Stepping back but still stepping up
Hughes to retire from homelessness nonprofit he founded but will continue advocacy on commission
Looking back on his three decades at the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness just before his retirement, Hank Hughes tried to turn the conversation away from himself.
As executive director of the nonprofit he founded, Hughes said he doesn’t work directly with the area’s unhoused residents.
His colleagues told a different story. Hughes, they insisted, has created personal relationships with many of those in the city who lack housing as he has worked to end homelessness in Santa Fe and statewide.
“He is absolutely phenomenal in the way he treats people,” said Stephanie Lefebvre, who worked under Hughes’ direction for 11 years, most recently as the coalition’s office manager. “He really has a vision for a better world.”
“I’ve known him for 36 years,” said Edward Archuleta, executive director of St. Elizabeth Shelters and Supportive Housing. “He’s just a wonderful man. I have the utmost respect for him.”
Hughes, who has worn nearly every hat in his effort to end homelessness, plans to retire at the end of the month. He will hand over the coalition’s reins in January to incoming Executive Director Monet Silva, who now serves as associate director of Common Cause New Mexico.
Hughes said he won’t stop advocating to improve the living conditions for local people but said instead he’ll continue to push the effort forward through his role as a Santa Fe County commissioner, a seat he has held since September 2020.
“The county has big plans for affordable housing, and I can support those,” he said.
Asked what drew him to work with the homeless, first as a volunteer at St. Elizabeth Shelter, Hughes said, “I got tired of stepping around homeless people on the streets of Philadelphia on my way to work.”
He and his wife, Bonney Hughes, both environmentalists, moved west from Pennsylvania in 1986 after she accepted a job in Santa Fe. “I was tired of environmental work, and so I volunteered at the shelter and kind of got sucked in,” Hank Hughes said.
He didn’t know it at the time, but the volunteer work would set a course that would
make him an administrator, a fundraiser, an advocate, a lobbyist, an educator, a diplomat and a comforting shoulder for those in need. He has provided housing, helped people with basic needs and services, connected people with medical care, mental health care and behavioral services and has made countless decisions and answered thousands of questions.
And he’s made a few friends along the way.
“[The homeless] do become friends after the first few years,” Hughes said, remembering a man who was sent to his office after demanding to “talk to the boss.” Thirty years later, the two remain connected.
Hughes pointed to an artistic photograph hanging on a wall in his modest downtown office. “He gave me that,” Hughes said of the man who had laid problems at his feet. He has many other images by the man, though he keeps his favorites at home. Some were gifts; others were purchased by Hughes when the man was down on his luck.
In the mid-1980s, Archuleta and Hughes volunteered together at St. Elizabeth. Hughes eventually became executive director of the organization, and Archuleta became a board member. Years later, Archuleta would find himself working again with Hughes, this time as a board member for the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness.
He has remained undeterred in striving toward his vision for providing housing Lefebvre said.
Through the years, she said she saw “more and more minds opened.”
“The coalition is a member agency, and so you have to work with all the members in the state — and there are over 80,” Lefebvre said. “Of course, everyone has an opinion, and not everyone agrees as to what should happen, but he has kept his vision through the years, and more and more people have embraced his work,” Lefebvre added.
Hughes described his work as “behind the scenes, coordinating federal funding of about $14 million per year across the state.” His office also manages New Mexico’s homeless data system mandated through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“The coalition was and is his initiative,” said Meryl Lieberman, a coalition board member who met and began working with Hughes in the 1990s. Hughes, Lieberman said, is “a collaborative reformer who lives in accordance with his values. Hank recognizes that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Hughes is a visionary with ethics, integrity and clear dedication of purpose, Lieberman said.
“He has a well-stretched soul muscle,” she added. “In his decades of advocacy statewide, Hank has modeled the transformative capacity to make the invisible visible.”
Hughes’ style, she said, is accessible, amenable and patient.
The work can be as frustrating as it is rewarding, Hughes said. The problems are many, but he returns to a single solution time and again: money. “It buys public housing for people who are experiencing homelessness or who are otherwise poor.”
Every year, Hughes has taken his wish list to New Mexico legislators, “and lately we’ve been getting some success,” he said. “Last year, we got the state to agree to provide annual funding for affordable housing.”
This year, they’ve asked for $30 million and additional funding for Linkages, the state’s permanent supportive housing program that assists people with behavioral health disabilities, he said. “We’ll know after this session. It’s a wonderful program.”
He operates by a single discipline, “Housing first, which means you cannot put your life back together until you have a place to live, a place to take a shower and basically feel safe,” he said.
Still, an estimated 350 to 400 homeless people wander the streets of Santa Fe, a condition Hughes calls “tragic.”
“The joy is when you see somebody who has made it out of homelessness and is grateful, and that’s lots of people,” he said.
During his career, he added, “thousands of people have made it out of homelessness.”