Last days of Hope
Clock is ticking for remaining homeless residents
Lennette Boyd is among the few remaining residents at Camp Hope who will be looking for a new place to live next week.
The 34-year-old says she’s been homeless for half of her life and spent the past seven years primarily living at the encampment on private land off Stockton Road, which Tuolumne County has ordered to be vacated over rampant code violations and environmental concerns.
“It’s almost like home,” Boyd, a Tuolumne County native, said. “I’ve had nowhere else.”
Boyd said she spent several years under the care of different siblings following her mother’s death when she was 13, before she started living on the streets on her own at 17.
She spent a couple months over the past year staying in a hotel room provided through Project Roomkey, a federally funded homeless housing initiative launched by the state of California in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“I tried a room, but it’s bad when you’ve been out here this long. You get cooped up,” she said at Camp Hope on Thursday. “I did that for a month or two and had to come back because this is home.”
Ahead of the impending closure of Camp Hope, the county has spent the past several months working with nonprofit organizations to reach out to its residents and offer resources to help with their transition.
The camp has been said to have a fluctuating population of between 50 and 70 people at any given time, though it’s estimated about 15 currently remain.
“It’s almost like home. I’ve had nowhere else.”
—Lennette Boyd, 34, resident of Camp Hope
Kellae Brown, the county’s grant-funded homeless outreach coordinator who organized the effort to help the camp’s residents transition, said the team has “made every attempt to speak to everyone down there and offer them services.”
“Of course we could miss people because we don’t know everyone’s name, address and phone number,” she said. “When you go out there 20 to 30 times, you hope you get everyone.”
Brown said they’ve had a team at the camp since May
9 on a weekly basis and have housed 48 of its residents, as well as offered resources and put up notices “all over campus.”
Agencies that Brown said have been part of the effort include social services, adult protective services, public health, behavioral health, the county administrator’s office, community development, and county supervisors.
Nonprofits have brought food and other items, while case management has been provided by organizations serving as contractors that include Resiliency Village, Give Someone a Chance, Nancy’s Hope, and The Refuge Recovery Center.
Mark Dyken, co-founder and chief executive officer of Resiliency Village, said most of the more than 50 people his organization has taken in as part of the program have been former residents of the camp.
“Probably almost 100% of the women we took in have suffered child abuse, domestic violence or sexual assault, and many have been victims of all three,” he said. “There’s nothing that makes someone wake up and want to be homeless, something puts them in that position.”
Many of the people Dyken’s organization have taken in have been provided temporary housing in local motels and hotels using Project Roomkey funds, though he said the money will run out at the end of the month.
Dyken said some of the clients they’re currently serving they plan to include as part of their pilot project of developing a tiny-home community with onsite centered on a property they recently purchased off Jenny Lind Road in the Big Hill area outside of Sonora.
There are some people like Boyd who aren’t ready to take the next step yet and immerse themselves in the structure of the rehabilitative program they plan to offer, Dyken said.
“It is really close to impossible for some of the people who have lived there a long time,” he said, adding that some with severe addiction programs are held back just at the prospect of painful symptoms that come with withdrawing from substances.
Homeless people have lived at Camp Hope for decades, long before it was given the name by Hazel and Dick Mitchell when they launched a pilot program in early 2019 aimed at seeing how providing resources to meet residents’ basic needs would affect their behavior.
The Mitchells co-founded the organization Give Someone a Chance in 2012 that provides aid to the homeless for food, water, transportation, clothing, hygiene, and case management. They also developed a bus that provides mobile showers multiple days per week.
They began organizing resources and agencies to provide such amenities at Camp Hope as regular garbage collection, portable toilets and a tank for drinking water, all of which collectively cost $1,400 per month to maintain.
“They started to pull together and want to become a community instead of just a homeless camp,” Hazel Mitchell said. “They started to really want to help each other, which was a huge step in the right direction.”
Dick Mitchell said other people and groups in the community then began seeing it as a central location where they could help the homeless on a more personal level and began to bring food and other supplies on a regular basis.
They even were able to work with the Sheriff’s Office to formally evict two residents that were known to push drugs on the others.
Hazel Mitchell said she has documentation to prove that they managed to get 22 people successfully out of the camp and reunited with family who took them in, or steady jobs and their own place.
The situation started to deteriorate early last year when it came out that the state was ordering the county to begin the process of shutting down the camp over health concerns related to the property’s historical use as a burn dump.
“When the county came in to shut the thing down, there was no hope of anything going further so they just gave up and the druggies just came back,” Dick Mitchell explained.
However, all hope is not lost, and the Mitchells still plan to move forward with other initiatives.
Among them is their longtime dream of finding a piece of land to develop a campground in the model of Kampgrounds of America, which they hope could then be modeled in other locations throughout the county.