One Year Later…
We are called to heal wounds, unite what has fallen apart, and bring home those who have lost their way.
Francis of Assisi
Last year at this time, I remember making an announcement at the shelter about the upcoming implementation of the CHANGES system. As a smaller shelter, our staff has the luxury of being able to get most people’s attention all at one time. We were slated to start using the system in late June, and I had begun to get more information about how the new computer intake would look for us at St. Boniface Shelter. As our former method of intake was rather low-tech (pen and paper) and not very invasive (name and last four digits of social security number), I was leery of how our guests would respond to a new, more formal method of intake–complete with finger-scanning devices and an online database.
Our staff knew we needed to prepare our guests a few weeks before the new equipment showed up at our facility. Preparing them began as a group announcement about the new computer system, information on how each guest needed to enroll in the system at the resource centers, and how our new intake process would look once it was in place. Almost immediately, questions began to surface from the crowd of our guests, primarily about the security of such a system. I assured them, as best I could, that the City had promised none of the information used in the system would be shared with law enforcement or with immigration. I finished our meeting and arranged times for more updates. Before I had a chance to repeat myself in Spanish for our monolingual guests, I noticed one older Latino guest who had been waiting very patiently, trying to get my attention during the English announcements.
Immediately after I finished the announcements, this gentleman tugged my elbow, and speaking earnestly in Spanish asked me, “Just now when you were talking, you said something about the INS. What was it you said?” Fear was visible in his facial expression. His comment made me stop to think. Here is a man who speaks very little English, who is very shy and hardly talks at all. I didn’t even know that he paid attention to any of the announcements made in Spanish! Yet, he gleaned from my English announcements that something was said about Immigration. Clearly, people deeply fear the possibility of running into Immigration. My gut feeling that the new CHANGES system would present even further barriers to effective service to many people, particularly immigrants, who are homeless, began to be legitimated.
Much of my time over the following weeks was spent talking with people about their fears of the new CHANGES system. Many struggled with the choice between enrolling in the system and feeling vulnerable to it or the alternative, having nowhere to stay other than on the street. Many of the men I talked with work day labor and a shelter bed at St. Boniface was the one resource they could count on. Others were seniors or disabled, who knew the choice had been made for them–staying on the street really wasn’t an option. It was a difficult decision for our guests and most of them ultimately bit the bullet and enrolled in CHANGES. At least two people I knew at that time did not enroll and chose to leave the shelter in hopes of finding somewhere else: a safe place in a park that wasn’t claimed by someone else, a non-city funded shelter, a doorway with empathetic owners. A survey done by the Coalition on Homelessness about CHANGES showed that 44 percent of Latino immigrants were making that same decision. And after a year of becoming more familiar with the CHANGES system, it seems that their fears were and continue to be justified. Soon after we received our computer and finger scanner, a friend who had once been detained by the border patrol saw the finger device and immediately was reminded of his time there. The fearful memories and wounds from being detained come back to people with experiences such as his each time we ask for a finger scan to allow entry into our shelter. Our ability to remain a place of hospitality and welcome, where wounds are healed, is compromised by the requirement to use these machines.
Additionally, the information used in the CHANGES system is always vulnerable. I have received calls from police officers who have asked me to help them find someone who they suspect is using the shelter system. I expect I’m not the only person working in the shelter system in San Francisco that has received these calls. I can only hope that other people have maintained the confidentiality of the people enrolled in the CHANGES system, but as some reports have been made by shelter users that police came into a shelter to find them (not in hot pursuit), that may not be the case. Maintaining confidentiality of information in a system with several individual users at multiple sites is difficult and requires ongoing training, which, of course, costs money that could be used to provide the vital services that are cut every budget season. There must be a better way.
One year after the implementation of CHANGES in our shelter, the challenges we’ve seen the system pose to people who are homeless and the people who work with them have outweighed the benefits of the system. The myriad of daily problems (two people reserved into the same bed, inconsistent results from finger scanners holding up the intake line, reports not generating accurate information, system freezes that waste staff and guest time) are usually overcome by our staff and guests with integrity and grace. I admire and respect them for that. But the current obstacle of the finger-scanning requirement, which keeps a vulnerable part of our homeless population away from the shelter system, is unacceptable. The recent implementation of the CAAP Benefit Package presents even more barriers as the City’s shelter system has fewer long-term shelter spaces available to people not on CAAP benefits–typically immigrants, seniors and disabled folks. Our city is failing at living up to its name–the City of St. Francis–unless we create policies that help us to follow Francis’ directive to “heal wounds, unite what has fallen apart, and bring home those who have lost their way.”
Shelly
