FALL RIVER – Driving a city vehicle filled with donated blankets, clothes, toiletries and other items, Niki Fontaine searches out the city’s homeless in campsites, abandoned buildings, wooded areas and downtown street corners, among other locations.
“I know a lot of the areas and the encampments,” said Fontaine, who was once homeless and an active heroin addict but today is part of a new outreach team that seeks out the homeless in Fall River to connect them with services and shelter.
“My phones don’t stop ringing,” she said. “It’s always someone who has a referral or their family needs help.”
The homeless outreach team is a new joint initiative between Steppingstone, Inc., and the City of Fall River’s Community Development Agency. Together with this past winter, the agencies also helped launch a new permanent overflow homeless shelter at the Timao Center on Bay Street.
“Our goal is to change the way outreach is done,” said Mike Dion, executive director of the city’s Community Development Agency. Instead of bringing services to the homeless, Dion said the ultimate goal is to bring homeless people to the services.
“We don’t necessarily want to bring tents, and blankets, and food out to the homeless,” Dion said. “We’d like to bring them to the services, bring them to the First Step Inn, get them into the shelter, get them the services that they need, the mental health and substance abuse services.”
Drug addiction, substance abuse and mental health challenges are historically among the most common drivers of homelessness in and around the city, several homeless service providers said. However, they also noted that in an economy overturned by COVID-19, with widespread business closures and job losses, more people are closer to ending up on the streets than they may realize.
“We’ve had people with a college education. Really, we’re all one paycheck away when you think about it,” said Lisa Mello, the director of the Timao Center, which Solomon’s Porch Church expanded last year in a former warehouse space. For 18 weeks this past winter, the Timao Center served as the city’s overflow shelter for when no beds were available at the First Step Inn shelter on Durfee Street.
From December through early March, the Timao Center had provided shelter to almost 90 homeless Fall River people, ranging in ages from 18 to their mid 70s. With the assistance of CDA funds, the Timao Center last year was able to install a laundry room, new bathrooms with showers, and a kitchen space.
“It’s more like home. It’s more normal,” Mello said. “It’s just a better experience for them overall.”
Anabela Azevedo, the program supervisor at First Step Inn and coordinator for the homeless outreach program, said the new permanent overflow shelter had already made a huge difference. In previous years, different churches in the city took turns offering an overflow shelter for two weeks at a time during the winter. That presented various logistical challenges such as transportation, meals and screening. The pandemic has presented its own set of difficulties.
“Normally in our winter overflow, we go up to 60 beds. (Because of COVID), we are only at 35,” Azevedo said. “We’ve had to take on a lot of precautions. Mask-wearing at all times, hand sanitizer when they come into the building. They have to have their masks. We take their temperature. We practice social distancing as best as we can. We’ve managed to adapt and we’ve managed to learn and get more educated on the virus.”
Mary Camara, the coordinator of homeless programs for the Community Development Agency, said the pandemic has thrown sand in the gears of processing the homeless into the shelters, though she added that shelter staff and volunteers “figured out how to get testing done and get people through the system.”
Camara added that the “Point-in-Time” annual count of single homeless people in Fall River this year reported about 70 individuals in late January. Camara said the usual count is anywhere between 12 and 25, which she added was a deceptively low figure that she and others estimated was a third or quarter of the actual homeless single population in Fall River. This year, the homeless count team used a new app called “Counting Us,” which Camara said enabled the team to record their work in real-time.
“So we think we got a really good count this year,” Camara said.
Dion said the homeless outreach team is a pilot program, paid for by federal CARES funding for two years, that he hopes will continue on into the near future.
“What it’s really done for us is to show the magnitude of the problem in the city,” Dion said. “We’ve always known we’ve had some homeless, but this has really shined the spotlight on it. It’s actually making some inroads into the homeless community.”
Fontaine said her personal background helps her to relate to the city’s homeless and to build trust with them. She has helped several of them to link up with recovery programs and medical providers.
“We make the best helpers if we’ve lived it,” Fontaine said. “It’s stuff you can’t teach in books. You have to really truly understand. It’s just this survival mentality when you’re on the streets. It doesn’t matter who you run over to get your next meal or your next fix; you don’t trust anyone.”
One person Fontaine has helped is Katie Perreira, 38, of Fall River, who today is sober and is looking to give back by helping out Fontaine with her outreach work.
“If you don’t have anyone to reach out to, you’re definitely not going to get help,” Perreira said. “Whenever I needed somebody to talk to, Niki was right there.”
Comments are closed.