San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Volunteers reunite homeless, families
‘Digital detectives’ help locate long-lost loved ones
There are obvious questions when San Franciscans come across a homeless person slumped on the sidewalk, all alone. Where is his family? Where are his friends? Surely, he had somebody who loved him at some point in his life. Where are they?
Beverly Stevenson tries to find the answers. She’s an ambassador with Miracle Messages, a nonprofit that asks homeless people if there’s anybody with whom they’d like to reconnect and then uses a volunteer crew of “digital detectives” to track down that long-lost family member.
Miracle Messages takes a video of the homeless person speaking to, say, his mother or sister, sends the video via social media, email or text to the chosen recipient, and hopes for the best. Sometimes there’s a good reason for the estrangement, and a video isn’t going to help. But sometimes, a little magic happens. The nonprofit’s work has sparked 194 reunions so far.
On a walk along Market Street the other day, Stevenson tried to add one more.
“You want to do a video so your mom can see your face? You can send a message straight to her,” Stevenson told 34-year-old Brad UrmstonParish, who said he’s been living on the streets of San Francisco or in its jail cells for seven years.
He’d just been released from a 12-day stint in jail in a burglary case, he said. But that meant he hadn’t used heroin, fentanyl or crystal meth in 12 days, so it was a good morning to record a video for his mom.
“I don’t look f—ed up or nothing, do I?” Urmston-Parish asked Stevenson. “I’m actually clean.”
“No matter how you look, you look beautiful to your mom,” Stevenson said, bringing her co-worker over to start recording.
“Hi mom, I just got out of jail last night,” he said. “I’m actually clean and sober right now. ... Hopefully, maybe you can see it in your heart to let me come back to New Jersey for a little bit, maybe take a flight home or something like that. I just wanted to say hi and I love you and I miss you very much.”
Urmston-Parish still had his mom’s cell phone number, which meant delivering the video would be easy. The Miracle Messages team took down his cell phone number and said they’d let him know if they heard from his mom.
Stevenson talked to him for a while, encouraging him to use methadone instead of falling back into hard drugs. He called himself a “drug dumpster” and said he’s ready to kick the habit after failing many times before.
“I’m kind of f—ing sick and tired of being sick and tired, you know? Drugs are just not doing it anymore,” he said. “Whenever I talk to my family members or anybody back home, they’re always like, you’re so bright — what happened? I want to prove to them I didn’t waste my life.”
At the end of their talk, Urmston-Parish and Stevenson hugged and told each other, “I love you.”
Miracle Messages is the brainchild of Kevin Adler, 33, who founded it four years ago when he was inspired by a homeless uncle who was in and out of his family’s life until his death. Adler and his team wear black T-shirts with white lettering reading, “Everyone is someone’s somebody.”
They work all over the country, but in San Francisco it’s mostly in Union Square, where they have a contract with the area’s business improvement district.
Interviewing Adler while walking happens in fits and starts because he stops when he sees any homeless person, greeting him with, “Hey! I’m Kevin.” He wants to know if they have anyone to reconnect with, and he wants them to take a card with the Miracle Messages phone number: 1800-647-7968.
A lot people aren’t interested. Like one man who was stumbling around without shoes, dragging a blanket and eating dry cereal out of a plastic bag.
“I think he was more interested in reconnecting to his lighter,” Adler quipped.
But Adler can rattle off plenty of success stories and estimates that his team helps 10 percent of the homeless people it approaches. If that’s true, it could make a difference in a city that tallied 7,499 homeless people in its count two years ago.
Adler has been pressing City Hall to add a question about family connections to its intake process for homeless people seeking services.
“Here’s the question that we’ve found very effective on the streets or when we show up at shelters: Do you have any family or friends you would like to reconnect with even if you don’t know how to reach them right now?” he said.
Adler said officials have given him a variety of reasons for saying no. It would take years of study to determine whether the question is valuable. It wouldn’t be fair to other nonprofits that want their questions added. It would look like the city favors family reunification over providing housing and services here.
A big sticking point, though, is that Adler wants the city to pay Miracle Messages for work it would do connecting homeless people who answer “yes” to that question with their relative. The city already pays its own employees for similar work on its Homeward Bound program, which provides free bus tickets and sometimes airfare to homeless people as long as there’s a receptive relative waiting at the other end.
Jeff Kositsky, director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said Homeward Bound helps more than 800 homeless people every year get reconnected.
“The program was pioneered here in San Francisco, and we’re glad it has spread throughout the country and to organizations like Miracle Messages,” he said. “I’m deeply impressed and grateful for the hardworking city staff who operate the Homeward Bound program. They perform miracles every single day.”
To frustrated San Franciscans, it can seem the city is welcoming all homeless people who enter its 47 square miles with lots of money and services. but it’s actually moving toward diverting them out of the city’s system entirely. That’s clearly a good thing.
Kositsky explained that in the city’s new coordinated services entry system, the first step upon encountering a new homeless person is to figure out how to get them help without relying on long-term city support. That might be a bus ticket home. Or in the recent case of a man who’d been kicked out by his aunt because she thought there wasn’t space for him, the city paid for a bed and provided extra grocery money. She took him back in.
Miracle Messages is a little different in that it goes on the hunt for long-lost relatives. Both the nonprofit and City Hall need to continue their efforts to reconnect San Francisco’s lost souls with their families, getting them off the streets and the city dole as soon as possible.
In the case of UrmstonParish, Miracle Messages delivered his video to his mom and spoke to her the day after meeting him on Market Street. Staff said she was happy to hear from him but dubious about whether he’d really quit drugs. They gave her his cell phone number.
His mother left him a voice mail message, but he hasn’t called her back. She had reason to be skeptical. Tenderloin police arrested him Wednesday on a burglary warrant, and he was booked back into County Jail.