By Khalida Sarwari
With her right hand cloaked in fleece fingerless gloves, McCartney Giannoni pulled up the sleeve on her left wrist, revealing a tattoo of a bluebird. She’s been chasing a dream, she said. She has followed Paul McCartney around the world for well over a decade now. All she wants now is for him to sign her tattoo.
She came pretty close once. Three years ago she was in the audience at the legendary former Beatle’s concert in Vienna, and by chance he noticed her and had her pulled up on stage. This was it, she thought, her chance to finally get that long-sought-after autograph. But, McCartney had other plans. Buddy Holly’s “It’s So Easy” came on the speakers and McCartney grabbed her wrists and leaned in. “First, we dance.”
“It was, like, a surreal experience, right? Like winning the lottery,” the 53-year-old Giannoni recalled, her eyes wistful and her round, bespectacled face framed by salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair.
Outside, the wind howled and the trees shook as people around her started preparing for the evening. Some helped themselves to a cup of hot coffee, while others visited with friends. A number of them collapsed on their sleeping cots and snuggled with their dogs. Those with more energy started preparing their laundry loads. This mid-December evening was no different than most others at the North County Winter Shelter in Sunnyvale. Soon, a hot meal would be served to the shelter’s visitors followed by a relaxing activity of each person’s choice. Giannoni uses the few hours before bedtime to surf the web on her laptop. Lights are off at 10 p.m.
“Our mission is basically to bring someone out of the cold and keep them safe,” said Stephanie Demos, chief development officer with HomeFirst, an organization that provides services, shelter and housing opportunities to the homeless and those at risk of homelessness in Santa Clara County. “Being homeless is a very precarious, dangerous existence, and we really don’t exaggerate when we say these shelters save lives.”
HomeFirst held a memorial service recently for the more than 70 homeless men and women who died in Santa Clara County this year. Nine of them were murdered, according to Demos.
For many, the North County Winter Shelter serves as a respite from danger and the elements. Formerly a warehouse, the new 125-bed shelter offers families and individuals hot meals, showers, sleeping mats, laundry facilities and a to-go pack of snacks to get them by during the day.
Dennis Fortner, 69, prefers the new space to the former old National Guard Armory building. Though he typically gets by camping underneath freeway ramps on warmer days, the winter months can be unforgiving on his skinny frame. And, it hasn’t exactly been a mild season so far. When temperatures dropped into the 30s a few times this month, the county’s supportive housing office responded by expanding its shelter capacity and opening shelters earlier.
Fortner said he wished the shelter was open year-round.
“What I’d like to see,” he said, “(is) to see it turn into transitional housing. Because once this goes down, everybody is going to scatter. We’re going to go back to camping out.
Added Fortner, “now I’m not saying keep it open for three or four years. I need affordable housing that I can afford. I need to just survive.”
Survival mode for Fortner means living on the $908 he gets every month from Social Security. It means stashing some of that money away for some kind of affordable housing arrangement in the future. After the North County Winter Shelter closes on March 31, he plans on applying for Section 8 housing. He reminds himself to be patient. A lot of people complain about the system, he said, but he gets it. “The system takes a long, long time. Hopefully I’ll be around when it works my way.”
Originally from Quincy, Ill., Fortner moved to California in his early 30s after both of his parents died. He worked odd jobs throughout his life, at one point owning his own cab company and most recently as a caregiver to a man with cerebral palsy. After suffering a bout of hernia followed by two heart attacks six years ago, he decided it was time to retire. The problem was his housing was tied to his job. So when the job went, he no longer had a place to stay.
With all its knocks and setbacks, life hasn’t succeeded in kicking the humor and joy out of Fortner. He admits that once in awhile, he treats himself to steaks from Outback Steakhouse and cigarettes. His doctor isn’t too happy about his smoking habit, but it’s his one and only vice, he said.
“I gave up women because I found out that once you catch one, they stick to ya,” he said, a grin spreading across his weathered face, revealing two remaining front teeth. But, he’s not giving up cigarettes. If his doctor thinks he’s going to sit on his porch and just wait for death, it’s not going to happen, he said.
For Giannoni, homelessness has been very much like “a revolving door.” After working for a local hospital for 17 years, most recently as a medical assistant, she found herself suddenly jobless and recuperating from an injury three years ago. These circumstances forced her to dip into her retirement savings not only to live, but to travel around the world for a few years. She said she thought it would be easy to find another job once she got back, but found that to be harder and harder with every day that passed by. Her landlord raising her rent was the last straw. She was evicted and forced back into homelessness this summer for the first since she was 19.
“I grew up in foster homes, in group homes, and had no family structure to say,” Giannoni said. “So I never really had a positive foundation. I kind of created that myself through my job, and then I lost that.”
Once the Sunnyvale shelter closes, she’ll have to go back to living in her leak-prone 1970 Chevrolet El Camino, she said. She’ll also have to double her efforts to look for work and housing. But, at her age, that’s easier said than done.
“It sucks; it really sucks,” she said. “It’s hard being homeless. It’s very demoralizing.”
Several organizations and groups in Santa Clara County exist to help men and women like Fortner and Giannoni. HomeFirst is one of them, but not the only one. Aside from the North County Winter Shelter, the organization operates the Boccardo Reception Center, the county’s largest homeless service center, and a shelter in Gilroy.
Boccardo, located at 2011 Little Orchard St. in San Jose, is open around the clock, year-round and serves both individuals and families on a first come, first served basis. The shelter has been in service since 1999 and offers 250 beds as well as all sorts of amenities, including showers, laundry facilities, hot meals, a library, computer lab, housing specialists, case management, a work program and a veterans resource center. During inclement weather, the shelter increases its capacity by an extra 50 beds, according to Demos.
Unlike Boccardo, the Sunnyvale shelter is open only through March and accepts clients only through a referral basis. People can register for a spot at the shelter through agencies such as the Downtown Streets Team and Sunnyvale Community Services. Both shelters allow clients to bring their companion animals and provide them with kennels, crates, food and treats. The Sunnyvale shelter recently opened a lactation room and is working on starting a small library.
“We find a lot of people need that help in getting out of their current situation,” Demos said. “We’re seeing more and more people come in that lived comfortably and had jobs, but they just fell behind… and it’s so hard to pull yourself out of that.”
Faith In Action is a rotating shelter program that operates in 12 churches and synagogues in Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Saratoga. This month it’s at the Congregational Community Church of Sunnyvale and next month the Trinity United Methodist Church in Sunnyvale will host the program. The churches rotate monthly throughout the year and provide a clean and sober environment for up to 15 men on a referral basis. The organization’s strict criteria for candidates help it stand out from other programs, said Cathey Edwards, executive director of Faith In Action.
“It’s for clean and sober males who are employable or willing to work and willing to move into permanent housing,” she said. “We oftentimes aren’t pretty full because of that, but we feel that’s something that’s different from other shelters and our guys will say they appreciate the structure we provide for them and the fact that everybody is on the same page.”
Each site provides sleeping cots or mats, lockers, meals, showers, laundry kits, bicycles for transportation and case management services. Pets are not allowed, but staff will help the men find accommodations for their furry friends, Edwards said.
The men are housed between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m., after which they’re encouraged to go out and look for work. As long as they can prove they are actively seeking employment and housing, they can stay at the shelters for up to three months, Edwards said.
“If at that point they still haven’t found housing we will give them an extension kind of on a weekly basis, but we really do expect them to be moving on,” she said. “This is not the next lily pad to land on.”
It’s for practical purposes that the program serves only men, Edwards said. Due to the organization’s small budget, it can afford only one overnight staff member. Another reason is that when the program launched, the vast majority of the homeless were men, she said. Unfortunately, that trend now seems to include women, too.
Faith In Action has operated since 1990 but took on its current form in 2012. Since then, the program has sheltered more than 200 men and moved more than 100 into permanent housing, Edwards said. Next year, it will celebrate its fifth year.
“We are changing lives one guy at a time and when we look back that way, we realize that we are making a difference,” Edwards said. “We’re not putting them into another program; we’re actually housing them.”
The Winter Faith Collaborative is one of the newer organizations that tackles homelessness. Co-founded by Phil Mastrocola, the collective includes 60 congregations that serve and shelter the homeless typically from December to April. Of that number, about 20 operate as shelters in the cities of San Jose, Cupertino, Campbell and Milpitas.
The idea for the collaborative sprung from a discussion following the screening of a documentary film in a San Jose church last October titled “Exodus from the Jungle,” Mastrocola said.
“Faith leaders and congregants said we need to do something to help people more than we already are,” he said. “So we met for about three months and created a network.”
Each church in the collective has its own rules, but typically operates from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and provides beds, showers and meals. Most allow pets. Some will offer shelter for the entire winter, while others commit to a month. Some are co-ed, others are segregated by gender and still others accept only families. They also choose their own capacity. Some offer full services while others operate as drop-in centers or “safe car parks” that permit people to sleep inside their cars while parked in their parking lot. Each church is serviced by volunteers and members of the congregations in the collective.
This past year, the churches sheltered a combined 258 individuals.
“It was an organic response to the overwhelming issue of homelessness in San Jose, particularly during the winter of 2015,” Mastrocola said.
Mastrocola said while the organization provides shelter to the homeless during the winter and on an emergency basis, its long-term mission is to work toward changing policies that impact the homeless community.
Organizations are not the only ones out there doing all the heavy lifting. Around every corner, there are individuals who take on some of the grunt work. Mark Metzler and Mady Salonga are among them.
Metzler is a San Jose resident who leads the biomedical engineering department at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. A year and a half ago, he founded Sleeping Bags for the Homeless of Silicon Valley, a grassroots movement sponsored by the Low-Income Self-Help Center in San Jose. The group meets every other Saturday morning at the Tully Community Branch Library to pass out tarps, tents, blankets and sleeping bags, along with lunch sacks, toiletry bags and warm clothes to the homeless throughout San Jose. They have been able to mobilize with the help of social media, such as Facebook, where the group has garnered nearly 5,000 likes.
“We normally have at least 50 people go out every other Saturday morning,” he said. “We’ve had 22 trips to homeless camps over the year.”
Metzler actually took over an effort that was started and headed by the Quaker San Jose Friends homelessness committee, of which he was a member. Next month, he plans to apply for nonprofit status.
“We intentionally set out to make it a community-based effort without any religious affiliations,” he said. “At this point it’s not Quaker; it’s free of political or religious affiliations.”
At 15, Mady is one of the younger members of the group. She said she learned about the group through her mother, who discovered its Facebook page and passed the word onto Mady. Upon learning what it does, Mady said she set out to collect 100 blankets from late November to mid-December. She said she started taking an interest in the homeless when she and her parents started noticing a prevalence of them sleeping by the creeks and under the overpasses in San Jose.
“After passing this, it made me stop and think about the conditions that they have and what I have,” she said. “I have a heater and nice bed to sleep on, whereas these people have cardboard boxes as beds. That’s when it hit me that I needed to do something to help these people.”
With help from her friends, family, teammates and coaches, Mady was able not only to meet her goal, but to exceed it. She said she didn’t expect to collect so many blankets in such a short amount of time.
“The fact that one sleeping bag can keep one person warm makes me realize that if I collected 100 I can help a hundred people stay warm,” she said.
And that’s generally the idea, Metzler said: to give average people, whether they are Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus or even non-deists, an opportunity to go out and help the homeless.
“What we’re doing is connecting with people,” he said. “These people are chased out onto the streets like animals and what we’re doing is reaching out and connecting with them and helping them.”
The group’s next blanket distribution is on Jan. 7.
Many of the aforementioned shelters could use help, whether in the form of volunteers or material and monetary donations. Some of their biggest needs are twin-size blankets, towels, feminine hygiene products and books. In addition, Faith In Action is looking for someone to help manage its social media accounts.
For more information about HomeFirst, visit homefirstscc.org; Faith In Action at faithinactionsv.org; Winter Faith Collaborative at faithcollaborative.wordpress.com. Sleeping Bags for the Homeless of Silicon Valley can be found on Facebook at facebook.com/homelessleepingbagsv.
Link: County and faith-based shelters take homeless in from the cold
