“How is that possible?” Hamp wondered at a meeting on the upper floor of Alpena City Hall on Thursday. “We work with the same people.”

Drawn together by a common goal of caring for those without homes, a diverse group representing charitable organizations, local government, police, medical responders, and homelessness advocates aired concerns and shared ideas at the meeting, excitement growing as they realized they could solve a serious problem — or at least bite into it — by putting their heads and resources together.

Alpena is home to people struggling with homelessness, but the city is also full of individuals and agencies trying to help, Purvis said.

Until now, many of those agencies have operated independently — something that needs to change if those groups want to truly help get people into homes, she said.

News Photo by Julie Riddle Alpena City Manager Rachel Smolinski, left, and Victoria Purvis, director of homeless and prevention services for the Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency, listen to comments about combatting homelessness from Randy MacAulay, director of the Friendship Room in Alpena, right, at a meeting at City Hall in Alpena on Thursday.

“There is a lot of help out there,” she said. “We just don’t talk.”

Thursday’s meeting may have started that conversation.

Stemming from issues arising at an Alpena Housing Task Force meeting, the group has met before and will meet again — not a formal collaborative but a collection of people who see a problem and want to fix it, they said.

Medical workers concerned about people using the local emergency department waiting room to escape the cold spurred a conversation about establishing an overnight warming shelter in Alpena. Such a shelter would provide a place people could escape the cold when they run out of other options.

Making that idea a reality will take months. The combined resources at the table, however, could put other options in place almost immediately, the group agreed, sharing suggestions at the lively meeting, their enthusiasm mounting as they talked.

Randy MacAulay, director of the Friendship Room in Alpena — which serves free meals to anyone who needs them six days a week — offered Purvis the use of several thousand dollars currently in an endowment fund earmarked for helping people experiencing homelessness.

That money — which has largely sat unused for some time — could fund short-term motel lodging for people in need of emergency shelter, the group agreed.

That fix is fraught with complications, they acknowledged.

Most local motel owners, burned by non-paying people refusing to leave, won’t take in homeless people, even if NEMCSA pays for two nights’ lodging.

Besides, two days at a motel may not help if it means leaving a campground that won’t take you back once you leave, Purvis said.

Then, too, “Emergencies don’t happen between nine and five Monday through Friday,” Purvis said. Homlessness specialists at NEMCSA can’t be on call all the time to get someone under a roof, she said.

At 3 a.m. when someone knocks on the Alpena homeless shelter’s door or police are asked to help someone fleeing domestic violence — or at 4 p.m. on a Friday, when offices are closing for the weekend and a shopper at a local thrift store says they’re homeless — the people who answer those knocks and hear those stories need to know the plan, the group agreed.

NEMCSA can’t hand out vouchers in the middle of the night — but maybe, they said, that resource can be in the hands of police or homeless shelter workers already on the job in the wee hours.

If they work together, they could keep lists of who has received what assistance, perhaps avoiding duplication of efforts and deterring abuse of the system, the group said, continuing to hash through potential roadblocks.

Even if a room is available, a voucher in hand doesn’t help someone reach that warm place. A person without a car can’t easily get to shelter, and police and other emergency responders don’t have time to drive them around, Hamp said.

Plus, officers can’t always fit a family of five into their squad cars, he said.

Volunteers could do the driving, MacAulay said, promising he could find people willing to take someone to shelter in the middle of the night, with himself the first in line.

Of course, Purvis said, even if there’s room, even if there’s transportation, the endowment fund money will only last so long if it’s not supplemented by donations from the community.

Though the only community in the region with a homeless shelter, Alpena is not equipped to house all its homeless with that tool. Sunrise Mission, Alpena’s 25-bed, 24-hour shelter, has to adhere to strict rules to protect its residents and can’t take people with certain criminal histories, including those with sexual assault and drug distribution charges, said mission Assistant Director Mike Fisher.

Those people, the hardest to house, are also the least likely to garner sympathy from the community, said Larry LaCross, clinical supervisor for Catholic Human Services.

Then again, Purvis said, those may be the people the community least wants to have out on the street.

And, though they have criminal histories, they also have kids, and those kids get cold, too, LaCross added.

The only real fix for homelessness is more low-income housing, and that’s not going to happen quickly. In the meantime, the group can get people who need it most into a warm place, right away — and that means making a plan, they agreed.

Later, down the road, maybe the community could use an army tent as a warming shelter, one said.

Or maybe the warming shelter could be housed in the same building as the Friendship Room, with the faith community working toward turning it into a legitimate nonprofit, another volunteered.

Maybe NEMCSA could hire someone to staff it, they realized. Maybe voucher money could funnel back to secure beds at the warming shelter, keeping the money in a cycle that keeps helping people without homes.

Maybe it might work, they said, speaking the same language, sharing the same passions, lightbulbs going on.

But that’s later, they reminded each other.

The group needs to work fast, they agreed, because people in Alpena are living in their cars and in tents and under bridges — and, “It’s going to get really cold, really soon,” Alpena City Manager Rachel Smolinski said.

In the cold, people get desperate. They injure themselves to be admitted to the hospital. They commit crimes to get put in jail, the meeting attendees said.

Several of them agreed they’d talk, soon, to iron out a plan so they know what to do, who to call, and how best to harness the power of their joint resources.

And they’d come together again, before Christmas, with a plan.

After the meeting, individuals stood in clusters, still talking about their work, about the people they want to help, and about the ways deliberate collaboration could turn their hopes into reality.

An hour’s meeting can’t get every cold person into a home, they knew.

“But, it’s progress,” Hamp said. “Progress.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.

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