Finding home

On Thanksgiving Day, many of us will sit down to an abundant meal with family and friends, content in the knowledge that when we go to bed, we’ll have a roof over our heads.

But that’s not a reality for everyone.

Tens of thousands of people across the nation, our state and in the Taos Valley, struggle to find a safe place to sleep every night. They don’t have a regular roof over their heads and a warm bed to snuggle in. They don’t have a home.

Some find a temporary safe haven at places such as the Men’s Shelter or DreamTree. Many Taos organizations and community leaders are working to ensure everyone has a roof over their heads, especially on these below freezing winter nights. The challenges to addressing homelessness are many.

Some people who are homeless fall through the cracks in care.

Some projects that would reduce homelessness never get off the ground for want of funding or political will or because of personality conflicts.

People become homeless for a wide variety of reasons, so finding a solution to help all of them is complicated.

We see ourselves in them. Many of us are only one disaster or one paycheck away from losing our homes.

This week, The Taos News launches a bi-weekly series exploring what it means to be homeless in a small town like Taos and the efforts many are making to address the problem. The series will publish every other week through January.

We hope by the end of it, dear readers, you will come to understand deeply the experience and the diversity of Taos’ homeless population

We also hope you will see resiliency, courage, fellowship and love in these stories—and more than a few potential solutions to homelessness in our region.

We begin, since it is Thanksgiving, with a meal, shared among strangers at the Men’s Shelter.

New sports editor

By now a few of you Taos County prep sports fans have noticed a new face at the sidelines and a new byline on stories.

Don’t worry. Our former fab sports editor Arcenio Trujillo isn’t sitting on the bench. He’s just taking a different role on the team, working independently on bigger sports history projects and features along with helping the newspaper think about different ways of covering games in the multimedia age.

Our new sports editor, Sheila Miller, comes to us from Colorado by way of stints as a math professor at West Point and at City University of New York. She’s a lifelong sports fan, an experienced yoga instructor and a climber.

We hope you’ll give her a big warm hello when you see her and welcome her to Taos. She is the first female sports editor in the history of The Taos News.

We look forward to having her on our team.