Following, is the conclusion to a a long article in My San Antonio News, titled "Haven for Hope: New home, life" by Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje and Brian Chasnoff. These last few paragraphs describe what passing through Haven for Hope, the new $100 million homeless-aid campus in San Antonio, Texas, is like for homeless people, themselves.
For most, the flow through Haven is marked in stages. First comes sleeping outdoors, then indoors next to Prospects Courtyard, then transitioning to “guest” status when moving onto the campus. When the homeless commit to a 40-hour work week of transformation, they become “members” Once earning income, they live in one-room apartments.An earlier blogpost to SacHo, today, describes Haven for Hope, generally, and the impossibility of something like it getting built and functioning in Sacramento.
Prospects Courtyard likely won’t be able to handle all those who want to get in, Haven officials said. The center is working with area churches that accommodate the homeless to handle the overflow. Salvation Army and a number of other shelters around town will still be functional.
A light-filled chapel offers nondenominational services.
“It’s a theology of hope, not hellfire and damnation,” [George] Block[, H4H’s vice president and chief operating officer] said. “These folks already feel damned.”
The heart of the campus is the Transformation Center, the 65,000-square-foot building where the real change takes place. In addition to mental health counseling and a slew of other services, the San Antonio Independent School District will provide GED and English as a Second Language classes; Alamo Colleges will offer a host of certificate training. There will be a ratio of one case manager to 40 residents. Eight partners will offer job training.
“In the first three months, we’ll have an average of 204 member hours of job training and about 775 hours a week of member classes,” said Ann Hutchinson Meyers, vice president of Transformational Services. Classrooms, including those with computers, will be filled night and day, she said.
Because, while hot meals and showers are the start, true transformation goes deep.
"Theses buildings are wonderful,” said Hutchinson Meyers, “but it’s what’s going on inside that truly matters. We don’t change the lives of the homeless; we just give them the tools. We set up the environment, and then they change themselves. We don’t change anybody.”
Comments
All this amounts to a very apparent effort to avert detection that the associations that Ron E. Russell claims are illegitimate.
Tom Armstrong, blogger of Sacramento Homeless