- Hey everybody, we're
here in Traverse City
with the king of the town.
♪ La la la, he's king of the town ♪
(laughing)
It is so good seeing you!
- Yes, you too.
- Oh my Gosh!
And who are you?
- I'm Madison.
- Hi Madison.
- Hi.
- I came out cameras blazin'.
- Yeah!
- So, we're gonna do--
I gotta stop saying sentences with so!
I so gotta stop it!
Many of you may remember
the vlog from last year.
It was wonderful.
As we travel around,
Ryan is king of the town.
You'll see today, everybody knows Ryan.
I believe he should run for mayor.
He is the super nicest guy,
and an amazing outreach worker.
We're gonna spend today in Traverse City.
Now this vlog is gonna be down and dirty.
I'm just trying a new format,
just gonna cut it.
It's not gonna be as
produced as the last one.
Link down below for you that wanna go
and see the trip from last year.
What's interesting is this trip
is almost identical.
- Okay.
- So I got a speaking gig in Lansing,
and God bless you, this year
I think they're all praying,
because I have a lot of rants,
and by hanging out with
you, I'll get nice.
So by the time I hit the
stage in a couple of days,
I'll be nice.
- We want them to be able
to hear what you're saying,
right, so if it's confrontational,
they may tune out.
But if we be confrontational
in a nice way--
- Right.
- Perhaps change can happen.
- Exactly.
The world only needs one Ian.
- Yeah.
- There's no room for two Ians.
And we love Ian.
- We do, he's really effective.
- He rocks the world,
the homeless services world.
I wish I was smart and
good-looking like he is.
(laughing)
Last year I got a speaking gig,
they flew me into Detroit,
Ryan kept emailing me,
come to Traverse City,
come to Traverse City.
And I looked at a map and I'm like,
that's like way up there.
- It is.
- There's, why would I
come to Traverse City?
But Ryan works for Goodwill,
and we all know of Goodwill,
but I've never heard of Goodwill
doing homeless services.
So I came up last year,
and it was amazing.
First, Ryan's amazing,
but he also took me around
and we saw churches working together,
24 churches, right?
- Yep.
- Came together to build a shelter.
So it was on operation this year, right?
Are we gonna see it?
- We will go there
later on this afternoon.
- Awesome.
- And actually, last
night was the last night
for the season showcase.
- Oh my gosh, I would've gone.
- Really?
- Oh my gosh, I wish I'd have known.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
'Cause I would've seen it in action.
Ah!
- It was actually, what they did was,
it was, so the name of it is Safe Harbor,
and they partnered with
Goodwill to make it happen.
But the season was only
scheduled through like
April 12th, I think.
And then we had like two snowstorms.
And the snow piled up almost two feet.
So we extended the season by a week.
And then the snow still hadn't melted.
So what we did was
what they call Safe Harbor light.
So they opened much later,
rather than like,
normally they open at 6pm
and have dinner, and the volunteers come
and put all that on.
But they did Safe Harbor light
because they didn't have a
church host for that week.
So they came in, the
doors opened at 9:00pm,
and we just had like a
skeleton volunteer crew,
and then a Goodwill staff
person came in later.
And so we just did it night by night
and allow for the snow to melt more,
because people go camping or sleep rough
when the winter shelter
is closed for the season,
and the other shelter is full.
So Safe Harbor didn't
want to send everyone out
on two feet of snow.
- Yeah.
So Ryan, what are we doing today?
- This morning, we're
gonna go visit a camp.
There's about three
people there, I believe,
that are camping in a spot,
and they have been camping
there for a week or two.
There's a woman there
we need to follow up on
to try to gather the documents she needs
to qualify for a housing program.
And there's also a gentleman there
that's in need of a tent and a tarp.
And we think about street outreach,
like should we really be
giving out tents and tarps?
Our community, Traverse City,
does a good job of working with us,
and so a community partner,
charity partner, Father
Fred, purchased the tents,
which normally are given out
when Safe Harbor closes for the season.
Because it's still cold at night, rainy,
and sleeping outside is--
- And there's not enough
housing for people.
- Absolutely, there's not
enough housing for people.
So we work together with our
community partner charities
to have the tent available for people.
But the nice part about it is
there's not just charities
all over town giving out tents,
they wanna kinda fund
with street outreach.
And what that does is gives us a chance
to talk about housing,
checking with people,
and make sure they're on the
radar, looking for housing.
- So he might've hear, ah ah!
So you may, here I go.
So, so!
I so gotta stop saying so.
You may have heard me rant before
that it's okay to feed people in the park
as long as you're doing something
to get them out of the park.
It's not that I'm against public feeding
or giving tents, and sleeping bags,
and different things,
it's that the right way to do it
is through homeless services
that are providing a
path out of homelessness
the best they can.
Which is why I support
Project Winter Survival,
Project Water Survival,
Summer Survival in Toronto,
because they make these kits
and then they give them
to outreach workers,
they don't go out and
give them themselves.
So what else are we doing today?
- Well there's also,
you can either go out with
Madison to do a couple things,
or come with me to a meeting.
- Ooh, we're gonna end
homelessness in a meeting!
I knew it!
- Well this meeting, it's not
exactly about homelessness,
but it's involved,
what it is is called The
Vulnerable Adults Group,
and there's different agencies,
including the courts,
adult protective services,
and senior, it really was born
out of senior citizen care.
And so they've asked us to come
discuss like how people access shelters,
because they're seeing more
and more of their clients,
people who are older
experiencing homelessness on the streets,
and the system is overwhelmed.
So if we can educate the people
that are working with folks
on how to access the
system and get in better,
then that's what we're gonna do today.
- So the options are
go and hang out with--
- Me!
- Or go to a meeting.
- With me.
- That's a, well you, that's nice,
but go to a meeting.
It's so, so, so hard of a decision.
(laughing)
It's really a hard decision.
Meeting, or go out and,
you get it.
- So--
- See, now you got it doing so.
- Ah, that happens to me too, but,
Madison, what she's gonna be doing
while I'm at the meeting is,
you wanna tell him, Madison?
- Sure, we're gonna go talk about
a housing opportunity
with one of our clients.
We're going to take her
to an apartment complex
and discuss with the
housing manager there.
And in addition to that,
we may be going to one
of our local churches,
to their community meals
to chat with some folks.
And also go to another church
that provides services during the day
to chat with some folks there.
Ding, ding, ding,
she wins.
- Yay.
- I love you, bro, but--
- I love you too.
I understand.
(laughing)
The client is actually gonna,
we're gonna be meeting at
this apartment complex,
or Madison and you, to,
she's almost ready to go.
We did all the gathering
the documents, right?
- [Madison] Yeah.
- Documenting the interactions.
Proving she's homeless.
Proving she's in need.
- It drives me crazy that people
have to prove they're homeless.
Trust me, nobody,
yeah, you get it.
Proving you're homeless.
I'm homeless, or I'm not homeless enough.
(yells) Ah!
- So this is what we call
the street outreach cage.
- Yeah, and you got sleeping bags,
and tarps, and backpacks,
and this is amazing.
Many outreach teams are lucky, I mean,
when I worked outreach,
the only time we had something to give out
is when media was going around with us.
Wow.
- So this is where we keep the stuff.
We get donations and stuff like this,
but a lot of times what we'll do is
supply our partners with stuff.
The drop-in centers where people go.
That way we don't have to
spend a whole lot of
time having stuff out,
but it's here if we need it.
If someone doesn't access that,
or it's off hours, or whatever,
we always have access if
we need, for stuff here.
So that's always good.
But we have a wonderful community that,
the outreach program has
been here for 10 years.
So we're very integrated in the community.
And really, the outreach program
is a community effort,
it's not a Ryan effort, a Goodwill effort.
It's coming together for the needs
of people experiencing homelessness.
So as time goes on and we've--
- He's king of the town.
- But as we learned about housing first,
and how the implementation
has been coming through the years,
like we may have close partners
that are drop in centers or charities
that provide basic needs,
it's important to bring them along
in the process of housing first.
And then really continue
to have them as partners
as we work towards ending homelessness.
We also have, if you go out here,
there's a, you'll see a whole bunch of
what we call "welcome home" baskets.
So when people move into housing,
we have items to help them make it
more feel like home, right.
When people move into housing
out of, off the streets,
quite often it's empty,
right, it's an empty apartment.
And to promote long-term
housing stability,
we wanna help people
make it feel like a home.
So if you didn't have toilet paper,
or a plunger, or a shower curtain,
it wouldn't really feel too homey.
So when people ask,
"Hey, what do you need?"
Oftentimes we'll say things like
"welcome home" baskets as well.
So it's good to come together as partners.
- But the problem is,
you got a lot of baskets,
you don't have enough homes.
- [Ryan] Amen.
- A little tip for hanging with Ryan,
is you bring outreach shoes.
Now he's wearing sandals.
- Summertime outreach shoes.
- Yeah, he calls them
summertime outreach shoes.
They're sandals.
His other outreach shoes,
I guess broke yesterday.
- Yeah, right about,
almost right where we're standing.
They had a little metal clip
instead of the hard plastic
ones from last year,
and they just came apart.
So I quickly went from
summer outreach shoes
to summertime outreach--
- [Mark] Footwear.
- Footwear.
- So you have a, you can
see a tent down there.
- That's a camp that was active last year.
There was a woman, she
came out of incarceration,
lived there for a while,
was at the winter shelter,
now she's back in incarceration.
But in between the
shelter and incarceration,
she was back at that camp,
in this wintertime for,
I think she was there a week or two maybe.
- So she calls that home.
- She calls that home.
- That's her home.
- It is.
And it's, we're hoping that it's
not home for much longer.
'Cause housing is the goal.
- [Mark] That's her home right there.
- We're going to this camp,
I was here yesterday.
- Do they know I'm coming?
- They don't know you're coming.
- Okay.
- They know I'm coming.
- When we get close
I'll turn off the camera
and get permission.
I will not videotape anybody
without their permission,
when they can be identifiable.
- I think there's
someone up here sleeping.
- Okay.
And I also don't like to wake people up.
So shh.
And we're gonna turn off the camera,
and if we get permission,
we'll turn it back on.
John, is that you?
- Heartbreaking that someone is sleeping
underneath that tarp.
- Yeah.
- I mean it was 30 some
odd degrees last night.
- It was, and it was a torrential downpour
about 6:00am today.
- And when we were walking up,
you could see his toes moving.
He didn't wanna talk on camera so,
I just shot that little bit of his toes,
'cause you don't know who's under the tent
sleeping outside.
- In these temperatures and so
I saw the roll their yesterday.
I left my car,
and I thought it was another gentleman,
but it was someone else.
But it surprised me it was him
because I talked to him the day before
and he told me he was
gonna be at the shelter.
So I asked him when I woke him up
a minute ago why he didn't,
he said he overslept.
He didn't make it in time
to get into the shelter.
So he was out all night in the,
it was probably in the 30s last night.
- See the winter shelters,
most winter shelters
do the best they can.
They don't have the resources
to be open all day.
So this particular winter shelter
opens at 9:00 at night,
or it did last night.
It's actually closed today.
- Yup.
So the season is over for the shelter,
and here we are back to tent camping
or sleeping rough for most
of the folks out there.
- And Ryan gave him a
tarp and a sleeping bag,
hopefully that will help,
but we need housing, we need support,
we need to get people on a path
from homeless, to shelter, into housing.
- Yes.
- Wouldn't you agree?
- I agree!
- We're walking up on another
homeless camp out here.
I mean,
this is affordable housing in America.
Find a safe place to pitch a tent,
and--
I'm going to turn off the camera
until we get permission.
And if we don't get permission,
we'll just talk to you after we hang out.
- Hello?
- The basic foundation of my work is
homeless people are people.
And no one, whether they're waking up
in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel,
or in a tent in Traverse City,
wants to be on camera
first thing in the morning.
No one.
So they may,
I just stumbled!
Did you, wish I could've done a full,
you've got these tree
things all over there.
But here's two couples,
they're showing us how they
cooked chili last night.
They're living out in the woods.
They're keeping their campsite clean.
One of them is starting a
full-time job next week,
which is great,
but it's probably still
not gonna be enough money
to pay for rent to get
them out of the tent.
Believe it or not,
many people living outside, homeless,
have jobs, full-time jobs.
Even in rural America,
a tent like that is affordable housing.
We have a crisis coming.
And we need you all to be vigilant,
advocating for more affordable housing.
Right?
- Right.
- Yes.
Please, it's very important.
We have subsidies for
people that need them
to help pay the rent,
but we lose them from our community
because we can't find
places to use them at
that fit the criteria.
- So you said something, Ryan,
that really caught my attention.
Is homeless numbers going up here?
- Considerably.
I ran the numbers for the
winter shelter last year,
and we averaged, for the 2016-2017 season,
we averaged 34 people a night.
This season, the 2017-2018 season,
we averaged 55 people a night.
- Oh my gosh, and how
big is Traverse City?
- Traverse City's a small
town of about 15,000 people.
However, the surrounding area is
about 90,000 people in our county.
- Right, and you have 55 unsheltered
homeless people out here.
- That's the average.
- And there's probably more
'cause they're out here
in the tents that you--
- Yeah, so the average
for the winter shelter is
at that shelter, it
doesn't count the people
who aren't there that night
or who are out here camping.
Or even who are in the other shelter,
the Goodwill Inn, that's full every night.
And that has a capacity
of about 150 people.
And that includes families,
so there's family rooms there,
where the winter shelter
is only couples or singles,
no families, no one under 18.
- And what are we doing now?
- We are going to the Goodwill Inn to,
or apartments on Keystone,
to look for an apartment.
Yay!
- So you gotta tell me who you are.
- I'm Britney.
- And?
- And--
- Well, why are you
looking for an apartment?
- Oh, 'cause I'm homeless.
(laughing)
- How long have you been homeless?
- A couple months now.
- And you're actually
now approved for housing.
- Yes.
- That is awesome.
- Yes, it works if you work it.
- Kinda, kinda.
It works if you work it
and there's an available apartment.
- Well, right.
One way or the other.
- Yeah.
What would you want people
to know about homelessness,
that they wouldn't normally know.
- Um, that it's hard, it's a struggle.
People definitely struggle with it.
And it's hard to get out of it, I guess.
People seem to look down on people
instead of looking them up a little bit.
That's one thing.
- Nobody, looking at you,
would know that you're homeless.
- Thank you.
(laughing)
- People just stereotype homeless people.
- Right.
(background chatter)
- [Mark] Britney!
- Yes.
- What just transpired?
- Trying to get into the place.
They're gonna work at
it, and they're trying.
They're doing good, so.
That's what we're doing.
- The woman said that
it's a waiting game now.
- Right.
But we're working on it.
One thing at a time.
- I mean, you filled out an application.
That's better than
just being homeless, there's hope.
- There's hope.
There is hope.
- Well Britney,
nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you too, thank you.
- Good luck to you.
- Yes, yes.
I need the good luck.
Good vibes, good vibes this way.
- [Mark] Ah, what's your story?
- I am going to school for social work,
and do you have a question?
- Sure.
- Okay.
- What made you want to enter social work?
- Well, my family has fostered children
almost my entire life,
and just seeing how social workers
interacted with those kids
who meant so much to me,
made me want to be that
person to someone else.
- That's awesome.
- Yeah.
Just a very vulnerable individual,
and someone being their advocate.
I think that that was really
special for me to witness,
and I wanted to be a voice
and an advocate for people
who may not have a voice.
- Now this is your first time working
with the homeless population?
- Actually I've been pretty involved
almost my entire life as well.
My parents kind of headed
a soup kitchen project
down state, we're from the Flint area.
So they did a ministry and a soup kitchen,
and we did that almost every Christmas,
and once a month, maybe even
twice a month sometimes.
So I have a little bit of that,
and I also interned with Ryan last summer.
He came in and briefly
talked to our class,
and I knew that that was
where I was supposed to be,
and that's what I was
supposed to be doing.
So.
- What would you say to people out there
who don't know homelessness,
or homeless people,
or have wrong stereotypes.
- People experiencing
homelessness are people,
just like you and me.
And anyone, I feel like anyone
could experience homelessness
if something went wrong in their life.
I mean so many people that I work with
were living a normal life,
and then one bad thing happened,
and then it was just one
thing after the other,
and it's a hard cycle
to pull yourself out of.
So they're people.
They're people just like us,
and the negative stereotype
needs to go away.
- Yeah, nobody would even know
that Britney is homeless
by looking at her.
- No, absolutely not.
Nope.
- So we're pulling into the Jubilee House,
and if you remember last year's video,
link's down below if you
didn't see last year's video,
this is run by a church as a day center,
and they even have storage
lockers for homeless people.
I know homeless services that
don't have storage lockers,
'cause they're scared that homeless people
might put something in there.
And here's a church, a church,
having storage lockers.
'Cause it's so important.
This is awesome.
- It's awesome!
(laughs)
I can get her to do that on queue now,
just by holding the camera.
- It's awesome!
- Here in front of the Jubilee House.
If you watched the video from last year,
or if you haven't,
there's a link down below,
I highly recommend it.
Jubilee House is run by a church,
it's a day center.
It's amazing.
It's full, because the winter
shelter closed last night.
And they're full up today.
And there's a lot of anxiety,
because people don't know
where they're gonna sleep tonight.
I just interviewed Michael.
You may remember Michael
is homeless 'cause his son died.
Well, he just updated me that
his other son died fighting in the war,
and now he has stage four cancer.
I'm kinda messed up right now.
Um...
So, so, so!
I gotta stop saying so.
When we're in an environment like that,
it's important to me that,
working with the other non-profit,
because it's their relationship
with a homeless person
that's the most important.
And I'm very sensitive to that.
Their relationship with their client
is more important to me than
Invisible People story telling.
And there's a place and
time for everything.
And you went on to say
about Invisible People--
- I think that Invisible
People is wonderful.
I think that it spreads a lot of awareness
to people who don't get that
face to face interaction
with people who are homeless.
And it really kinda,
it shares their story,
and it shows that they
are just people too.
So I think that that's really great.
I share a lot of Invisible
People stuff on Facebook,
and I think that it's
great to spread awareness
to people who wouldn't get that
on a day to day basis.
So.
- I think I'm starting to
like her better than Ryan.
(laughs)
If I just went in, cameras blazing,
cared more about the story
instead of people's privacy,
I probably could spike YouTube views,
but it'd make better videos.
What I mean by that, better,
is that they would have
all this content that
would attract people.
However, people's privacy
is also very important.
And their permission being on video.
I just don't walk into a situation.
We were just in a day shelter
that was filled with about 50 people,
and the TV producer in me would've loved
to break out a camera and
just videotape everything,
and last visit, we did do that,
but everybody gave permission,
or the people that didn't give permission
are on the other side of the camera.
It's so very important
that people give consent
to being on video.
Especially homeless people,
because, I mean, it's a touchy subject,
and it's a personal decision
that they have to make.
Now you gotta say awesome.
- Awesome!
- I've been really self-conscious
about growing my hair,
and last night I posted a
photo of me on one side,
and Trump on the other,
because I have a real concern
that that doesn't happen,
you know.
And I don't know if I should keep going,
'cause there's this thing
when you're growing hair,
it gets awkward until
you get to that point,
and you go through, and I'm like, and
she said to keep growing it.
- I vote yes.
- Why?
- 'Cause it's awesome,
long hair is awesome.
- Oh my gosh,
and then she said, not only
that she was a millennial,
she did the millennial,
wa-wah.
- Wa-wah.
- And that's awesome.
- Good to see you!
- So every place we go,
earlier it was the coffee shop,
I wasn't able to catch it on camera, but
the sign spinner over there
saw Ryan.
Every place,
every place we go, he is king of the town.
Every place.
Even the sign spinner.
- People are generally glad to see me.
- Right!
That's why you're king of the town!
And Ryan guy's gotta give me some warning
to turn on the camera,
but here we are at--
- Safe Harbor.
- Wa-wah.
Wa-wah is our millennial joke.
I should stop picking on her
'cause she said that looks good.
She's a millennial, so she knows, right?
What cool is.
Us old people don't.
Wow!
- Here we are, we have
electronic lighting,
we can put it on schedules.
This is the day center,
or great room they call it,
where guests come in and get checked in.
- 'Cause it's a night shelter,
so you can't have a day shelter.
- Right, right, so it's
the great room, yes.
So they come in and these
are the tables people sit at.
- So last year, in the video
down below, go look at it,
this was under construction.
What is cool about it,
it's like nice and new and all that stuff,
24 churches came together to fundraise,
build it, and then maintain this.
It was based on the
rotating shelter model,
where homeless people,
like a church will have homeless people
stay for a couple of nights,
then they go to another
church, and another church.
They realized that all this travel
with homeless people was a burden,
and it was probably a burden
on the churches themselves.
So they built this together.
24 churches working together.
That is a miracle in itself.
- We have a TV room.
- [Mark] You have a special TV room.
Ooh!
- We have chairs, and a book,
and that way there's a little separation
so people can have a,
maybe some peace and quiet
at least for a little bit, for the night.
- No, I totally get it.
- Yeah.
- For those of you that have
worked a winter shelter,
you fully know what I'm going to say.
But the one thing as a worker,
when you know there's trouble,
is when it gets really silent.
So when there's noise going around,
that's just normal.
Snoring, all kinds of stuff.
When there's no sound,
that means something's about to go down.
When there's no sound,
something is about to go down.
- This is the control area.
There's, this place has
showers and laundry.
And the light's all electronic,
and the building manager,
who's a volunteer,
will be up here and run that.
And people sign up for
showers, and they put them on,
and they're all timed.
And the reason they do it
is to try to keep it moving
so there's opportunities
for as many people
as they can to get showers.
- It's kind of interesting
that you've got it right
here in the middle.
So this is the women's sleeping area.
- Yeah.
They come in, they're assigned
a number on their bunk.
These are cell phone
charging stations, so--
- They can put their--
- They can charge.
- That's pretty amazing, I've never--
cell phone charging lockers.
- This is flex room A.
I didn't have the lights on.
But this is a space we
try to keep available
for special situations.
If somebody maybe really
couldn't be around others,
or a crowd, or had a
real significant issue,
we could put him in there.
It's a safe place.
This is flex room B, same situation.
The women's sleeping area.
Maybe I should turn the lights on.
- Eh, it's bunk beds, we get it.
- It's bunk beds.
And then with the churches,
it's nice they all work together
and come together for a
common cause, no egos.
And,
when I first got started in this business,
it was 10 and a half years ago,
and they approached Goodwill.
The churches were like,
we need some help, eh.
They were getting into something that they
didn't really know what
to expect the whole time.
So it's a great partnership.
I'm glad to be a part of it, but we're,
the reason we're stopping here
is we're gonna get a bag of belongings
for a guy that's in the hospital,
and bring it up to him.
And they're out in the shed.
Now I gotta try to figure out
and make sure the alarm doesn't go off.
- Oh that'd be fun.
I'd get to meet Traverse
City's finest, right?
- I could take ya to meet them.
Oh good.
- I can take ya to go meet the police.
I normally end up meeting police
all by myself anyways, but thank you.
- No help needed there, huh?
- Yeah, no help.
Actually, I shouldn't make jokes
because police are awesome,
and they are often the
front line support workers
to help people.
But now, okay,
how 'bout in the wind?
- It still looks good.
- No way.
- Looks good.
It looks good!
- Is she lying?
- No.
- 'Cause it's doing the Trump thing.
- They put models in front of fans
so their hair blows,
that's all it looks like.
- Ah, you are definitely a politician.
She wants to run for state office.
- Yeah you can vote for me.
Some day.
- So we're here at the hospital.
We have a client who was
the victim of a stab wound.
He's all stitched up and
ready to get out today.
However, he's got nowhere to go.
So we've got a bed for him at our shelter.
We're gonna go in,
we have to do what's
called the pre-intake.
So when you get into the shelter
they ask a few questions,
but intake doesn't come in until 3:30,
and that doesn't line up with the time
he'll get discharged from the hospital.
So we're gonna do those questions.
- You're doing the pre-paperwork
before the paperwork.
- Yes.
- Ryan's gotta run for mayor because
I missed it, they were like hugging,
and another person came up.
He knows everybody.
He wouldn't have to campaign,
he could just be mayor.
- In the first video, I did this song,
king of the town, Ryan's king of the town.
And so he was just hugging
this woman that he knew,
and I went na na na na na,
and oh gee, you should've seen
the dirty look that she gave me.
Eric, we just picked you
up from the hospital.
- Yes sir.
- You're homeless.
- Yes sir.
- Tell me about it.
- Ah, it's not a place I would
recommend anybody to be.
I've been in a shelter in Midland,
I've been to Safe Harbor,
but I have not been to Goodwill yet.
I came up here to get a job,
to make some money,
but I moved up at the
wrong time, in the winter,
because winters up here obviously
are as bad as they say.
And the job I had gotten
did not go through,
so I ended up being homeless
until I got on my feet,
and continued to be,
because the industry that I'm in is hard.
And um--
I don't, I don't recommend it.
Stay in school.
- Even then, I mean.
- Even then, I have an Associate degree,
and there's people with a Master's degree
that are in Safe Harbor right now.
Even they're homeless,
it can happen to anybody.
- So what happened that
got you in the hospital?
- I was helping out someone
who had a medical issue,
and was attacked and
stabbed in the stomach,
and beaten when I was down.
Underwent emergency surgery,
because the stab wound was so deep.
Stayed for five days,
could've stayed longer but
I wanted to go to work.
Um...
- Now you said it was a combat veteran
that had an episode of PTSD.
- He had extreme PTSD.
He was having an episode,
and I tried to calm him down and,
I said the wrong thing to him.
And he did not like it,
and he took me down very
swiftly and quickly.
- Homelessness is dangerous.
So what now?
- Now we're gonna go to the Goodwill
and continue working,
until I can get in the Whiting Hotel
for the next step,
and then I'm gonna get my own place again.
Either that or I'm moving
down south to Grand Rapids.
Or Texas.
- Or anyplace that you can survive.
- In the winter.
The winter up here being
homeless is the worst.
- We just dropped Eric off at the shelter.
And Madison is having a millennial uh-uh.
Oh, it's wa-wah.
Now she started that, not me.
I didn't do that.
She did it.
- Uh-uh.
- Wa-wah.
But besides being a politician,
she wants to grow up and--
- Eat popcorn in bed all day.
And be rich, be, I don't know.
Something.
- But she's going to
school for social work.
So how do you plan on--
- Getting rich?
I don't know.
I'm gonna be on TV.
I'm gonna be on TV
for laying in bed and
eating popcorn all day.
- Now that sounds like a career move
from a millennial wa-wah.
- No.
That's never gonna happen.
I'd like it to happen.
But never gonna happen.
- Ryan got a report of a tent encampment
out behind a store.
So we're out here to check it out.
Hey, wait for us!
Yeah, don't fall while you're on camera.
Because that is how I would
start this YouTube video.
While Madison and I were helping Eric,
Ryan went and got his hairs cut.
- Thanks for inspiring me, Mark.
- And your point is?
See now Madison says I
should leave it growing.
You're saying I should chop it off?
- Well, you kept asking,
"Do I cut it, or not?"
And I thought to myself,
my hair's getting long so,
here we are.
- Oh my gosh, what do you guys think?
- Your hair looks nice,
mine I got this big bald
spot in the back here,
so it's like why do I even have hair?
So we'll just keep getting
it shorter and shorter
until it's all gone.
- A friend of mine, Rick O'Neil,
who is without hair,
is who first, when I crowd sourced,
do I cut it or let it grow, said,
"Well, if I had hair, I'd grow it."
and that made a lot of sense because
I have hair still,
so might as well grow it.
So where is this?
- This is
an area of woods that oftentimes
is a spot where people camp
because it's off the beaten path.
It's out of the way,
there's not a lot of foot
traffic through here.
Quite often there will be
homeless camps throughout here.
I had a report of a encampment breakdown,
where authorities were gonna come
break down an encampment.
It didn't make sense to me.
I thought--
- So we're here to check it out.
- Yeah, we're here to check it out
for a few reasons.
One, if there's people camping back here
I don't know about, I wanna find out
to make sure they're offered housing,
or we can start engagement,
or check in with folks
if we already know them,
where they're at with housing.
And then I don't want any camp dismantle.
Whatever I can do to help prevent that,
is what I wanna do.
And then, I just wanted
to make sure of that.
I don't want anyone to be,
that to be taking place.
The police actually are
pretty good around here.
They'll reach out to street outreach
before something like that happens,
to give us a chance to go down,
see if it's an active camp,
and talk to the folks that are there.
- Yeah.
When I worked outreach in Los Angeles,
police were really good about that.
Often CHP, LAPD, Glendale police,
we would collaborate and work together
the best possible.
But there was no housing.
There was no, it was
really just moving people.
Look at all the snow still.
- Yeah, this,
I feel like I'm on a
movie set or something.
- This is pretty swampy in here.
No ones gonna be camping
in this immediate area,
but on the other side they will.
- We didn't find any encampments but,
whoa.
That is good exercise.
I need to get back doing outreach.
We didn't find anybody.
I don't know if that's good or bad.
- Eh, that is true in this context.
- The winter shelter closed today
so there's gonna be people out there.
- You're gonna be busy for a bit.
We're going to where?
- Drifter Julie.
She's at a spot where
she's waiting for me.
This is a woman who
to get there, this is a woman who
won't come into shelter.
She won't go to community meals.
She gets very freaked
out out and about so,
I'm one of the few people
she actually trusts.
So we're gonna go, she
asked if I had a coat.
We're gonna go see if
any of the coats we have
work for her, and talk
to her about housing.
She's got a lot of ambivalence.
- But do you have housing?
- We don't have housing,
but she's the one that
would qualify for like--
- She's vulnerable.
- She's vulnerable, yep.
- We're going in to
meet Julie at Taco Bell.
She doesn't like interaction
with strangers so
I'm not gonna be able to record,
but we're taking a bunch of stuff in,
coats and different things at Taco Bell
for her to pick through
to get what she needs.
We just met Julie.
She's inside.
She doesn't like people,
she doesn't want to go
into an emergency shelter.
She's been on a housing
list for a year and a half,
there's no housing.
- There's no housing.
But if this puts it in perspective for ya,
she's been sleeping
rough on the streets for
almost 15 years,
and the housing list she's
been on for a year and a half
is the first housing
that she's ever been on.
So if you think about that
in context of progress,
as far as in relationship with her,
and coming to terms with what's going on.
Like that's a success.
However, it's pretty
damaging in the relationship
of working towards housing
for someone like that
to finally accept some help,
or cut through the ambivalence
and get on the road to
going towards housing,
and it takes this long.
It's really
harming her faith in the system,
what little there even was.
- So one of the myths
is that homeless people
wanna be homeless.
What happens is they give up.
Learned helplessness kicks in.
They try to get out of homelessness,
they hit that wall,
they hit the wall,
they get all kinds of promises
from service providers
who mean well,
but there's no path out of homelessness,
or the path out of
homelessness has so many hoops,
it's nearly impossible to jump through
to get to housing.
- So we have subsidies available
for people like Julie
who actually really qualify
for permanent supportive housing.
However, the available units,
even with the subsidy in hand,
is a big barrier that we're
experiencing right now.
So the more you can do to
advocate, support policies,
inform people that
housing ends homelessness,
and how we can do much better
if we had units to go into,
please do.
It's really important.
- And service providers and policy makers,
we gotta reduce the bureaucracy
that it takes to get
somebody into housing.
Okay.
- Beautiful hair.
- Yeah,
shut it.
(laughs)
Ryan, thank you so much
for a wonderful day.
Getting to spend some time with you,
and meeting your homeless friends
here in Traverse City.
- Thank you, Mark.
It's been a pleasure.
The more we can create awareness
about homelessness, the better.
Like you always say,
you can't end homelessness
if you can't see it, right.
So thank you for all you do
in spreading the word,
and the real ins and outs of homelessness,
not what people want people to hear.
- And thank you for watching.
If you like this video,
please click like.
Leave a comment down below.
I do my best to respond.
And thank you so much
for supporting us on Patreon.
Without your generous support,
none of this would even be possible.
- Thank you.
(soft music)
