Very interesting shift today. We met a young man that is staying in adult shelter and connected him to a drop in center and a case manager. He did a great job verbalizing his dislikes of the situation he is in and talked about his goals and where he would like to be soon.
Recently we have encountered some snags in the “creative outreach” that we have been doing. we are no longer allowed to post signs on light posts which sucks because it has been working as far as calls go but then a cop told us that chalking on public sidewalks required a permit.
This was upsetting because chalking been a very effective way to have outreach out there, even when outreach workers aren’t. After some phone calls to the city and some good advice from an artist in residence, we talked to some city council members and they did some research and told us we can continue to chalk. AWESOME!!!
Later in the shift we had to call 911 because someone lit a dumpster on fire. The fire department came and put it out before it could get to out of control, and no one was hurt.
We also ran into a language barrier today. we were looking for camps and found a young persons id, social security card, his citizenship card and other important documents. Most of them had been cut or damaged in some way but the address on the ID was nearby, so we drove to the apartment building.
The guy happened to be outside and we gave him his stuff but were not able to communicate how we found it because he doesn’t speak English. It seems to me that his wallet was stolen and discarded but we couldn’t ask about police reports of if there was anything else we could do.
We ended our shift back at one of the adult shelters and had good chats with some of the youth staying there. one just got housing and is moving in tomorrow!!! AWESOME!!!