Remembering Karen
I still remember the first night we saw Karen (not her real name). It was late May 2016 and we were in the Walmart parking lot. We saw a car with the seat tilted back and some clothes hanging the window, so we decided to take a closer look. Derrick, one of our street outreach volunteers, took the lead as I stood back and waited with our other team member. We watched Derrick go up and stand by the car for a while and then return. He said, “There is a little lady with white hair sleeping in the back and I didn’t feel like I should wake her up.” We went up, agreed with his assessment, left a street outreach brochure on the windshield, and moved on.
The next day we received a message at the HOPES Center office that a woman had called because she had found a brochure on her car. We were excited. We had just started using street outreach informational brochures and it was our first response. I asked Jerry to call her back. A few hours later, Jerry came and told me that the call hadn’t gone as expected. The woman had called to say we were disturbing her and to leave her alone. Jerry had tried to explain what street outreach was and what it does, but to no avail. A few days later, the woman came to the office and wanted to speak to “the manager.” I invited her into my office, where she announced that she had come to lodge a complaint against the street outreach team, which I had been part of when it, without waking or speaking a word to her, left the brochure on her car. That was the first time I met Karen face to face.
Karen and I had a very long discussion that day. She talked about an eviction from a HUD-funded unit and many traumatic events in her life. The fact that the street outreach team left a brochure on her windshield seemed very trivial compared to the other things she related. She was also much more interested in talking about her recent eviction than the alleged “harassment” by street outreach. Several hours later, we agreed that street outreach would not approach her vehicle. I made sure that she understood that we were often in the area at night, but it is what we do and that we weren’t there specifically for her. We left it at a sort of informal “no contact” order, but I told her that if she saw us and wanted us to come over and talk to her or help her with anything, she could just wave us over or flash her lights or something. We continued to go about street outreach at night, but didn’t go anywhere near her car. Two weeks later we got another call from Karen with a simple message, “I need help.” That started our long history of street outreach contacts with Karen at her car, through the heat of summers and the bitter cold of winter nights. She parked at a few different spots over the years, but we knew her car and were always able to find her.
At first, Karen mostly told the team about her difficult and traumatic past. Eventually, she talked less about that and more about the books she was reading and things she was observing in the world around her, from people to chipmunks. She had gone from telling street outreach to leave her alone to asking us to wake her up if we found her sleeping so that she could talk to us. In the winters she enjoyed rich hot chocolate. In the summers, she often wasn’t hungry on Friday nights because that was her “pizza night.” She would go get pizza from Kwik Trip, which she gave high ratings. Karen knew and liked everyone on the HOPES outreach teams and she was a regular stop on our rounds at night.
Street outreach provides hot chocolate, coffee, blankets, socks and other items. Karen liked gray blankets and socks that matched her car. The ultimate goal of outreach, however, is to help get people off the streets. If someone is unable to, or (as in Karen’s case) declines to go to shelter, street outreach tries to connect people directly to housing opportunities. Those who live outside (unsheltered) are eligible for housing programs for people experiencing homelessness. The street outreach team can place them on Racine’s coordinated entry prioritization list for that type of housing. Many people who are homeless are also eligible for various other types of subsidized housing. The outreach team and HOPES Center’s office staff are familiar with those as well and can help make housing connections to help end someone’s homelessness.
When we first started to talk to Karen about housing, it was clear that the wounds from her eviction were still raw. She was content staying in her car, where she felt safe (for the most part) and in control. Over the months that followed our initial contact in 2016, her car started filling up with belongings and she went from sleeping in the back seat to sleeping in the driver’s seat. She put together some curtains and other privacy blinds on the windows around her and had clearly settled in for a long stay. We discussed housing with her periodically, but it was many months before she allowed us to refer her to the coordinated entry list.
It wasn’t too long after her referral that Karen was prioritized for housing and assigned to a housing project run by Lutheran Social Services (LSS). She told us that she had spoken to someone from LSS, decided that she couldn’t afford it, and declined the assistance. It was clear that Karen had misinterpreted something, so we asked her to at least meet with the project case manager in person before declining. She agreed and we contacted LSS and asked them not to remove her from the project yet. They met and Karen received information on the project, which we thought was a great opportunity. Unfortunately, there was a name on one of the documents that she received and it triggered something from her past. We could hear her reliving a traumatic event as she talked about something that had happened many years ago. We explained that the name she saw had nothing to do with LSS and nothing to do with the project. She agreed to continue, but she just wasn’t ready for housing. In the end, she declined all of the opportunities that were available and eventually left the project without being housed. Some of us on the street outreach team believed that it may have been related to the trauma experienced from her eviction and not wanting to risk repeating that. Although she didn’t accept housing, she did tell us that she was seeing a professional to talk about her past trauma and how it affected her.
So the years went by and Karen remained a “regular” as our teams would go out at night. One of the challenges we experience in street outreach is related to people who live outside during cold winters. Once someone has made it through a harsh winter outside, it becomes very difficult for them to accept shelter or housing. This is especially true for people who live in their cars. Karen was one of those people. Whenever we would bring up housing, she had all kinds of “reasons” why she couldn’t apply for housing yet. We would talk through those reasons and she would come up with more. One time she said that there are rules that she didn’t like, such as not being able to smoke in your apartment. She said it wasn’t fair to make people smoke outside. I quietly said, “Well, you smoke outside now… all the time.” She laughed and said, “That’s true, but I just am not ready.”
Karen went to stay with some friends and we didn’t see her outside at night for about a year. In street outreach, we usually consider it a good thing if we are not seeing someone, because it probably means that they have found a better place to stay inside somewhere. We would see her car parked at a local church (with their permission), because she was afraid to keep it in the parking lot at her friends’ nearby apartment complex. We still checked her empty car periodically, until late one night in December 2020 we found her sitting in the driver’s seat. It was almost Christmas. Things had gone bad with her friends and she was outside again. We discussed shelter and housing, but she was not interested. We told her to let us know any time and we could take her into shelter is she wanted to go. A mild December turned to January 2021 and then the snow and cold spell came.
The snow storms of 2021 always seemed to fall on nights when Ben and I had street outreach. During one of those winter storms, we found Karen in her car and she asked if we could put gas in it. She said she had money, but she was afraid to get out and pump the gas in the horrific weather. We said we would do that for her, but first we grabbed some snow brushes and quickly cleaned off her car. Smiling, she rolled down the window and yelled, “You’re hired!” We followed her to Speedway, where I went in with her card and paid for the gas while Ben worked the pump. During another storm we did the same, but she went into the store while I pumped the gas. Ben came out with her, holding her arm as he guided her back to her car through the wind and snow. She looked small and frail.
After the snow came a prolonged period of bitter cold and the outreach team went into “emergency weather outreach” mode. When it is below 10 degrees we go out on the nights between our normal shifts to conduct welfare checks. During about 10 days of frigid and often below zero temperatures, no one who was sleeping outside in their vehicles or tent accepted shelter. We went through a lot of hand warmers, sleeping bags, and blankets. Karen especially liked a type of warmer that goes in your shoe. She was the only person that specifically requested those, because she said she hated getting cold feet. During one of those sub-zero nights, I was out with Warren and Karen’s car wasn’t in its spot. We decided to keep looking in likely locations until we finally caught up with her at a KwikTrip. She told us that she had been having chest pain for several days. We pleaded with her to go to the emergency room, telling her to look after her health and that it would also keep her warm and inside for a while. She agreed and the next night Ben and I located her car, unoccupied, in the emergency room parking lot. We were happy to know she had gone there and was warm, safe, and taking care of her health.
We gave her a call the next day and she told us that she had pneumonia. She said she had been tempted to let her stubborn side take over and stay in her car anyway after seeing Warren and I that night, but she decided we were right and went to the ER. Later she told us that she had also been diagnosed with a serious (non-COVID) illness and was receiving treatment that she didn’t like. She also didn’t like the hospital food and she thought that the TV shows were stupid, although she admitted that she did watch a show called Ridiculousness that that it was kind of funny. Karen was more of a reader and one of her main concerns while in the hospital was a library book that she thought was somewhere in her packed car and might be overdue. We told her not to worry about the book and talked about housing. She agreed to go back onto the coordinated entry list and try again.
Karen received her mail via HOPES Center, so we would drop it off to her and kept in contact with her. While she was in the hospital, she was accepted into a permanent supportive housing project through coordinated entry. We acted as a liaison between Karen and HALO, which runs the housing project. When it came time for Karen to move to from the hospital a rehabilitation and care facility, she couldn’t drive and was afraid she would lose her car. She called and asked if Street Outreach could move her car, so it didn’t’ get towed. She still considered the car to be her home that held all of her important belongings. It isn’t something street outreach would normally do, but we understood and agreed to help.
Karen made arrangements for us to get her keys and Ben and I tried to move the car from the hospital one night. We couldn’t get it started. We had seen her use some special technique of turning the key on and off for designated periods before starting, but couldn’t remember how she did it. After consulting with Karen and her mechanic the next day, we finally got it moved on another night. She wanted her car parked at the local church where she had friends instead of the care facility where she was staying. She knew it would be safe at the church and we guessed it was also a symbol of hope for her that she would move out of the care facility and back into her car, or perhaps housing. Sadly, that never happened. One night the Wednesday outreach team (A-Team) noticed that her car was not where it had been parked. The next morning we received a message for our mutual friends at “the Spaceship Church” that Karen had passed away. Everyone agreed that at least it was in a warm place where she was being cared for, but that didn’t alieve our sorrow at the loss.
We have often had people leave the streets, enter housing, and the pass away in their own beds. We remain sad at the loss of someone with whom we had walked through a challenging part of their life, but we are happy that they had moved out of homelessness and experienced another, fuller level of life after the streets. With Karen, that was not the case. I remain with many memories of Karen from our hundreds and hundreds of contacts over the years. In my mind, she remains the lady rolling down the window in the middle of a snow storm, smiling and laughing as she told Ben and I that we’re hired as her official snow brushers.
- Scott, HOPES Center Street Outreach