Amidst the Cleveland winter, remember those who live and die homeless on the longest night of the year.
We’ve all done it before – walked through downtown Cleveland and sidestepped someone asking for spare change or trying to get warm over a heating grate. Maybe we’ve handed them a few quarters, or pretended we didn’t see them. To most of us, the homeless in Cleveland are invisible.
On December 21 – the longest night of the year – we join with other homeless advocates across the country to observe National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day. Each year on this day, homeless service advocates pause to remember the thousands of homeless men, women and children who die without realizing the dream of secure housing. Twenty-six years after our founding, we at Care Alliance are still working to meet the needs of Cleveland’s invisible.
In 1985, in response to the tremendous growth in homelessness across the country, Care Alliance began as Cleveland’s Health Care for the Homeless .
“We began as a demonstration project intended to help solve the homelessness problem,” said Dr. Lisa Thomas, Care Alliance COO and founding program director of Care Alliance (then Cleveland’s Health Care for the Homeless). “We were supposed to put ourselves out of business, but the fact is – we’re still here, and we’re still very much needed to serve the homeless in Cleveland.”
Today’s causes of homelessness are complex. The extended recession compounds the systemic issues of drug abuse, lack of affordable housing and insufficient behavioral health care services that have led people to homelessness for decades. Because of this, Care Alliance continues to serve more and more new people each year who are experiencing homelessness or on the bring. So many of our patients are fragile – medically, spiritually and emotionally – and require a tremendous amount of compassion and time to be cared for.
On this National Homeless Person’s Memorial Day, we are reminded that we cannot solve the problem of homelessness in our city alone. But we will continue to build partnerships with the people and organizations that serve the homeless and strive for the day when no more Clevelanders live on the streets – or die on them.
