Mary Frances Ford doesn’t mind saying something that offends people.
“The homeless population is just like the population that I belong to and you belong to, in the sense that ‘they’re just people,’” said the case worker with 37 years of experience working with people experiencing homelessness.
“When it comes down to it they’re just a human being like you and I. With the same feelings, the same needs the same type problems that we have, it’s just on a different level.”
Ford is a volunteer homeless case worker for the St. Vincent de Paul Society at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Biloxi.
The organization provides food, clothing, and case management for people in need from the West Biloxi community. They also give access to showers and laundry facilities for individuals experiencing homelessness.
“We’re really just here to serve those in need,” said Society president Sharon Gentile. “There really are people that desperately need this.”
The number of meals they distribute is a good measure of that need.
“We keep a daily count of how many lunches we give out at the front door,” Gentile said. “And 85 is not an unusual number. Today, it was close to 60.”
While much of their work helps individuals who are homeless maintain their lives. St. Vincent de Paul does help get people into housing with the help of Open Doors Homeless Coalition.
“Whatever it is, we’ll try to work with them,” Gentile said. “Now we do not find housing. But we do help with deposits. Because if you can’t pay the deposit, You haven’t gotten anywhere.”
“Very often, it’s just bad luck as to why they ended up homeless,” Ford said. “There are ones who truly, if they have the opportunity, would be able to pull themselves out of this with a little hand-up from some of the organizations.”
For most people, the initial move-in costs such as deposits are the biggest hurdle to returning indoors.
“So we just feel like that’s something that is worthwhile to make an investment in,” Gentile said.
Everyone is different
Throughout the day, people in need knock on the well-worn wooden door looking for a meal or some form of financial assistance. But each of their situations is unique.
“The homeless population is hard to put into one category,” Ford said.
“There’s so many sub-groups of the homeless population, that I always find it interesting that people talk about what we need to do to solve ‘the homeless problem,’ and you really can’t look at it as a whole like that, because each sub-group has a different category of needs.
See the video on St. Vincent de Paul’s work
“Families with children are different. Women are different from the needs of the men. The mentally ill’s needs are different from the uneducated or the untrained. The addicted have a completely different set of needs.”
Ford does find some common threads besides bad luck that people experiencing homelessness share.
“Almost everybody who comes in here does not have family support.”
Often, she said it is because addictions and or mental health issues have led families to say “‘we can’t deal with it any more. So as a result the person no longer has family that they can turn to.”
Ford said she also sees many people who “never had a proper family” because they grew up in the foster care system.
Seeking solutions
Another struggle both Ford and Gentile noted is transportation.
Busses “don’t go to a lot of services the poor need,” Ford said.
“That problem of getting around for job applications, going to work, mental health, medical service. All of those things are blocked at the very beginning by a lack of transportation.”
One solution could be a single facility that services many of these needs.
“It would be lovely if we had a place that was like a one-stop shop where you could talk to the food stamp people, you could get the social security card, you could get your ID, instead of having to run all over places,” said Gentile.
And while she feels like St. Vincent de Paul is able to meet most of their client’s needs, Gentile has something else on her wish list.
They can only allow 10 people inside each day, which leaves everyone else outside for the day.
“It would be nice to have a place where you’re out of the weather, and if it’s hot, you’ve got air conditioning and if it’s cold, the heats on,” she said. “Just a place to be able to let your guard down for a minute and not worry about somebody rousting you off this bench and telling you to move on.”
For Ford, “the solutions have to go to the root causes, but the root causes are different based on the subset of the homeless.
“I just don’t think you can say ‘this is what we can do for the homeless.’”
