Lunch, laundry: Fulfilling needs for homeless people
Nonprofit Gilroy Compassion Center seeks donations to boost laundering capacity
We often hear that many homeless people were just like the rest of us until they could no longer get by and wound up on the streets. Juliana Padilla, who runs the front desk at the Gilroy Compassion Center, knows the truth of that better than most. “My biological father is homeless,” Padilla says. “I always think of places like this and people like my dad visiting them.”
On a recent Friday, several dozen unhoused people were coming for lunch — and laundry. Most of the center’s 40 to 50 regular clients live in tents and ramshackle shelters on the banks of a now- dry creekbed a stone’s throw from the center, which also pro
vides showers and a range of other services, including Friday visits from a medical van.
Breakfast, often eggs with fruit and bacon, and a hot lunch — usually spaghetti with meatballs, rice and curry, or stew and noodles — are served five days a
week. While people used to be able to eat, relax and socialize indoors, the coronavirus has ended that. During mealtimes, some of the center’s clients stay in and around the parking lot to eat. Others leave, some returning to their tents.
“It’s pretty important to me in my life,” Sally Broshear, 60, says of the center, which is a short walk from her tent by the creek in an industrial-park area of Gilroy. She lost her home more than four years ago after her husband died of cancer. Her car became her home, and then she lost her car, she says. She’s been coming to the center ever since. “I’m getting older,” says Broshear, a former retail worker. “I can’t get around like I used to. It’s a lot of things in one spot. The laundry’s really important.”
To that end, the center is hoping to raise $10,000 for commercial-grade washers and dryers that would double the capacity, so staff can wash each client’s clothes weekly.
The center has five staff members, and survives on a mix of donations from individuals and foundations, plus service contracts with local governments. It is the only homeless day center in southern Santa Clara County and helps folks in need from Morgan Hill and San Martin to Gilroy.
Operations ma nager Francesca Paist spends much of her time scrambling to address imminent needs. She cultivates volunteers and sources of food and clothing. She washes empty plastic milk containers, and hands them out to clients. “It becomes a water jug for them,” says Paist, whose mother, Maria Skoczylas, now 94, co-founded the center in 2011. “They don’t have access to water when we’re not open.”
When a pregnant woman and a man arrive together a few minutes after lunch is over, Paist tells them the hours and then says, “I’ll go back and put something together.” The couple depart with two bag lunches, two small bottles of water and a bowl of sliced watermelon.
T he pandemic’s onset has meant even more scrambling. Staff and volunteers have been making masks. Paist had her husband put up clear shower curtains at the front desk and at the food-service tables at the entrance to the center. The on-site shower can’t be used, and showers provided by a mobile service once a week can’t meet the demand, but Paist got her hands on a baker’s dozen camping showers to distribute to clients.
The center’s location makes it safer than urban centers for homeless people who live outdoors, says Faith Lucero, an unhoused deaf woman who comes for meals, showers, laundry and medical care with her partner Jude Castañeda, who is also deaf. The couple, in their 50s, are waiting for an apartment. “We have grown children,” Lucero says in a handwritten note. “We want them happy for us.”
And while the center is removed from the city’s core, it’s not too far for people staying at the local shelter a mile-and-a-half walk away, “especially if you’re hungry,” says Jose Medina, 24, who usually stays in the shelter but sometimes lives in his tent. He comes to the center most weekdays, and appreciates the laundry, he says. “Who doesn’t like clean clothes?” Without the center, Medina says, “It would be miserable trying to find the resources everyone needs.”
But the need for clean clothes has outstripped the center’s capacity. The approach of winter makes that need urgent, Paist says. “The winter is wet and muddy and sometimes all we can do is dry, not even wash, sleeping bags, jackets or blankets,” she adds.
At times, the environment at the center can be
chaotic. Mental health problems and addiction are rife among those who come by. Some get into arguments, others have panic attacks, Paist says.
“It’s never the same,” front- desk coordinator Padilla says. “I never come to work expecting the same kind of day. It’s challenging, but rewarding; I love working here. I like being able to help people. I don’t get bothered by most of the stuff that happens around here.”
Most of all, Padilla wants others to understand that many homeless people end up unhoused because of circumstances beyond their control. “A lot of them didn’t have proper resources in their early childhood and their early life,” she says, adding, “I see a whole lot of young people who have aged out of foster care.”
Pastor Debbie Rivera sits on the center’s board and volunteers as a spiritual counselor. Since the pandemic hit, her talks with clients have focused a lot on “just reassuring them that we’re going to get through this together,” she says.
“This is a big adjustment for them. There’s no comfort in knowing what tomorrow holds. It’s not easy, just like for everyone else.”