I do street-based outreach and I also volunteer at the house. My favorite spot is the clothing room I’m forever organizing the clothing closet. I really enjoy helping people pick out outfits. They’ll be like, ‘Does this look nice or does this match?’ and I give them feedback like, ‘No, those colors clash but this and this look nice together.’ Sometimes they’re looking for clothes that affirm their gender or their identity, like there are people who love dresses and people who don’t, and there are people who love cargo style baggy pants and people who would never wear them. There’s this older participant who loves pretty things bracelets and trinkets and things with gemstones-so sometimes I put things away for her and then she comes and she’ll be like, ‘Oh my God I love it.’ I really enjoy that about the house. I like helping establish relationships and getting to know people as they are.

DESK provides food, resources, and services for folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. I think that the pandemic kind of laid bare exactly how many folks fall into those categories. We have professors, construction workers, electricians, hip hop artists, graphic artists, veterans. They have the most amazing stories and yet to many people, their experience of homelessness makes them not worthwhile.

New Haven gets a bad rap for the concentration of services being a magnet for folks from outlying towns and there’s a lot of animosity around, ‘If we concentrate the social services, we’re just drawing people in.’ But I don’t think that’s a bad thing if that is what’s going on. It takes a lot to ask for help and I think that the bootstraps narrative of, ‘If you just tried harder’ is really busted. It’s really powerful to have folks come and ask for what they need and it’s gratifying when I’m able to help facilitate providing those resources.

Our guests are very good at naming what we aren’t providing, whether that’s within a referral network or what we’re providing ourselves, and we use that feedback very carefully. Like I’ve been getting a lot of requests for employment services so I’m really trying to develop our employment and job readiness services. I’m learning all the time that our best teachers are our guests.

Since covid, we have re-allocated part of our dining hall into our supplies and clothing corner—we’ve been giving out about 50 pounds of clothes a day. So if you think about how much a hoodie costs and how much that would benefit somebody to not have to spend $12 at Walmart to buy a hoodie, what could that $12 do for them when they’re given back the agency to decide what they’re going to spend their money on? I really like to get away from the bootstraps narrative of, “You just spent your money wrong that you probably didn’t deserve in the first place.”

One of the longer-term legislative campaigns we’re working on is building towards decriminalization of sex work. I also hold meeting with our SWAN members to hear about what kind of advocacy they would like to see. A big issue has been dealing with the police—harassment from the police is a really common complaint.

We have great high-level support from the police department and there are some officers that we have great relationships with. But when it comes to the entire force, even though the New Haven police department doesn’t arrest for prostitution right now, there is still really intense stigma against sex workers, people who use drugs, and people on the streets in general. So people will be harassed while they’re out working, or threatened, and it’s rare to see accountability for that. We want to see that change.

Most of the people we work with are survival sex workers or street-based sex workers. There are a lot of misconceptions about sex work, like that anybody who is engaged in it is being trafficked and needs to be rescued. So the support people want to give is, ‘Let’s get you out of sex work first,’ when in reality the reason most people do sex work is because they have needs like housing, food, or supporting their family. Sex work is the best option for them to meet those needs, so getting somebody out of sex work without doing anything else to meet those needs is actually not going to help them.

When I started working with SWAN, I realized that a lot of the people on the street were women I had known from the shelters and soup kitchens. But as much as I’d been doing medical care for them, they had never told me about doing survival sex work. Many of them were relieved when they finally saw me here because they were like, ‘Now he knows and I can be honest and get better care.’ Learning this very personal information opened my heart more to these men and women and motivated me to really advocate for them.

Medical and nursing students are the future of how people will be taken care of in our communities, so the more that we can expose them to humanity and the social barriers to care, the more they can effect change when they become doctors and nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

This is why it is so important that their initial learning experiences be grounded in personal connections that break down stereotypes about sex workers, people who use drugs, and people on the street. Too see the struggles some of our patients endure and the strength required just to get through the day will hopefully change the culture of healthcare and create a network of empathetic supporters.

As a medical provider, one of the things I’d like to see is a sobering center so that those who are intoxicated can go there instead of the ER. In New Haven, if somebody is intoxicated the police don’t arrest them. They call an ambulance which is great because the person doesn’t get arrested. The problem is, the ER is not a place where they have the time, the training, or the bandwidth to handle people who are intoxicated. Sometimes that leads to their emotional filters coming down, creating a not favorable experience for the patients. But if you could take that away from the ER, you could hire people with the training, empathy, and desire to care for people in that state and improve their health outcomes.

When people think of harm reduction, they think of needle exchange programs. That’s really important and we do that, too, but there’s all these other life needs that people have. People are really hungry for community and this house gives them the opportunity to have that. Even the nap room expands what harm reduction is because people we work with are for the most part homeless and spending nights outside and are exhausted. So just having a few hours of uninterrupted sleep when they can recharge and then be woken up by a person handing them a cup of tea or coffee, that’s so lovely. It can help people feel better in their bodies and make clearer decisions.