WORKING TO HOUSE THE HOMELESS
Lisa Lee has empathy for society’s most vulnerable individuals
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In January, the Truckee River threatened to overflow its banks and flood parts of Reno, Nevada. While businesses covered their doors with plastic wrap and sandbags, Lisa Lee rallied local police forces, nonprofits and volunteers to warn people living in homeless camps along the riverbanks.
Lee and about 40 people walked the icy banks to tell people about the city’s emergency shelters. She waited for shuttles to retrieve people and their belongings before moving down the rocky embankments in search of another hidden tent.
Once the flooding subsided, most people moved back to their spots along the river or in nearby parks. But Lee didn’t stop after the crisis ended. She even found permanent housing for some of the people she met that day.
She walks trails every week in search of people who need help. She doesn’t force them to go to the city’s homeless shelter, but instead tells people what services are available. She frequently helps people use those services to find a permanent place to live.
Her empathy for people on the street and her approach to service comes from her experience living on the street as a teenager. She ran away to Seattle in 1994 and eventually became homeless and addicted to heroin.
“I got clean and housed when I took a job in Dutch Harbor, Alaska,” Lee said. “I went up there on methadone and someone stole my methadone from my room, so I kicked methadone cold turkey.”
Lee’s boss in Alaska challenged her to push herself, saying women can do anything except touch the large and dangerous fish processing machines. But she learned to use them anyway.
“I left Alaska completely ripped, smelling like fish, but totally different,” Lee said. “I came back to the Lower 48 not knowing what I was going to do, but knowing I wasn’t going back to drugs.”
Now Lee is a case manager at Alta Vista Mental Health and also is working on her anthropology thesis at the University of Nevada, Reno. She’s using her position and education to find and keep homeless communities together when re-housing them.
Q&A WITH LISA LEE
What does it mean to you to be an American?
To be an American means freedom from persecution. It means to celebrate diversity, to respect the liberties of our fellow citizens and to fight for those liberties. For me, America is the “Mother of Exiles” as exemplified by the Statue of Liberty and the famous words of Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempesttost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” That to me, is what it means to be American.
What moment touched and motivated you to launch this effort?
As a child, I had several experiences with houseless individuals that left an impact. Years later, at the age of 18, I experienced homelessness for almost a decade. After years of reinventing myself — housed and sober — I pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in anthropology. All of these experiences have driven my passion to draw attention to income inequality, the fallacy of meritocracy, mental illness, substance abuse, the trauma-informed approach and the belief in empowering others to use their own voices to become advocates for themselves and their communities.