How Public Libraries Have Become Spare Homeless Shelters (Hard Times USA)

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/hard-times-usa/how-public-libraries-have-become-spare-homeless-shelters-hard-times-usa



SAN FRANCISCO—Not everyone who spends all day, every day in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library is down and out. Only mostly everyone.

Kathleen Lee knows this because she spends hours a day walking the six floors of the vast, sky-lit building, looking for patrons who might need real help. They are everywhere: in the carrels, amid the stacks, on the computers. Some wear all they own on their backs and all they’ve lived through on their faces. Others hide in plain sight. Lee knows this, too, since she was homeless a few years ago. So she tries to let everyone know who she is and what she does.

“I strike up a lot of conversations,” she said at the end of a recent three-hour shift.

What Lee does at the San Francisco main library is help homeless and indigent patrons fill fundamental needs--food, shelter, hygiene, medical attention, substance abuse and mental health services. She’s one of five peer counselors, all formerly homeless, who work with a full-time psychiatric social worker stationed at the library to serve its many impoverished patrons. This outreach team, one of the first in the country, is no longer a novelty. In these hard times, as social safety nets shrink, libraries have become more vital than ever as safe spaces for people with nowhere else to go. Since the San Francisco Public Library outreach program began, about four years ago, it has been inundated with requests for guidance from libraries all over the country grappling with their new role as de facto day shelters.

“I think we’ve paved the way,” said Leah Esguerra, the SFPL’s social worker, who is in demand as a speaker at library and social worker conferences. She estimates that the library has helped more than 60 patrons find permanent housing and hundreds of others find social services.

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Libraries are cornerstones of our communities...

we must save them and provide more tools, beyond reading-related tools.

K&R

[Victor_c3]

2. Homelessness must be a very important issue to you

I've noticed that you've posted many articles regarding the subject.

Thanks for sharing this.

[Dustlawyer]

3. Where are all of the folks who want to brag on American Exceptionalism?

I wonder how many in the library that are mentally ill? That we can thank ol' Ronnie Ray Gun for!

[progressoid]

4. I've seen it in smaller cities too.

k/r