(Not a) Shelter
Street Outreach is not a shelter. The street outreach team doesn’t have rooms and they don’t have motel vouchers. Those are shelter services. Street outreach doesn’t have rental assistance. That is a homelessness prevention service. Street outreach serves people who are unable to enter shelter, or who decline to enter shelter, for whatever reason.
The main general shelter in Racine for men, women, and families is HALO. Women’s Resource Center (WRC) provides shelter for people who are fleeing domestic violence. The Transitional Living Center of Burlington (TLC) has some shelter space for women in the western part of the county, and SAFE Haven of Racine offers shelter to children in crisis. Shelters in Racine are often filled to capacity and during the current COVID-19 pandemic, they are stretched to the limit and using waiting lists. Despite the tremendous efforts of HALO, WRC and the other shelters in southeast Wisconsin, it is not easy to get into shelter, especially during the pandemic.
Most people seem to go into shelter from doubled-up situations, meaning that they were staying with people and were told to leave immediately before entering shelter. People who are unsheltered (living outside) also enter shelter, but they appear to be the minority in shelter. When there are waiting lists in shelter, and especially when shelters are using motel vouchers, street outreach gets a lot of calls from people seeking shelter. Most of these are in very tenuous, unstable living situations with friends or family. A very small minority are actually staying outside as their ordinary sleeping location. The calls almost always come in during the morning or early afternoon hours and our advice is always the same: “If you haven’t been able to get into shelter, keep calling all your friends and family and trying to find a place to stay. If you end up sleeping outside, call us and leave a confidential message where you are sleeping. The team will check there the next time it is out.” We almost never get that second call. People are resilient and given the option of having to sleep outside or finding another place, most people find another place.
Street outreach does connect people to housing services and, yes, even shelter. We took a number of people from the streets to shelter as the cool fall weather started. But street outreach isn’t a “back door” into shelter or way to get around the shelter’s waiting list. It is first and foremost a service to people who actually sleep outside as their ordinary place of residence. From that starting point, street outreach teams meet with people to help ensure that they are safe, warm, and can get connected to services.
