RESCUE MISSION LAUNCHES HOMELESS OUTREACH EFFORT
Program to pair one volunteer with one homeless person
Sometimes the road out of homelessness can begin with something as simple as getting an identification card, filling out the right form or talking with the right social worker.
And sometimes, it takes a friend in the know to help with those things.
With that in mind, the San Diego Rescue Mission is launching Walk With Me, a new homeless outreach program that will pair volunteers with homeless people on a one-to-one basis.
“I feel like the mission’s been playing defense for 65 years,” said Rescue Mission President and CEO Donnie Dee, who often turns to sports analogies because of a past career that included playing tight end with the Indianapolis Colts and Seattle Seahawks in the late 1980s. “I want to play offense, and offense to me is to be more out there, out in the community, meeting people who are experiencing homelessness.”
Walk With Me, now in its pilot phase, is a homeless outreach program that will be significantly different from traditional outreach
teams run by law enforcement or social workers who often encounter several homeless people in a single day, including some they are meeting for the f irst time.
In the mission’s new program, connections are
made not by chance encounters, but by pairing volunteers, known as friends, with homeless people, known as neighbors. Each friend will work with only one neighbor in a yearlong commitment, with the two meeting four to six hours a
month.
Dee said training in the program will begin in January, with a plan to recruit 100 volunteers from churches and other groups in 2021.
“We can’t change the state of homelessness by
hiring enough staff to do all that we want to do,” he said. “We’ve got to engage churches and corporations around the area. Then we begin to cover more ground.”
Funded with a $100,000