 Hello everyone welcome to the third annual Hope benefit concert and our annual panel discussion on homelessness. So we'll start with our prepared questions. Got a very small program started of Sunday showers for homeless people on Sundays using Hickey Gym because they had access to Hickey Gym and nobody uses Hickey Gym on Sundays mostly and just seemed like a no-brainer to open it up and have it available for homeless people to at least get a shower. I got involved many years ago with DCM back in 1993 as a volunteer and I got involved for a couple of different reasons. One was I have a family history of mental health issues and it's one of my parents and secondly I had served as attorney at a major mental health institution in the state of California for many years and got to realize how mental health and homelessness kind of went hand-in-hand. I had reached out to the director which is Leslie Kemp and pretty much asked her what the basic needs center would do and I liked what they were about so I joined. I got into the kind of work related to basic needs about a year ago last summer and mostly due to my own personal experiences with trying to kind of balance being a student and the financial challenges that come with it and so I just had a lot of empathy for how challenging some of the situations can be sometimes. I was a student here in the early 70s and I always wanted to come back and retire here. I got hit by a car and lost all my money because a person was not insured and on my road to recovery I finally was awarded a disability check and I hitched to Davis for a place to live and discovered I could not afford to live in my own town. I had lived homeless in San Francisco. There are quite a few homeless people in San Francisco and I noticed that they had something called a street sheet. There was a it was a non-profit and they would give 25 papers a week I think to anyone who wanted them and the people could use these to sell. So I thought that was a pretty good idea and I created what is now a 20 page newsletter journal. I've been working on helping put up a proposal for an emergency day and night shelter run by the city of Davis to help support the homeless community. What does it look like? The homeless look in Davis to me it looks like lines for community meals and I think Bill can probably tell you a lot more about that than I can but there are places where the homeless and others can go to go eat so to me it looks like community but it also looks like lines and waiting for people. Homelessness to me and Davis also looks like people with no place to be hanging out in places where they can panhandle for money typically stores restaurants particularly liquor stores restaurants. Homelessness to me looks like typically older men not generally women but women too as well looks to me like sleeping in our downtown and places where they are obviously seen and have no place to sleep. They do the things that you and I do but they do it out in the open. Homelessness looks to me like people with severe personality dysfunction maybe even schizophrenia walking through town looking in cans for food looking in cans to recycle. Homelessness looks to me like people sleeping on campus public areas EMU that kind of thing that's what homelessness looks like to me. In my experience I think there's a lot of diversity in the homeless community and the reasons for why people do become homeless and I think it's it's very different between the student population and the community population. I think the the community population of homelessness is it's more of a shared issue with Yolo County as a whole with especially with West Sacramento and Woodland and kind of what was said earlier there there's a lot of issues that make coming out of homelessness difficult the higher rates of substance abuse and the lack of sort of support programs that these people may have difficulty sort of finding in the first place and there there are a lot of good support programs and there's multiple community meal programs in Davis and I think just identifying them can be kind of difficult. We at the Aggie Compass we specifically deal with students primarily that are having difficulty associated with housing and there's a lot of diversity in what that looks like. Some students are sleeping in the cars. There was one report of a student sleeping in the elevator shaft. They didn't self identify but we do have sort of like caseworkers that are school that are dedicated to working with these students one-on-one to help them find housing. I would say that in my experience I see homelessness in the community more visible than homelessness in the student community and I think that Davis is trying to provide more programs to become more visible and I do appreciate student organizations like Hope helping to destigmatize being homeless because a lot of students are not educated on the resources that Davis has to offer and also programs that are in the works or just even like the community programs that are around Davis community meals and like Empower Yellow like there are so many that students don't know. So I think that for me personally and like why I enjoy organizations like Hope I didn't really know if there was a way to necessarily like reach out to homeless people because you know it's like stigmatized like oh like you know you when you see someone you kind of just like walk as quickly as you can and don't say anything but I do appreciate like what they do and they have educated me on how to break those barriers and like communicate because they are people as well and they may be in a different situation than I am in but I do think that everyone needs help. I guess I've kind of struggled to figure out what homelessness in Davis looks like because to me in my experience homelessness is pretty much the same everywhere. You know it's an issue that's caused a lot by major mental health issues, substance abuse issues, lack of life skills, lack of housing, a whole multitude of issues that can cause anybody anywhere from any socioeconomic background, any economic status, any degree to at some point in time in their life become homeless. I mean in all the years I've served at Executive Director of DCM and my years as a volunteer I've seen people as diverse as doctors and lawyers have been homeless to folks who unfortunately grew up in a foster care system and were basically had the worst of the worst child that you could ever imagine and all those folks were homeless. I mean the difficulty is is that a lot of times it's folks who become developmental health issues at some point in time in their life, substance abuse issues, a whole range of other things that can conspire to get somebody to kind of lose the support of their family and end up homeless in the streets and whether it's Davis or Woodland or Westsac or the Bay Area or Southern California. It's unfortunately a problem that's not only been here for quite a while but it's also unfortunately in the last few years growing quite rapidly. In the city of Davis we went from 146 homeless folks in 2017 to 190 in 2019. 40-44 people were more experiencing homeless now than they were just two years ago and those numbers are kind of kind of being replicated pretty much everywhere around the state at this point in time. I heard that Orange County I think went up 150% of where they were just a few years ago, increased from 45 to almost 7,000. So I mean the increase in homelessness right now is unfortunately happening quite rapidly and you know I think a lot of that has to do with the lack of housing, the lack of housing development, whether it's affordable housing or any other kind of housing and of course there's different issues about services to the folks with major major mental health problems and some substance abuse and how you effectively deal with those issues to end their homelessness. I mean the one little odd thing I would always tell folks is being a university town, the one little distinction I would always say I found in Davis as opposed to other places is that university towns and unfortunately not fortunately unfortunately seem to attract folks who actually have a lot of degrees. I mean you know if you go to the homeless population in Davis you're going to find quite a number of folks in the streets who have BA's and other degrees such as that who are homeless and I think that's popular population for those folks in a town with a university like Berkeley, Santa Cruz and those communities. You unfortunately get to attract folks who have a smarter than average homeless folks and that's really about the only thing I think that distinguishes Davis's homeless population anywhere else in the state. My experience in helping with IRWS for many years and then helping with the Sunday showers for the last over two years is it doesn't have, there's no racial thing, there's no gender thing, certainly there's no age thing. We've had at IRWS a mom and three little girls came in and it was, I can't tell you how heartbreaking it was, we're having breakfast the next morning, they spent the night at the shelter, we're having breakfast the morning and it's just this, we had like instant oatmeal or something and that was the breakfast that they were going to get and the mom took the little girls into the bathroom and she's brushing their hair and brushing her teeth and comes out and the littlest one just on her own just comes up and climbs in my lap and just sits there and gets her stuff and she starts eating and I'm just like, wow, I just felt like I'm not worthy and I don't do enough to help and so that really spurred me to just go, in this city, which I moved here in 77 as a student and thought I was going to be here for a couple of years, right, like a lot of people and then never left, it boggles my mind that we have the resources that we have, that the university has a budget of $4.5 billion a year and we can't just figure out how to figure, you know, solve this and Julie knows this from our experience with the sunny showers. To me, they were, it's just a little thing that we do that the very first shower guest was an overnight guest with a rotating shelter, they couldn't let him stay there because he had lice and they have rules, he can't be in the shelter with lice and so the lady that ran it said, if I bring him over to Hickey Gym tomorrow, can he use the shower to, he's got to put the cream on and do the whole thing and it was like, just the simplest act of dignity to let this guy take a shower was so simple to do, but it was everything for him, right, because there's no place, hey, can I come take, I've got lice, can I come to your house and take a shower, there was just no place to do it and I just, I look at that story, I'm sitting in the locker room with him while he's throwing away his clothes, we've got gloves on and we're talking and he's looking around, he goes, so this is the athletic thing? And I said, yeah, he goes, you know, I was city champion, 110 high hurdles or something in Los Angeles, he's a guy about my age, when I was in high school and then I got in a car accident and broke my back and things went south and I just thought to myself, it just struck me like, for me, there, but for the grace of God, go I, I mean, that could happen to anybody, right, and this guy, I don't know what all the other turns he had to make in his life and so forth to get where he was, but I just thought, that's this simple gesture of offering a shower so simple to do, and yet, we know the red tape that you can hit from a major research institution, as you can from any institution, was like, well, you have to have this and liability, I used to be a litigator for many years, and so I could understand that side of things on that side of but to me, I think what it looks like in Davis is it could be any one of us, depending on what happens to us in our life. People that would come in for showers grew up in Davis, and I thought, how could this guy grow up in Davis and be, how do we let this happen? Sort of, right? And also, people from, it's not the Czech Republic, it's Czechia now, is that accurate, does anybody, my European history people, I think it's now, and very well educated and but homeless and coming to the shower, you know, every week. So it looks like it could be anybody, it could be anything, and as many people as you'll see homeless, there's probably that many stories is how it happened. But it's just very hard for me to reconcile how we haven't fixed it or taking better steps towards fixing it, because it's still here, it still exists, it's getting greater. Stigma means different things to different people. To me, it means a cluster of assumptions that I make without much reason or without much thought about something that I see or hear. So when a person asked me, do I think homeless people are stigmatized? I think what they're asking me is what prejudices, what assumptions do I or others make about them when I see them. And for sure, homeless people who look like homeless people, it's the easiest thing in the world to assume that they are homeless by choice, that if they didn't like the way they were living, they go get a job, or they would do this, or they would do that. And that's independent of whether or not the opportunities are really there. And when people find themselves chronically homeless, I'm not talking about a few weeks or three months, I'm talking about years long. We forget, and I can say we because been there done that don't want to do it again, right? We lose that connection between work and reward, ie, something to do and get paid for it. It's living day to day, you people do not make the best effort at their appearance. They don't make the best effort of using language that's not offensive to the average person. In short, we lose the persona that one needs to have to not be stigmatized. But if you see somebody, you know, with a backpack and they're dirty, and the backpack is dirty, or they're talking kind of crazy, or, or they're just not somebody you know, or you're not used to being around. Then it's only natural, I think this is what we have to fight. It's only natural to assume that that person is potentially dangerous to you and yours. And that's right. What I mean, and what I feel that people mean when they use the word stigmatize a certain set of assumptions and perceptions. And it doesn't matter whether they're, they're, they're accurate or valid or not, they, they are made, and we have to work, you know, work with that. I would agree that maybe prejudice is a little bit of a better word in, in place of stigma. And I think those prejudices are a lot in place. So a lot of times based on superficial things like appearance, when you don't have the resources to kind of keep your hygiene up. And I would also just kind of like to emphasize what was said about the importance of the issue of like, just get a job and you won't be homeless. But when you're, when you're in kind of a different environment, it can be kind of difficult to get back into the group of things like you've ever taken a break from school. It's kind of hard just to adapt back to like a full class course load. But even with things like work and the whole day to day affairs of the work reward system, it's something that you kind of have to learn. It's a part of a life skill and it can be difficult to, to get back into that kind of that pattern of work. And with the, with specifically the student population, one issue that we've kind of run into with our center on campus is the, the issue of student, of there being knowledge of certain students being homeless, but the difficulty of them kind of self identifying themselves so we can support them so the university can't provide resources to them. And there's been times where the reported student that was homeless just, we, we never got to actually talk to them or meet them. And I think part of that maybe is the, the prejudice of kind of having to come out and, and state and talk about it in the first place. And I'm hoping things, things like this panel will help de-stigmatize that issue because there, there has to be solutions out there for these students and for the community members because there's a lot of, there's a lot of financial assets and, and different programs that are in the works and development. I guess like I would say that people are not like receptive to homelessness because I think that individuals don't think it's going to happen to them. Like if they have a stable job and, you know, over for the head, they're like, oh, that can never be me. So I feel like people don't, I don't know, like are in a hurry to, to help out unless like the situation is like theirs and it's, and it's like directly affecting them. And I think that's something that has to stop. Like you don't know when, where or how that you could possibly be in that situation, but it is a possibility. And I feel like people aren't really taking that seriously. But in general, I do think that individuals should just, to just help others because if you were in that situation, I feel that you would want someone to help you as well. And to, to piggyback off of what Ryan said, I, I would agree that our center does try to, we want to help students and community members who are homeless. We've tried multiple ways to get these students to identify and just speak up. But I do, I don't know who's going to be that first one to speak up, but I do believe when it does happen. I think that's like the first step into like breaking the stigma because I think we had found out that there were homeless students when the fires had happened and there's a whole like community of them. And there's like a leader, but that person, we don't know who that person is, but they don't want to like identify themselves or their community because, you know, they're protecting each other. So I think we have to do better and to, to make them feel comfortable to talk to us because we have the resources. Yeah, no one's taking advantage of them. So I just, I just hope that we do make a great effort to destigmatize homelessness. I'm only talking specifically about the homeless folks I deal with. I'm not really too familiar with homeless students. I would just kind of say this. I know I've had lots of discussions the last few years about students being homeless at UC Davis. And yet nobody have ever talked to can quantify it or qualify it or actually give me any kind of rationale of who they are, what they're doing, are they outside or the inside sleeping in cars, couch surfing? I have no idea, frankly. And frankly, I mean from the discussions I've had and this comes from some folks at the university administration, I'm not clear that they're really actually wanting all those answers. Because frankly, I think it'd be a scandal to find out that out of a university with what is a 25, 30,000 students now, that you've got, you know, hundreds of students who because of lack of finances are living homeless and going day to day without knowing where they're going to feed themselves. And that would be a scandal of monumental proportions, frankly, especially since from my view of what the university's done the last number of years, I think they've built probably close to $150 million worth of buildings on campus in different places. And so instead of doing that, maybe way more, okay, he probably knows more than I do. Instead of spending the money to help students are spending on buildings like the Food Institute, the Minetti Shrep Museum. I mean I'm not sure there's a bunch of others that I don't know about, frankly. So I think that's, unfortunately, I think at this point in time unless somebody really kind of forces the issue with the university administration, I'm not clear. I know that there's any kind of thought process to actually kind of evaluate the situation in a way that's going to result in any solutions. Be that as may, I mean for the folks I deal with the homelessness on the streets of Davis, I think there's a lot of stigmatization. And I think a lot of it comes due to the fact that the folks who are homeless who don't look like you and I, don't act like you and I, don't dress like you and I, that dirty, they sometimes smell, they act strangely, they walk down the streets and are talking to themselves, they're doing a whole range of behaviors that set them apart from you and I. And I think the real kind of tragedy of that is as I sell folks, if I go around town, I speak to the service organizations, the disc club, that club, this group, that group. Pretty much every time I speak, I know some people in the room have one, family members who have been homeless or are homeless currently, two, family members with major mental health problems, and three, some abuse issues, and probably a few folks in the audience who have some abuse issues. And those are some of the main reasons why people are homeless and yet there's not a connection between their own personal experience and the experience of folks who are homeless. And I think it's just kind of people are shutting themselves up to the idea that these folks are somebody's children, you know, somebody's mom and dad, somebody's brother and sister. And that is the homeless population. I mean, everybody out there, you have no idea how many homeless folks I know who have not had contact with their children for many years, their mom and dad, their brothers and sisters, there's a wall that kind of goes up around them that kind of prevents them to have any support system outside of themselves and their local homeless population and some service providers. And that's really where the breakdown comes in. Unfortunately, keep people in the streets for a long times. I agree on the on the stigma. I think it's for many people, it's they are looking for a reason not to get involved because they are different. This person looks different for me. I'm not going to get involved. So now I have to create a reason for why I'm choosing not to get involved with this person's situation. Yes, I do think that it is necessary for the city of Davis, UC Davis students and the existing nonprofits to collaborate to help solve the issue of homelessness. One cohesive approach is far better than multiple smaller projects where we don't even talk to each other. And each of these groups bring something different to the table. I mean the different nonprofits bring experience and the expertise needed to address homelessness. The UC Davis students, they bring energy and creativity to the table. As a UC Davis student myself, I want to change the world for the better. And that's part of the reason I came to Davis to gain experiences and see what role I have in shaping the world. And I think that's why many other UC Davis students came to Davis. And I do think that those students are a crucial piece in solving homelessness. And then the city of Davis has the manpower to create change and also connections to larger entities like the state and federal government. And so as an intern for the mayor of Davis, Brett Lee, I've been working on proposal for an emergency day and night shelter here in Davis. And so the city of Davis is ready to collaborate with everyone. And there are several different ideas on the table for the day and night shelter. But the main goal of the project is to be a one year pilot program that would provide the homeless community a place to go during the day and get out of the weather. It would be a place for them to store their belongings, a place to take a shower and a place to receive access to services. And we also hope to have a night portion that would allow people to stay so they aren't sleeping in a tent year round instead of just the four months of the year that IRWS has. And we know it won't solve homelessness, but we just hope to ease the pains and problems of being homeless. And if this proposal is approved by the city council, it's not yet, but we will need the help of UC Davis students to serve as interns to help run the program and provide for the needs of the homeless community in Davis. And I was hoping that a group of students here, if you were interested, would be able to be interns because we need our interns to be leaders and to serve different aspects of the program. And so after this, I do have a sheet to sign up so that when the day and night shelter does get approved, we can send out information.