San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
She ‘inspires everyone around her’
Plauche’s approach to San Antonio’s homelessness is both hands-on and visionary
As homeless seniors file into Catholic Worker House to grab cereal and fruit on a hot Wednesday morning, volunteer director Chris Plauche greets each one by name and asks how they’re doing.
“Is that apartment working out good?”
“How’s the job?”
“Are you able to afford your medicine?”
She hands them their mail, adjusts a man’s bag so his cash doesn’t fall out and asks another man if he’s ready to go to a hotel.
Volunteers have been trying to get him an ID for months. He finally has an appointment at a driver’s license office. Now, they’re taking him to a hotel so they’ll know where to find him when it’s time to go to his appointment, Plauche explains.
Along with meals, Catholic Worker House on the East Side provides laundry services, internet access and toiletries.
Rooms in the Dignowity Hill house are filled with bins of shampoo, body wash, socks, underwear, shoe strings and cotton balls. There are also envelopes and packages waiting for their recipients to come by and pick up.
“These are my friends,” Plauche, 73, said. “They’re my community.”
Last week, the San Antonio Express-News launched an initiative called SA Lights. The series will showcase San Antonians such as Plauche who are leading the way in changing their city — or “lighting the path forward,” as publisher Mark Medici wrote in his introduction to SA Lights.
Plauche’s approach to San Antonio’s homelessness problem is both hands-on and visionary.
A Lake Charles, La., native and retired physician, she has been serving the homeless community since 2005.
Back then, she’d never heard of Catholic Worker, a movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin that is “committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and the Works of Mercy as a way of life,” according to a website about the organization. Those works include caring for homeless, sick and imprisoned people.
Plauche was nearing retirement after having devoted her life to children with special needs and teaching as a pediatrician, professor and camp founder.
Plauche and other Air Force pediatricians started Camp CAMP — Children’s Association for Maximum Potential — in 1979 to provide programming for children who could not attend other camps because of their disabilities and medical needs.
Plauche also worked as a neurodevelopmental disability specialist for the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, since renamed UT Health.
But as she struggled to finish writing a book chapter on autism in 2005, she made a deal with God that would change the course of her life. She admitted she shouldn’t have agreed to write the chapter in the first place, and promised that if he got her out of it, she’d volunteer 20 hours each week.
“You can take me out of my comfort zone,” she said in her talk with God.
Soon after, she had a dream in which her pastor helped a homeless person. In real life, her pastor soon after gave her a book on Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker. Then she made a wrong turn driving to a clinic and ended up under a bridge, where people sheltering there walked up to her car thinking she had brought food.
“All my life, when something major happens, it’s like three things happen at once,” Plauche said. “I said, ‘OK, God, this is it.’ ”
Since then, she’s spent much of her time at Catholic Worker House and started volunteering full-time in 2007. Plauche likens her experience to what missionaries’ expectations may be when they go to a new place to evangelize.
“You think you’re going to be helpful and you’re going to make a big difference, and what you find out is they have more of an impact on you than you can ever hope to have on them,” she said.
The environment Plauche created at Catholic Worker House stood out to Katie Vela, executive director of the South Alamo Regional Alliance for the Homeless, when she first visited years ago.
Guests can safely eat and relax outside Catholic Worker House on Nolan Street. Vela recalled Plauche talking about wanting to provide clients with a good, hot cup of coffee. She also helps them apply for disability benefits.
“She wanted it to feel like home,” Vela said. “I could just see immediately how comforted people were by being there. The people who got services there all had a personal relationship with Chris.”
Molly Biglari, interim CEO of Haven for Hope, the homeless services organization, said Plauche and Catholic Worker House provide clients with a place where they can feel safe and build trust with the organization.
Plauche is “phenomenally caring and compassionate,” Biglari said.
Up before daybreak
Plauche starts each day in the wee hours — around 3 a.m. — reflecting on the previous day, meditating on Scripture and praying. Then it’s off to mass, followed by a two- or three-mile walk and on to Catholic Worker House to serve meals and help guests.
She heads home for an hour before switching to work on Towne Twin Village, a housing community with services for homeless people that is slated to be built at 4711 Dietrich Road on the East Side.
The development is Plauche’s brainchild.
The project will provide 205 units for homeless people older than 50 and free meals. That includes tiny homes, efficiency apartments and RV trailers.
Residents will have access to medical, dental and mental health clinics, addiction treatment and harm reduction with onsite caseworkers.
Towne Twin Village will include hospice and respite units, a food pantry, a chapel, a multiuse center with an amphitheater, a barber, a community garden, a laundromat, a nail salon, a library and computer
center, a gym, GED testing, and music and arts classes.
Catholic Worker House will move to the site, and Plauche plans to volunteer to spend time with residents as a PAL, which stands for Please Alleviate Loneliness.
The first phase — which includes the land purchase, the placement of RV trailers and construction of 42 tiny homes and several buildings — will cost $11.8 million. The second stage is expected to cost nearly $8 million.
About $4.4 million has been raised from private sources, including $1 million from the Sisters of the Holy Spirit. The city of San Antonio, the San Antonio Housing Trust Fund and Foundation and Bexar County are also providing funding.
The idea for Towne Twin Village started percolating in her mind in 2008, when she learned about the “housing first” model — placing those without homes in housing as the first step in addressing their needs.
Then she discovered a convent was up for sale. Soon after, developer and philanthropist Gordan Hartman contacted her about joining an advisory council for Morgan’s Wonderland, a theme park for people with disabilities that was inspired by Hartman’s daughter Morgan.
Once again, three events in a row.
Hartman, who calls Plauche “Saint Chris,” met her years earlier when she became one of Morgan’s doctors. He offered input to Plauche as she searched for land for Towne Twin Village.
She “believes that she has a certain role to play in assisting those who don’t have a voice and don’t have any power within our community to make their lives better,” Hartman said.
“You’re not going to stop her when she has an idea,” he added.
Finding land, putting financing together for the first phase and setting up the nonprofit to oversee it took years, but Plauche and other organizers broke ground on the project in May. She hopes the first RVs will be ready this fall.
Vela, of South Alamo Regional Alliance for the Homeless, said Plauche has “grit.”
Plauche kept Vela in the loop as plans for Towne Twin Village progressed. At one point, she was close to finding a property but it didn’t work out.
“A lot of people would’ve given up or said, ‘I guess it’s not in the cards.’ But she was not willing to do that,” Vela said. “She just has that inner drive and that passion that keeps her going, and that inspires everyone else around her.”
Reflecting on the years she’s been volunteering at Catholic Worker House, Plauche said she is amazed by the homeless community’s resilience and faith. They’ve dealt with all manner of suffering and tragedy.
“They just keep on going. I don’t know how they do it,” she said. “Their faith is so much stronger than mine. I wish I had the faith that they had.”
Back at the Catholic Worker House on that muggy Wednesday, a woman visiting with a volunteer for the first time comes over to Plauche to thank her.
Tama Bakel said she’d been homeless for a year and a half. She was struggling to get well after falling ill and someone had stolen her cell phone. Breakfast, she said, was wonderful.
“I think you need to tell people she’s fantastic,” Bakel said to a reporter. “I think you need to tell people she’s incredible.”
“There will be people to come back and thank you because of the impact you made in their life,” she said, turning back to Plauche. “All I knew is, I wanted to get to the lady who has impacted lives here. I love you.”