anybody really knew, I didn't really broadcast it, that I had a full-time job, and I didn't have a home, so I think I was surviving pretty well, despite not having a place, I had all of what I need with me, so I'm grateful for the experience too, because of the change of perspective, and now my new situation just feels so good that I could be nothing other than grateful, so it's been quite a journey. When I was working in Boston on Thanksgiving for probably five or six years, I would go to Pine Street Inn, which is the biggest shelter in Boston, very well known there, and tremendous facility, huge number of people, and the stories, the people we would meet, and the stories we would hear were just so amazing, because many of these people were people who had very high training, they were engineers, they were lawyers, they were business owners, and they hit a rough patch in their life, and in most of those cases, a single incident led to a series of other incidents which led to them becoming homeless, and you meet these people and you think, wow, this can happen to anybody, a health situation, a family break up, a sudden unexpected employment, and you are in a new world, and you have to figure out how to navigate it, so congratulations that you are on a really great path. Well I don't think it would have been such a success story had it not been an amour, because I think that as Wayling said earlier, the people of amours are very generous and conscientious, and there is no food poverty, and that's one of the biggest things. There are a lot of hungry people, but they have a way to feed themselves, because of amours, but what's next on housing, because I'm assuming that we haven't fixed everything we need to fix in that realm. No, not at all. So Wayling, do you want to weigh in on what you see from the organization's perspective about what the next steps are, because I'm really excited to hear the conversation about how from the people who are working with these kinds of situations that we've got a great food system in town, and we have an improving system and situation around homelessness, but we're not done yet. What's next? Well, what's next? It's always producing more housing that people can't afford. Right now the amours housing market is so unaffordable, more than 50% of the people who are renters, they are paying more than 50% of their income on housing. So anytime, as you said, they have a little bit of incident, whether it's utility bill high due to the winter or loss of employment or sickness, they will fall behind on their rent. And when you have rent owed to the landlord, the next thing you will know is the infection. So in amours, we really need to produce more housing that's affordable to our residents here. And while we are struggling to come up with more housing for the people who are on the virtue of becoming homeless due to the high rent, I want to ask the public to be more supportive of the efforts. In particular, the Northampton Road 28 units of studio apartments has had a lot of oppositions from some of the public members. And if we all recognize housing is a basic human needs and basic human right. So when you speak against a development, you may not be so readily saying no. You want to think everyone should have housing. But if the idea is, oh, the housing is going to be for those who are homeless, then shouldn't be here. I want to ask all of us to go inside of each one of us, think if the person who experiences homelessness, if it's my brother, it's my father, it's my aunt, how will we handle that compassion, kindness, and being mindful of how our opposition can impact people who really don't have a voice in the community because they are homeless. They are struggling. They are being evicted. So that would be something. We've had on the show as a guest twice, I believe, Jack Horneck, I keep thinking of I know a Jack Horner. It's John Horneck, who's the chair of the Affordable Housing Trust in Amherst. Can you talk a little bit about your views on the work that they're doing? Because they're very much behind that Northampton Road property that you're talking about. And they recently came up with a plan, which has been reviewed by the town council. Give us some thoughts and reaction to what you know about the work that they're doing in terms of their long-range plan and the work that they're doing. Well, I must profess that I do not know enough to make comments on all their projects they do, but it is as a member of the nonprofit communities, we had to go to the Affordable Housing Trust to ask for support for the projects we do. And I'll use this example to show the breadth of the work that they have in mind. We provide social service to prevent homelessness. We provide social service to those who are homeless. And the homeless population, it's a fairly small population. And the population who are being rent-behind, being evicted, also a small population. So the Affordable Housing Trust, they have a lot on their table. So when we went to them a couple of months ago asking if they could lend their committee support for a grant proposal that we are writing, which is called the Housing-Based Homeless Services. After I made a presentation, I could see the members of the committee look at me, really gave me the encouragement I need. So in the 10 minutes presentation, they said, yes, this is the kind of things that we need. While we as a committee, Housing Trust Fund, working to build more affordable housing, for those who are homeless on the street, we must find a way for them to have some stability, some housing stability. Because of that realization, affordable housing takes time. But what do people need in the meantime? Because of their insight, they understand support service is also very much needed. So that's something I have to say that the committee trust members, they are made up with people who really have been there and really understand the needs for housing. And I want to do a shout out for their breadth of their work. Not only they tackle the most basic how to build more units, but they are in the forefront of working with legislatures to talk about the 40R zoning and how we can address the housing restrictions by looking at the zoning bylaws. So those are the big pictures. And Mr. Hornick, who has such a breadth of the policy landscape, he was able to work with his committee members and really come up with very concrete different various proposals to propose to the town of Amherst. And as you said earlier, helping people stay in their homes and not become homeless is job one. Job two is if they are homeless or become homeless, to give them the wraparound services as they say in the jargon, so that you're not just looking at the housing, you're looking at the wide range of things that are necessary as Tom experienced in order to be able to get through that tough time and get yourself back into a living situation that gives you stability and security so you can go on to work and doing other things that you need to do. Very true. Yeah, the stability. Maybe Tom, you have something to say, how the housing stability has made it easy for you maybe to carry on your job. Give us one minute on that because we're almost out of time, but that would be great to hear your thought on that. Well, I mean, it's night and day, having a place to shower and cook meals and to sleep through the night and not having one. I mean, it's still sinking in and I'm still in the gratitude phase, but I don't think there's any comparison. I mean, if you have a place to live, you can self-actualize. You can become yourself, but you can't really do that if you're trying to not freeze to death. So it just makes all the difference in the world. I don't know what's ahead, but I think very good things are ahead. Great. Well, Weyland Greeny, thank you for the work you've done for these decades both in food and now in shelter and Tom, congratulations to you. It's really an inspiring story to see someone who's making it again. So that's great. And thank you for joining us. And you've heard it here. There's a lot going on in Amherst that you can help with in many different ways, be a cheerleader, be a funder, be a supporter. So thank you and we'll see you again another time.