One-stop shopping: Project Homeless Connect links clients to services during daylong event

It was purposeful chaos Wednesday morning inside the Juneau Arts & Humanities Culture Center, where more than 40 organizations were providing everything from haircuts and blood pressure checks to housing applications, food and some very popular sleeping bags.

It’s the sixth time the Juneau Coalition on Housing & Homelessness has hosted Project Homeless Connect, a free event for Juneau’s homeless to get access to a variety of services and resources in one day and in one place.

At the table manned by the Juneau Public Health Center, Joshua Smith was getting a flu shot. Smith was at the event with his partner, Karli Phillips, and said their top priority was regaining custody of their now 4-month-old baby.

“I’d like to get housing, that’s a major critical step to getting our daughter back,” Smith said. “And a support network of people we can call for help, because when you’re out on the street, you’re vulnerable.”

Phillips, who was homeless the entire time she was pregnant, was quick to show off a photo of her baby. The girl is currently in foster care and her mother sees her four times a week.

Housing was “definitely” at the top of her list of the valuable resources at Project Homeless Connect, said Phillips, who explained she was unwilling to stay at shelters due to her concerns over cleanliness and theft.

To that end, she said, she has been filling out “stacks” of paperwork, saying, “It’s all good stuff.”

Finding housing was also the priority for Jessie James Jackson, who said he and his wife had been homeless for nearly 10 months.

“It is starting to get cold out and we want to get to a place where we don’t have to worry,” he said. “We have a kid on the way.”

Jackson is trying to be proactive and admitted it has been a little bit overwhelming. He and his wife have housing, but only until April.

“And then we’ll be homeless again,” he said.

Mid-morning, AWARE Deputy Director Mandy Cole was greeting people at the door, directing them in to take a survey before checking out the available services.

“We conduct a survey to get some demographic information and to make our ‘point in time’ count,” Cole said. “It also gives us information about the issues they might be experiencing” such as domestic violence or eviction.

The homeless coalition has added a question for Alaska Native Corporation affiliation to better track the percentage of how many of the homeless being served are Native, she added.

Cole said there were about 40 people waiting to get in when the event opened, and then providers saw a rush of about 100 people between 9 and 9:30 a.m.

“We’ve got most of the people who come on their own,” she said. “We’ll probably see more families later.”

Project Homeless Connect in Juneau typically sees between 175 and 200 people each year, Cole said, with little variation in the numbers.

“It’s the people who are consistently difficult to house … due to the lack of permanent supportive housing in town,” she said. “I hope we’ll see a significant dent in that number once (the) Housing First (facility) is up and running.”

One of the organizers of the event is Shari Partin from Alaska Housing Development Corporation, which owns and manages 136 apartment units with different levels of subsidies. The corporation also has a housing assistance program, which loans funds for deposits or to stave off evictions, and was helping people obtain state ID cards.

“I see a lot of new faces every year, which is sad in a way,” Partin said. “I would like to not have (to need) this event.”

Project Homeless Connect is a major endeavor for Juneau’s homeless coalition that typically starts in October and involves organizing volunteers, donations and providers, Partin said. The event began in California and has since spread nationwide.

“We seem to grow a little more each year, with more and more agencies,” she said. “The word is getting out.”

New this year was Haven House, which provides recovery and re-entry housing for women; Second Chance re-entry program; Family Promise of Juneau; Keren’s Mobile Sewing Service; and child support services for the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

Family Promise of Juneau is an organization so new that, said Executive Director Joann Flora, “We’re not even open yet.”

Family Promise will function as a nomadic shelter hosted by a rotation of area churches and will have a day center as well as a van for transportation. The group is an affiliate of a national organization that has a “unique focus” on families, one of the segments of the homeless population that tends to be invisible, Flora said.

“This was a great opportunity to do some networking with the other groups in the community,” Flora said.

That was one of the side benefits touted by Partin, who noted that not only did clients get to connect with services, but the service providers get to more easily connect with each other and connect their clients with the other providers.

“I think, for most of the clients, this is easier for them to manage than going around to all the different agencies,” she said. “That can be overwhelming to navigate; people feel safe here.”

• Reporter Liz Kellar can be reached at 523-2246 or at liz.kellar@juneauempire.com.