Volunteers try to help ‘carry’ homeless, but work takes toll
Advocates meet face to face with families to find solutions
Scrolling through Rebecca Lavergne’s Facebook timeline for just two weeks is a study in the day-to-day needs of Houstonians living in poverty or on the streets.
On Dec. 1, she posted about a family with four kids that had been on the streets for four months and had just gotten an apartment. Could anyone, she asked, help get their stuff out of storage?
On Dec. 8, she asked for anyone who was looking to give for the holidays to consider donating to a family that told her they left Baton Rouge, La., because of violence, lived on the streets for a while and got an apartment on Thanksgiving. In particular, they were looking for household items.
And seven days later, she was back asking for help for the family with four kids. She didn’t need any gifts: She asked for help making the phone calls and filing the paperwork to enroll them in school.
Lavergne is a 43-year-old teacher, and she does not get paid for her work helping people get off the streets and back to life. She’s a volunteer homeless advocate, taking on homeless individuals with families one on one. She builds trust face to face and uses Facebook to get resources. It works, she said, because of the trust.
“We have a mutual friendship,” she said. “So you can call me if you need me or call me and just say hi, you know? I’m not up here and you’re down here.”
She works most closely with Shere Dore,
40. They balance well: Dore is the loud one of the two, who owns a “Flush The Turd On November 3rd” baseball cap and distrusts most authorities. Lavergne has a quiet style.
Dore and Lavergne meet most of the people they work with through food sharing put on by Food Not Bombs, an advocacy coalition that’s suing Houston over its requirement to get permits to serve food in public places (“Oh hell no, you’re not going to tell me who I can and cannot feed,” Dore said). They also meet most of the homeless people they work with at the food sharings.
On Friday, Dore had meant to stay home from the food sharing. She was exhausted. But she was sitting at home and watching TV and thought, “I’m depressed,” so she found herself outside the Houston Public Library at 7 p.m., distributing numbered tickets for the 8 p.m. feeding.
Dore acts as a supervisor (and, in the case of one man everyone calls “’90s Reject” who had been repeatedly warned after sexually harassing women, a bouncer) at the feedings. Everyone takes a number to get in line. She booms out numbers, keeps order and helps break up any tiffs. She and Lavergne know almost everyone who shows up and greet them with hugs.
“This is really, really, really helping me out a lot,” said Rochelle Jamison, 45. “It’s some food to put in your stomach.”
Jamison, who has bipolar disorder, has been on-and-off homeless between prison stints for about 10 years. She’s struggling to get an apartment and a job with her convictions for prostitution, assault and robbery.
Crystal Rose, 33, met Dore when she was homeless. She’s now living in a motel with her fiancé and their children. Dore raised money for them to get motels on Facebook and GoFundMe campaigns.
“She wants to get a degree in social work — and I’m like, ‘She doesn’t have a degree?’ ” Rose said. “And I thought she did. She’s that good at what she does.”
Dore and Lavergne were able to help the family for about 15 weeks. But then money started running out and people started asking why the parents hadn’t gotten jobs yet. They’re still close with the family, especially the 10 children, and did a gift drive for the children’s Christmas.
Dore got involved with homelessness after camping out during Occupy Houston in 2012. She met homeless people. She didn’t like how they were treated. She’d grown up the daughter of a Baptist preacher and used to do work in a food bank.
Sometimes Lavergne and Dore act as go-betweens. A man who became a friend named “Mr. Stanley” told Lavergne he was going to get veteran’s housing. Like every story she hears, she took it with a grain of salt. Finally, when workers came out, she helped them figure out that he wasn’t on the right list and he was, in fact, a veteran. (As far as she knows, Mr. Stanley is still housed.)
They also help direct people’s charitable impulses. When they raised money for Rose and her family to stay in a motel, people wanted to offer toys for the children or sweaters for the coming winter. But until they’re stable, too many gifts are impractical.
“I tell people, you know, when they get their housing, we’ll open the floodgates and you can give them everything you want,” Dore said. “But right now, they can’t.”
Lavergne is better able to emotionally separate herself from the work than Dore is. She takes people for what they are: Some have fallen on hard times after a job loss and eviction. Some are dealing with addiction and mental health issues. Sometimes people try to scam her. Sometimes it’s a combination of factors, and sometimes she’ll never really know what’s going on.
For Dore, the work of “carrying” a family, as she puts it, can be emotionally exhausting. She knows she’s not the best at managing herself emotionally, especially when there are children involved.
She still thinks about situations where she feels she could have done more. One woman they met at a food sharing had three children — one a boy the age of Dore’s children. Once, she said, the woman left him at the food sharing to walk back to their house in Second Ward alone. Dore drove him back. He passed out in her car until his mother came home, sometime past midnight.
The mother had almost let Dore take him in but instead moved to Temple. There, at age 14, the boy who had slept in Dore’s car got shot in the stomach and died.
“I feel guilt all the time,” she said. “I should’ve taken him. I should’ve fought harder.”