PREhab

As the Director of We See You San Diego, I (along with many others) have the honor of walking with people through their most joyous & difficult times. Holding a young homeless woman's hand as she is experiencing the pains of labor, looking through a glass wall into the eyes of a man serving a brief jail sentence, driving a 45 year-old woman away from the streets of San Diego to a recovery program as she leaves homelessness & crystal methamphetamine behind. 

Through a weekly gathering that serves a home-cooked, sit-down dinner to roughly 150-200 individuals, families & veterans in our city's homeless community, relationships are formed, trust is built, and then often, stories are shared.  We are a listening ear, a hug, and a shoulder to cry on. We are a hand extended, offering options to those ready to transition out of homelessness. 

PREhab is the manifestation of hope. Homelessness is the situation for approximately 10,000 people in San Diego.  Many are addicted to substances, mentally unstable, or simply helpless. There are moments of clarity when someone desires to take steps to change their life: get sober, reconnect with family, get a job, & shelter.  What is their next step?  Often it's a drug rehabilitation program.  We have found there are many steps before an individual can go from living on the street to being admitted to a recovery program. 

That's why we started PREhab.  

Rehabs require people to have an ID, insurance, be sober, check in daily prior to being admitted, interview in person, bring supplies, have certain clothes etc. PREhab gives people practical and otherwise unavailable help to get off the street and into recovery.  We provide a bridge to begin the unimaginable & impossible road to rehab.

Ultimately we are solving an identity problem . . . a lack of dignity, self respect, & responsibility. In our experience, for most, homelessness is not the result of lacking a home or a roof over their head. Homelessness is the result of wounding that begins at an early age that isn't dealt with aside from self-medicating, abusing or being abused.

Through relationships that are cultivated at We See You San Diego's weekly dinner, we listen, pour out love, offer hope, friendship, and help. 

When a person battling shame, unworthiness, and pain combined with a serious addiction has a breakthrough moment where they have the desire to get off the street "the road to rehab" often seems impossible. How do you make calls to find out about rehabs when you don't have a phone? How do  you get in without an ID? How do you acquire the two pairs of black pants, dress shoes, work boots, alarm clock, stamps, pens, notebooks that they tell you you need?  Getting high can seem like an easier option even though it will ultimately lead to death. 

We offer help in the moment of breakthrough. PREhab is the bridge between the streets & rehab.

"I have a constant feeling of incomprehensible unworthiness," Aaron explained with tears in his eyes. Through serving those living in the homeless community, like Aaron, we have learned that roots of pain from childhood often lead people to drug addiction & the streets. 

Aaron said that sentence the week after he had overdosed on opioids. He was ready to make a life change after being brought back to life in the hospital. He turned to his friends at We See You San Diego for help. PREhab for him meant calling a list of recovery programs to investigate which would best meet his needs. PREhab was also making frequent calls to his mother to let her know how he was doing, helping get insurance paperwork, taking him to get an ID, getting him a place to stay before rehab, getting supplies, then taking him to recovery.

PREhab is meeting with someone to talk about recovery options, "rescue missions", driving someone to get their ID, calling recovery programs, picking up prescriptions, paying for pre-rehab hotel stays, rides to rehab, visits in recovery but more than that, it's listening, hearing peoples' stories & loving the person even when they feel unlovable.  

We See You San Diego is working directly with the homeless population in San Diego, California. In 2017 we started serving a home-cooked dinner once a week to 10 people in the homeless community. Today that home-cooked dinner averages 150-200 people weekly. Through meeting with, eating with, & serving people weekly we have gotten to know people, their stories, daily struggles, their pain, & their joys. We are often called when a friend from the homeless community is admitted to the hospital, arrested, when someone passes away, when a woman finds out she is pregnant, or when a person is thinking about getting off the street.  

Our desire is for every person who attends our dinner to leave the streets & addiction for a life they are worthy of living. For many of our dinner guests a recovery program is the next necessary step. We See You is consistently meeting physical & emotional needs, patiently waiting for the breakthrough to take place in a person so that once it does, PREhab begins. PREhab is coming alongside the person to help navigate past the obstacles in the way of a person taking the brave step off the street.

Someone has to have hope for the hopeless. 

The population that we serve are not homeless because they lost their job & need housing. 

They are addicts, they have been institutionalized, as kids they have been "through the system", they have committed crimes. This population knows loneliness. In many cases these individuals have no family and no sober voice at all in their lives.

We are creating opportunities for those that society looks away from when they see someone sitting on the sidewalk in a pile of their belongings. 

We believe these people need another chance at life.

"We should call it PREhab," Kevin, the Co-Founder of We See You San Diego said one evening in April 2018. He had been sitting quietly listening to his wife, Laura, talk to Aaron (a friend from the homeless community) who had recently overdosed on opioids about how they were going to get through the next few days before he would be accepted to a recovery program.

The conversation between Laura & Aaron went something like, "So you can't get in the program until Tuesday??? That's not for another 5 days. We don't want you sleeping in the San Diego Riverbed now that you're 3 days sober!"

"I know . . . if I'm out there, drugs will be everywhere."

"We need to get you a hotel . . . then tomorrow when you come by we need to figure out your insurance, make a list of the requirements for the program, go shopping for those things . . . oh and you need an ID."

"I wish there was a place where I could go that would help me all this stuff!" Aaron exclaimed. 

"I don't think it exists. We probably need to start one."

Cue Kevin . . .  

Death to life. Those 3 words are what drive and motivate me.

The most beautiful thing I have ever seen is a person being restored, renewed, & redeemed, leaving their old life behind and stepping into a life they are worthy of living.  I weep over and over when I see people who used to be chained to drugs and addiction transformed and completely free, thriving, living new life. 

That is why I do this. I want to see people walk in freedom & I will do whatever I can to help each person get there.

I am not a social worker. For a while I let that thought discourage me. My background is in radio broadcasting. "What did I know about how to help people in the homeless community get off the street???" But there I sat 2 years ago with a man from the homeless community who we had become friends with through We See You San Diego's weekly dinner and he needed my help after a drug overdose. Through my weekly commitment of being there, getting to know him, pouring in love, & listening, he called me when he needed help. And other people started doing the same. I had earned trust.

Over the last two years I have sat with women in the hospital giving birth, visited people in jail, taken people to appointments, I have gone to find people who were in trouble, helped a family reunite, came alongside people who had the desire to start a small business to earn money to get off the street and so much more. I take phone calls, answer texts, meet with individuals & family members to talk about the options to leave homelessness. I learn about rehabs & recovery programs because I need to. I research resources for the homeless on my own. I connect and network with people who know more than I do. I left the radio industry in 2020 so I can do PREhab full time and am planning now to get my drug and alcohol certificate. 

"Hey Laura, can you come pick me up?" It's the hardest call to receive. After all the hope (not to mention time & resources) poured into a person's transition off the street into recovery, it is never easy to get the phone call from the person telling me that they're leaving the program . . . they're not ready . . . it's too hard. But we overcome this by continuing the relationship & continuing to pursue sobriety on their behalf.  And we do that together as a community.

The first person we ever helped (Aaron) is still on the street battling heroin addiction. How could anything good come from that? 

What makes PREhab so special is that relationships are the foundation. We see Aaron weekly.  We continue to love him and believe he WILL walk in victory over addiction. Because of the relationship with Aaron we were able to help his wife (Candace- her video is above) and their 18 year old son get off the street & into recovery. Today they are thriving in sobriety.

We overcome setbacks by being intentional in our relationships, understanding that the road to recovery is long, and choosing to endure.

We lead a team of committed members and occasional volunteers.  Everyone looks to our example as we serve the homeless community.  The work is not a formula where we do certain things and then get specific results.  Success is hard to quantify and it is not linear.  

As leaders we have to train ourselves to be strong for the constant outpouring that the work requires.  We have had to come up with our own definition of success and communicate that to our team.  Constant encouragement is needed: both given and received.  

Part of our team was grumbling, feeling disrespected & taken advantage of by those we serve.  We didn't take these feelings as complaints but validated them, sharing similar feelings we have experienced.  We thanked them for not keeping these feelings to themselves but bringing them out into the open so we can deal with it.  We shared a picture of how we need to grow a thick skin around a big, tender heart. Each of us are going to be taken advantage of and we should almost expect it so we are ready when it does happen.  

These team members continue to serve with even more passion.

We See You San Diego is not a provider of services to the homeless community. We are a group of people committed to getting to know our neighbors in the homeless community and walking alongside them through the ups and downs of their unique life situation. The power of personal relationship is what makes our approach unique and effective. People in the homeless community need help, a lot of help, but too often obstacles of lack of trust, lack of resources, lack of support and lack of vision for a better life keep people stuck. Through the relationships we form through our weekly dinner we can overcome all these obstacles. Our friends in the homeless community trust us, we can provide them personalized resources, we support them mentally, emotionally and physically, and we are a constant source of encouragement providing a vision for their life they never get from their community on the streets. There is no one size fits all solution for homelessness. Providing a physical house will help a small number of homeless people, but for most it is not enough. Transitioning out of years or decades of homelessness is a radical life change and it requires constant and personalized support. That is what we provide. 

The impact of We See You San Diego on our dinner guests is often immediate, and yet it is also long lasting. We are frequently the first people to look them in the eye, speak kindly to them, serve them, show an interest in their life, or put simply, treat them like a human being worthy of respect. This is a seed in the process of reestablishing their dignity and self-worth. The more time we spend with people the more they feel valued and worthy of a different kind of life. Without this process of overcoming unworthiness and shame many people won't even consider pursuing change. Once a person has their own self-worth restored the possibilities are endless for what can be restored in their lives. We have seen people break free from drug and alcohol addiction, reunite with family members, start new jobs, become parents, and find their own ways to give back to the community that they came out of. This all starts with simple and intentional hospitality to a community that is otherwise marginalized and it continues with committed relationships to those who primarily know abandonment and rejection. 

We weekly serve dinner to 150-200 guests, but it's not the exact same set of people every week, so the total number of people we currently serve is difficult to precisely quantify but is likely over 300 people. We have provided varying degrees of PREhab services to approximately 20 people.

In three years the weekly dinner attendance has grown from 10 guests to over 100, so we expect than in one year our impact will increase by another 100+ people, impacting over 400 people. We hope to increase our PREhab provisions to another 20-30 people in the next year.

Given the staggering number of people in the homeless community in San Diego (10,000 people) and the consistent growth in our dinner attendance, it's easy to conceive that we could impact over 1,000 people in five years. We hope to expand our ability to provide PREhab to 150 people in 5 years. 

We would like to hire full time staff (two in the next year and one more each additional year). Coordinating the PREhab process takes a lot of time and interaction with various other organizations, stores, community members, etc. Having dedicated staff to help with these logistics is essential.

We want to partner with local social workers, medical doctors, and psychologists to assist us with assessing the best way forward for the people we meet.  Everyone’s situation is different and we want to include as much professional expertise as possible to give our friends the best chance of success. 

We are in search of a building(s) to be able to further our work.  A building would enable us to have an office that receives people who are interested in taking the next steps to sobriety and life off the street. It also could possibly serve as the place where people can safely stay for a few days while they await the start of their recovery program. We also recently created a food distribution center and want to expand it and a building is necessary to do that. 

If our own building is not immediately suitable as lodging during PREhab we need to create a partnership with a hotel or apartment owner to be able to affordably house people as they prepare for their recovery programs. 

We want more community involvement both locally and from across the country to assist with both serving the weekly meal and contributing to PREhab. 

Financial -  We don’t have money to hire staff at this point in time. Thus far all finances for PREhab have come out of personal donations from a small, passionate group of We See You volunteers. The majority of the food for the weekly dinner over the last three years has also come solely from donations from members of the community. Providing safe housing during the PREhab process is critical but it is expensive and comes with a degree of liability since drug detox is often a concurrent process. 

Technical - We have had some success reaching the community through social media but we still don't have a formal website to be able to increase our reach to more people and businesses locally and nationally. 

Legal/Medical - Some people need help resolving issues with the law including warrants and parole. Others need specific medical evaluation and/or intervention in order to live a truly safe and healthy life. Right now we don’t have an efficient way to create these connections, we just form them slowly and organically over time. 

We are applying for every grant we can.  When our lease is up in two years we plan to petition the landlord to gift us the building.  We are actively looking for other building availability in the neighborhood we serve but we don’t currently have the financial base to afford one.

We are working with a website developer currently to create a website. We are also actively working to increase our social media presence.

We are constantly working to form relationships with any type of service personnel/agency that could be potentially useful for our homeless friends. We desire to have resources for every type of obstacle someone might have to moving into recovery.

We partner with other non-profit organizations that are like minded in helping the homeless community. We recently established a partnership with the San Diego Food Bank to receive food supplies for the weekly dinner. We also have recently connected with CityServe which provides us with fresh produce for our weekly dinner. Through the process of providing PREhab we have formed relationships with a couple intake coordinators of rehab programs and one crisis center. 

We were recipients of Jersey' Mikes "A Sub Above" grant of $5000.00 in January 2020, Alberston's COVID relief grant of $5000.00 in April 2020, Albertsons Nourishing Neighbors grant of $5000.00 in June 2020. 

Various one-time donations from people in the community: $34,000.00

We hope to raise $100,000.00 in 2020, $200,000.00 in 2021, and $1M+ by 2022 so we can have full time staff and purchase the necessary building(s).

Yearly Costs:

Projected Rent: $144,000.00 (right now space is donated)

Recovery Program Fees: $50,000.00

Recovery Program Consumables: $10,000.00

Food Distribution: $30,000.00

Laundry Services: $2000.00

Short-term Housing: $10,000.00

Salaries: $100,000.00 (projected)

The financial and organizational support from the MIT Elevate Prize would be game changing for our organization. We are tremendously proud of the work we have accomplished thus far, but to truly keep expanding our ability to serve and support our homeless neighbors we can’t continue to rely solely on the finances of a few hard working families. We are a passionate group of volunteers but we lack formal marketing and business building expertise. The resources from the MIT Elevate Prize would enable tremendous growth of our impact.