Homeless families get help, a place to sleep – for now

Heidi, the Wichita mother who was living in her truck with her children, 1 and 5, has spent the past several days living in a motel because people sent money to help her.

Recently, she slept in motels with her kids, instead of in her truck, while the temperature dropped to below zero.

Dozens of people offered to help homeless children and their parents after they read a Dec. 16 story in The Eagle about two homeless mothers and their children. They called or e-mailed The Eagle and the Wichita school district, offering space in their homes, money, baby-sitting services, food, coats, blankets and shoes.

“I’m really grateful,” Heidi said.

“The offers of help have been just overwhelming,” said Cynthia Martinez. “Some came from out of town and far out of state.”

Martinez runs the Wichita school district office that identifies and tries to help anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 homeless students in Wichita public schools every year. Martinez had identified and helped 1,549 students by mid-December, including 10 high school students living on the streets and 60 more high school students “couch surfing” with friends or relatives.

There were 28 students sleeping outside or in cars, abandoned buildings or campgrounds, she said. There were six mothers with kids besides Heidi living in cars, Martinez said.

So many offers of help came in after the Dec. 16 story that Martinez, who runs the district’s homeless help program, is now coordinating a relief effort for the donors with Gracepoint Church, a nondenominational congregation in west Wichita.

Donations are welcome, but Martinez cannot collect and distribute money for anyone; it would raise liability and ethical concerns, she said.

Martinez asked Terry Johnson, Gracepoint’s executive pastor, to help coordinate efforts.

Donors

One donor paid for a hotel room for a week for Heidi and her children last week.

The donor, Lt. Col. Glenn Clark, is a pilot and U.S. Air Force Reserve officer based with the 931st Air Refueling Wing at McConnell Air Force Base.

“The Clarks paid for a hotel for us, brought us food, all kinds of stuff,” Heidi said. “People have been helping us out like crazy.”

Clark, 45, was homeless, begging for food and living out of his car at 19.

“You can’t imagine how humiliating that felt. The story about Heidi struck a nerve,” he said.

“I hope the effort to help homeless families grows well past Christmas,” Clark said.

Another Wichitan is setting up not just a donation but a network of people to donate in the long term.

Jane Owens is the wife of retired Sedgwick County District Judge Clark Owens.

“I am making calls to my friends to see if all get together and sponsor things like paying utility bills,” Owens said. “I am a 64-year-old grandma, and I and all my friends the same age have all got nice clothes our kids and grandkids have outgrown; we could send those, too.

“What happened to those young mothers in that story, that could have been me,” Owens said. “Or my daughter or my granddaughter.”

Homeless fears

If homeless parents ask for help from some local agencies, they might get their children taken from them.

For that reason, neither Heidi nor Lynn, who has been raising her two kids in a car, wanted their full names published with the Dec. 16 story.

Officer Nate Schwiethale heads the Wichita Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team.

“Most everybody loves the HOT team; we get 50 to 60 calls a day from people wanting our help,” Schwiethale said.

“But the homeless families are always reluctant to talk with us, and I get why: We are law enforcement, mandated by the state to take action. So if on a cold day, and the shelters are all full – and they are nearly always full – if we run into parents with kids, we might have to take the kids away from the parents and put them into the Wichita Children’s Home.”

He and his team have sympathy for them and other homeless people, he said. The stereotypes about the homeless – lazy, stupid, drug-addicted – are true only for some people, Schwiethale said.

“There are guys we run into who laugh at me when I talk to them about jobs and housing. ‘I don’t want to work; I can get all the food I need and still drink all day,’ some of them say.

“But there are plenty of people on the other end of the spectrum who have jobs and can’t make it. You see those people when they take everything we can give them, for a week or a month, and then just like that, they’re off the streets.”

Some homeless families might not accept help.

Heidi, the woman who has been living in her truck with her two young sons, at first refused the help donors offered after the story describing her circumstances was published.

“She received multiple offers for a place to stay,” Martinez said. “She had a hard time accepting but did ultimately accept the offers to protect her children from the recent cold weather.”

Heidi has been homeless even though she has a contract job as a security officer at a local company. Many families Martinez helps have jobs and become homeless because they don’t make enough to keep an apartment or are so financially stressed from medical bills that they live outside.

Lynn, the other mother quoted in the Dec. 16 story, could not be reached for this story because her cellphone is no longer accepting calls. Martinez’s office also has not been able to reach her.

Gracepoint Church

Johnson, Gracepoint’s executive pastor, serves on the board of ICT SOS, a local charity that helps needy children and human trafficking victims. The church also has helped Martinez and the school district for years with a program called Project Teacher, in which church members donate and collect school supplies and give them free to classroom teachers and students.

Gracepoint’s involvement will ensure that help is given and that donors can feel more comfortable in donating to a fund at a local church that has experience in helping homeless children, Martinez said.

They plan to handle donations carefully, Johnson said.

“This is not a benevolence fund,” Johnson said. “It’s not a fund anybody will have access to; it will go specifically to children involved with the (federal) McKinney-Vento homeless program in schools. If a donor wants to help one specific family, all the money they donate will go to that family. And all students involved will have to be referred to us by Cynthia at the district.

“Cynthia lets us know know when there’s a need, such as when a family car breaks down, or a family just got a job and are almost on their own, or they found an apartment and need just a first-month’s rent,” Johnson said. “We’ll use donations to help them pay for such things, and we plan to set up a program to help homeless students right through their high school years.”

This story was originally published December 29, 2016 at 8:25 PM with the headline "Homeless families get help, a place to sleep – for now."