5th Annual Home Run for Homelessness

Partners Ending Homelessness will host its 5th Annual Home Run for Homelessness on Sunday, June 30th at NewBridge Bank Park, where the Greensboro Grasshoppers will face the Delmarva Shorebirds. Doors will open at 3:00pm and the opening pitch will follow at 4:00pm.

Home Run for Homelessness was created as a community celebration to commemorate Guilford County’s Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. Today, it serves as an initiative to educate and raise awareness on how the community can collectively help end homelessness.

Doors to the stadium will open at 3:00pm. There will be a community resource fair composed of Community Coalition organizations that provide services to individuals and families experiencing homelessness in Guilford County. Resource Fair participants include Family Promise of Greater Guilford County, Greensboro Housing Coalition, Greensboro Urban Ministry, and Bread of Life Food Pantry.

This family event is a great way for the community to enjoy America’s favorite game while giving them an opportunity to become agents of change throughout Guilford County. Home Run for Homelessness also gives our Community Coalition an opportunity to inform the public about the services and resources available for those in need. Sponsors of the event are Lorillard Tobacco Company, Lincoln Financial Group, Westover Church, Senn Dunn Insurance, Fairway Outdoor Advertising, and 88.5 WFDD NPR News & Triad Arts.

$2 from every group ticket order will benefit Partners Ending Homelessness. Group tickets forms can be found here. We encourage you and the rest of the community to join us for an amazing, fun-filled day of family, friends, and baseball! Help us knock homelessness out of the park!

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About Partners Ending Homelessness

Partners Ending Homelessness leads the system of care to end homelessness in Guilford County. The organization is a groundbreaking, collaborative partnership that includes over 80 community partners that work to generate housing, strengthen prevention and supportive service efforts, and increase coordination, collaboration and access through the continuum of care in our community. For more information, please visit our web site. For more information, email us or call us at 336-553-2715.

Ride begins at:

Faith Wesleyan Church
4425 Rehobeth Church Road
Greensboro NC
Registration: 12-2:30pm
Kickstands up at 3pm

Ride ends at:

Church Under The Bridge
300 Spring Garden St.
Greensboro, NC

Cook-out, live concert and worship!

Event page on Facebook

REGISTER HERE

Registration info:

contact Dale Banton at 336-906-6188 or info@16centsministry.org

SUMMARY

Chronically homeless individuals spend years or even decades living on the streets and cycling between emergency shelters, hospitals, jails,and treatment programs.

Chronic homelessness can be ended with permanent supportive housing, and better policies to prevent homelessness among people at high risk.

The public cost of ending chronic homelessness can be considerably offset by the savings of doing so.

Changes to the way communities approach the problem have led to dramatic reductions in chronic homelessness.

HIGHLIGHTS

What Is Chronic Homelessness?
Chronic homelessness is long-term or repeated homelessness. Virtually all chronically homeless people have a disability. Many chronically homeless people have a serious mental illness like schizophrenia, alcohol or drug addiction, and/or chronic physical illness. Most chronically homeless individuals have been in treatment programs, sometimes on dozens of occasions.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identifies five characteristics associated with chronic homelessness:

1. The near universal presence of disabling conditions involving “serious health conditions, substance abuse, and psychiatric illnesses.”
2. Frequent use of the homeless assistance system and other health and social services.
3. Frequent disconnection from their communities, including limited support systems, and disengagement from traditional treatment systems.
4. Multiple problems such as “frail elders with complex medical conditions, HIV patients with psychiatric and substance abuse issues….”
5. Fragmented service systems that are unable to meet their multiple needs in a comprehensive manner.

Emergency Shelters were originally designed to provide short-term relief for people who had experienced a crisis and who, with some assistance, could move back into a home of their own. Shelters were not designed to address the extensive needs of people with serious mental illness or other disabilities. Without the proper assistance such people tend to stay homeless in shelters for long periods of time, making them chronically homeless, while utilizing a disproportionate amount of shelter resources…

This creates a paradox in which shelter staff struggle to serve people that their programs are ill-equipped to help, while turning away many families and individuals that they could serve well because they lack the space.

Ending Chronic Homelessness Is Cost-Effective
“A landmark study of homeless people with serious mental illness… found that it cost the public the same amount to house a person with serious mental illness as it did to keep that person homeless. But while the costs were the same, the outcomes were much different. Permanent supportive housing results in better mental and physical health, greater income (including income from employment), fewer arrests, better progress toward recovery and self-sufficiency, and less homelessness.”

More on Chronic Homelessness here.

Editor’s Note: Our StreetWatch homeless outreach team focuses on unsheltered and/or chronically homeless people  in Greensboro, NC.

I see the Lincoln Financial Building from where I stand — in a dirt parking lot, underneath the Eugene Street bridge, near a scrawl of graffiti.

This is church.

Or really, Phil’s church.

He pulls his hair back in a ponytail and often wears his ball cap backward. He’s a big guy with a cat named Ghost.

He lives in a tent near downtown…

>> Read all of Jeri Rowe: Finding grace under Eugene Street bridge. (News-Record.com)

>> Visit Church Under The Bridge and 16 Cents Ministry on Facebook.