Northeast Indiana offers services for those suffering temporary and chronic homelessness, and those services aim to provide the most immediate and quality care they can for individuals and families in need.
In part two of a five-part series on homelessness in Northeast Indiana, WBOI’s Zach Bernard looks into the one population that agencies agree needs more attention.
Fort Wayne and Allen County offers services for women who encounter situational homelessness. Vincent Village takes in primarily single, female-headed families, while the Redemption House serves as a transition home for women battling drug addiction.
But former Fort Wayne Director of Housing and Urban Development Heather Presley-Cowen says there’s one area that needs more attention.
“What we find is women without children and without an addiction often have nowhere to go,” said Presley-Cowen.
This was the case for Carol Davis. She’s originally from Saginaw, Michigan, but personal circumstances led to her moving to Fort Wayne.
“It was domestic violence,” Carol said. “I didn’t want to be in that situation ever again, and I didn’t want my children to be expelled to that, so that’s why I moved here.”
She says she tried moving in with her daughter, which didn’t work out. Soon after, Carol found herself alone without a home or family support, with nowhere to go.
“I wasn’t working, so that was the biggest issue right there. I was looking for work but I couldn’t find it at the time,” she said.
Eventually, Carol found Just Neighbors. She says they welcomed her, and had the resources to help her when she needed it most. But her situation highlights a greater service need in Northeast Indiana: immediate shelters for women without children or addiction problems.
Service agencies like Just Neighbors take part in a planning council to determine areas of need around the community, and that information is relayed back to the City of Fort Wayne.
Presley-Cowen notes this as a helpful guide for the City to determine where it invests its money.
“If I’m only focused on women or I’m only focused on men, I will only be focused on that piece,” she said. “Collectively, they get together to see, is there a bigger problem that needs to be solved.”
Currently, that group has zeroed in on the need for more services for women without children or addictions. But adding these services is challenging under a tight budget.
Each year, the City of Fort Wayne gets roughly $300,000 for homelessness from HUD to disburse between agencies. According to Presley-Cowen, this resource is scarce.
“We put those dollars on the streets with a ‘Notice of Funds Availability’ -- it’s going to look a lot like what we heard in the planning process, and then those agencies need to come to us with their best solutions to compete for those dollars,” she said.
This summer, ten agencies were awarded part of a $360,000 disbursement from the City to help with various services. None of that money went to women without children or addiction.
Right now, we’re roughly six months away from knowing who will get funding when the planning process is complete. Presley-Cowen notes collaboration among these agencies helps the city move forward, and the focus over the last few months has been refuge for these women who have been overlooked in the past.
As for Carol, she’s back on her feet and found a job in Fort Wayne -- as a case manager with Just Neighbors. And she learned an important lesson about homelessness from her experience.
“Never be judgmental toward someone because you don’t know what their situation is. If anything, we need to help them because we don’t know how they became like that,” she said.
Discussions among agencies and city officials will continue into the New Year, as the City determines how many HUD dollars it can dedicate to the agencies in 2017.
