Fall 2019
Innsider
Pathways Out of
News from Pine Street Inn
Homelessness
People often associate the term “triage” with an
emergency room, where medical professionals quickly assess the needs of patients to determine next steps of care. Pine Street’s “Front-Door Triage” program was modeled after this approach. The idea is to engage intensively with new shelter guests as soon as they arrive at our door, quickly calibrating the right level of support needed and expediting their return to housing and stability.
LeSans (right) works with a new guest to seek alternatives to shelter.
For some, an immediate solution is possible through family reunification, individual counseling and/or assistance with transportation home, where someone awaits their return. For others, the path out of homelessness is more complex, requiring coordination with medical, mental health and/or substance use treatment systems. (Continued on page 2)
A Voice from the Early Days: Mary Johnson Throughout our 50th anniversary, we are sharing
stories from those who were here at the beginning. The following excerpt was adapted from an interview with Mary Johnson, a staff member who has worked at Pine Street since 1980. I was going to school at Boston State College to train as a surgical nurse. I started working at Pine Street a couple of nights a week in the Women’s Inn. At the time, the women’s shelter was new to Pine Street – a place for homeless women was not really a
focus back then, but was needed. We saw a lot of domestic violence survivors who would come here. With deinstitutionalization, a lot of people who needed help came to us because they had nowhere else to go. We learned about crisis intervention – that we had to be more intentional and focused in how we were dealing with people who had many different problems. About 10 years ago, I started working with veterans here. A lot of them did not identify as a veteran because
Mary (right) and a guest at the Women’s Inn in the 1980s.
of substance use or mental illness – they were embarrassed. I thought it was going to be an easy transition because I had been working with the homeless population for over 25 years. But it wasn’t. Veteran PTSD is very overwhelming.
(Continued on page 2)
