Imagine being homeless, but having somewhere to go where you could get everything you need to get back on your feet. It would be like a dream come true.
This March, Creighton will be helping that dream come true for many homeless people.
Project Homeless Connect Omaha will be held in the Kiewit Fitness Center on March 27. Kenneth Reed-Bouley, Associate Director for the Creighton Center for Service and Justice, said this is the second year the event has been held at Creighton.
“We welcomed and served 318 people who are homeless last year,” he said. “We expect more than 400 this year.”
According to Project Homeless Connect Omaha’s Web site, http://homelessconnectomaha.org, PHC started in San Francisco and is now held in 170 communities. It is designed to act as a one-day event where the community’s homeless receive a variety of services, including housing, legal resources, Social Security, health care, food-stamp benefits and employment.
“Project Homeless Connect Omaha is — about engaged residents volunteering their talent and time for the area’s homeless,” Reed- Bouley said.
Another goal, he said, is “to connect people who are homeless with needed services and connect volunteers with people who are homeless.”
Reed-Bouley helps coordinate Project Homeless Connect Omaha by working with numerous individuals and departments at Creighton, such as the KFC, Public Safety and Creighton Medical Labs.
One of Reed-Bouley’s other duties is to recruit volunteers for the event.
“I and Allison Kinney-Walker in the CCSJ are in charge of recruiting and preparing the 400 volunteer ‘Navigators’ who will each be paired up with a homeless guest to help her/him ‘navigate’ the various services offered that day,” he said.
People interested in signing up as a volunteer for Project Homeless Connect Omaha should go to the Web site and click on the volunteering link. Reed-Bouley said he anticipates having enough volunteers.
“The issue is more getting people to sign up in a timely fashion so that we can plan for the event and train everyone,” he said. “At some point soon we will stop taking volunteer registrations, so we need interested people to register as soon as possible.”
The Rev. Paul Coelho, S.J., who acts as an assistant to Reed-Bouley for the event, said he believes homelessness “— is an issue that can be addressed if we put our hearts and minds to it.”
“If you’re talking Jesuit values, if you’re talking men and women for others, you’re talking [about] a preferential option for the poor, what better way would there be to emphasize this, to make this real on a Jesuit campus?” he said.
This year, Coelho said Project Homeless Connect Omaha will be able to use the entire basketball court-area in the KFC, whereas last year the event was only given part of the space. However, one possible difficulty will be holding the event on what is now a smoke-free campus.
Reed-Bouley said Creighton could participate if it were held somewhere else, but it is important to hold the event on campus.
“Hosting PHCO at Creighton allowed us to welcome some of the most vulnerable people in our community to our campus. Workers from Siena/Francis House later reported to us how much it meant to their clients that Creighton hosted the event,” he said.
“We can improve on the event, but I believe the first PHCO was a success for our guests and for our volunteers, helping to connect one to the other and to needed services – win-win-win all around.”
Reed-Bouley said the event is focused on helping the homeless, but we also need to examine the causes of homelessness. He said he hopes the event fits in with the “10 Year Plan to End Homelessness” for Omaha and Council Bluffs that was announced at the end of 2007.
“As wonderful an event as PHCO is, we do not want to be celebrating its 10th anniversary someday,” he said.
“We are happy to connect people with services and each other, but we are also interested in changing systems so that someday everyone has a home.”
“I think it’s a great event and I’m so happy and so proud that Creighton does it,” Coelho said.