Basic needs & beyond

How Dorothy Day Place offers shelter and serves neighbors

By Rebecca Omastiak

The Catholic Spirit

Editor’s note: This report is part of The Catholic Spirit’s ongoing Homelessness in Minnesota series.

THETtemperature in the Twin Cities April 12 climbed to 84 degrees — setting a record for that day; a perfect day for barbeque.

Steaming heaps of barbeque ribs and chicken — along with fruit salad, roast vegetables and cheesy potatoes — awaited clusters of people gathered for lunch. Steady meals are among the services offered at the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation St. Paul Opportunity Center in St. Paul as people experience housing challenges and the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have people who are experiencing homelessness — whether they’re sheltered or unsheltered — receiving meals here, we have our campus housing residents receiving meals here, and we have a strong mix of people who are housed in the community … a lot of people who are housed but still are in fairly deep states of poverty come here because it is a guaranteed, secure meal for them,” said Christine Michels, director of housing stability and opportunity at Catholic Charities Twin Cities.

Michael DeJong, 65, has been the food service supervisor for Catholic Charities Twin Cities for the past 17 years. It’s unique work, DeJong said, because “instead of planning a menu and ordering, we depend so much on donations … and so our menus (are) planned after we get the food in.”

DeJong, 10 kitchen staff members, and volunteers prepare and serve three meals a day every day of the year at the St. Paul Opportunity Center — currently, the kitchen averages serving 210 to 270 meals per mealtime, DeJong said; sometimes up to 300 meals are served. Having volunteer help is necessary, he said, not just to help with the volume of food preparation and serving but also in making connections with people.

“A lot of our volunteers have been here for years and years and so a lot of people get to know them … people anticipate, they know those people,” DeJong said. Michels, who has been working with Catholic Charities Twin Cities for the past 13 years, agreed, saying, “The long-term relationships are key.”

Peggy Parenteau, 72, has been active as a coordinator with the Loaves and Fishes ministry through her parish of St. Mary of the Lake in White Bear Lake for over 20 years. She and her husband, John, who is also a coordinator, help to organize the list of parish volunteers and order food to be delivered to the St. Paul Opportunity Center’s kitchen.

Parenteau said the third Wednesday of every month, a parish volunteer group of about 10 people visits the center to serve dinner — this meal service has been taking place since 1985, when the ministry launched at St. Mary of the Lake. Parenteau said she and her husband have a list of close to 100 volunteers that they add to the monthly rotation. “It’s a very popular ministry,” Parenteau said. “There’s so many people that would do it every single month.”

A volunteer supplies a dessert for each month’s visit. Volunteers also set out new silk flower arrangements as table centerpieces — “a couple of our parishioners in the ‘80s started that,” Parenteau said.

As center visitors move through meal lines, volunteers make connections with comments such as “Enjoy your meal,” “Thanks for being here,” and “We’re glad you came,” Parenteau said.

“It’s very humbling to know this is maybe their only meal that day,” she said. “All we know is we can feed them this wonderful meal and we can be the hands, the feet and the smile of Jesus to the guests that we serve.”

Currently, groups from 28 Catholic parishes and two Catholic schools within the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis volunteer regularly to support Catholic Charities’ offerings.

‘Next step of service delivery’

Catholic Charities Twin Cities programs assist more than 20,000 people per year, including 10,000 who seek support at the nonprofit’s four emergency shelters and two day centers.

Receiving both public and private funding, the St. Paul Opportunity Center opened in October 2019. Also on the $110 million Dorothy Day Place campus is the Higher Ground St. Paul building, which opened in 2017, and connects to the St. Paul Opportunity Center via skyway.

The St. Paul Opportunity Center — which serves about 1,000 people per day — offers meals, shelter, employment and housing resources, social services, financial assistance programs, veterans services and medical care, among other services. The St. Paul Opportunity Center also has 177 units (77 efficiency apartments and 100 single-occupancy units) on site. Higher Ground St. Paul offers overnight and emergency shelter — its five floors of emergency, transitional and permanent shelter have capacity for 356 people and include 193 single-occupancy units.

According to Michael Goar, president and CEO of Catholic Charities Twin Cities, the nonprofit organization is the only provider in the Twin Cities of both overnight and daytime shelter and services — including hot meals, showers and laundry services as well as storage locker access.

Meeting a variety of basic needs in one location is one approach to addressing the multi-faceted issue of the experience of homelessness, according to Michels.

“The expectation that someone is able to step up and out of whatever their circumstance is, when they’re not getting those fundamental basic needs met, is really unlikely for any individual,” Michels said, adding that “the stabilizing aspects that we’re able to provide along with engagement, relationship-building, garnering and brokering trust with people, is really how we elevate to that next step of service delivery.”

Parenteau said the center is “a beautiful, beautiful space” that “can provide so many different tools for the guests that are in need.” Having services near shelter residents was a critical consideration for the St. Paul Opportunity Center’s design. “Residents talk about the experience of homelessness as being shuffled around and told to go to different places,” said Mike Rios-Keating, social justice education manager at Catholic Charities Twin Cities. “So, the entire vision for this space was can we have (services) in a single space … to be able to say upstairs versus downtown. That’s a huge difference in terms of those barriers for individuals.”

Needs beyond a roof and walls

In its 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determined that, on a single night in January 2022, the total number of people experiencing homelessness nationwide was 582,462. Of that total, 60% were sheltered — meaning, in “emergency shelters, safe havens or transitional housing programs”— and 40% were unsheltered — meaning, “on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation.”

In Minnesota, the report determined that, on a single night in January 2022, the total number of people experiencing homelessness was 7,917. Of that total, 77.7% were sheltered and 22.3% were unsheltered.

Meanwhile, a key finding from a report the Minnesota Department of Health and the Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute partnered to release in January 2023 was that those who experience homelessness face an earlier and greater risk of death regardless of age, gender or race — the death rate is triple that of the general Minnesota population.

To compile that report — produced with nonprofit CDC product of the Center Health and Homelessness used data gathered December 2021. merged Minnesota Information System who used homelessness-related as shelters or transitional to 2021 with state data from 2017 to compare sociodemographic causes of death homelessness. The data from substance use-related experiencing homelessness at 36.7%, overall for 36.1% of deaths, suicide, homicide, accidents and trauma”) deaths, and infectious were at 5.1%. The report also people experiencing Minnesota meet chronic homelessness. most people experiencing Minnesota lived Ramsey (17.3%) portions of Anoka, Washington counties. metro area, 10.6% County designated other areas throughout On top of unique always a clear-cut, someone experiencing all think about second? And also, housing, what’s more difficult question what’s second is varied.”

Frustrating to which someone

Foundation support as a Center of Excellence on Public Homelessness — MDH and HHRI gathered from January 2017 through 2021. The partnering agencies Minnesota Homeless Management System data on 93,923 people homelessness-related services (such transitional housing) from 2017 state death and state population to 2020 from the U.S. Census sociodemographic differences and among those experiencing from that report show overall use-related deaths for people homelessness in Minnesota were overall chronic diseases accounted deaths, external causes (including homicide, traffic incidents and “other trauma”) accounted for 15% of infectious disease-related deaths also showed roughly 15% of experiencing homelessness in meet the federal HUD definition of homelessness. The report indicated experiencing homelessness in lived in Hennepin (29.9%) or (17.3%) counties; 8.7% lived in Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Scott and counties. Beyond the Twin Cities 10.6% lived in the Duluth/St. Louis designated area and 33.4% lived in throughout the state. unique needs, Michels said it’s not clear-cut, linear story of progress for experiencing homelessness. “We can ‘housing first,’ but what’s also, while you’re trying to find happening? And that’s a much question to answer because is person-centered, unique and Michels are the moments in someone she, or a member of the

Catholic Charities Twin Cities staff, is working with can articulate a need — and then there’s a roadblock to meeting that need.

For example, Michels said, “somebody says, ‘I need treatment’ and it’s three months of bureaucratic red tape to get somebody into that place (of treatment).” Or, “somebody says ‘I just need some empowerment and some mentorship and maybe some education on financial resources and support’ — if I don’t have that volunteer that I can connect them with when that lightbulb has gone on, it’s really disheartening not only for the individual who is expressing a want and a desire for the service, but for the person who’s trying to make a referral or a connection to that service. And that was what we lived through 24/7 during COVID.”

Michels noted the community she encounters on a regular basis on the St. Paul campus “is suffering pretty significantly and I think it’s going to take at least a few more years of really authentic and intentional services.”

Andrea Hinderacker, program coordinator of St. Paul’s Homeless Assistance Response Team, said she, too, witnessed new challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic as she and her outreach team visited encampments throughout the Twin Cities. “When it came to mental health appointments, when it came to getting your prescriptions renewed, when it came to getting your general assistance or any type of basic benefits, you had to navigate a now complex system on top of just surviving every day.”

HART issues a weekly report on encampment population demographics and locations; the reports also feature team perspective for community education. In one report, Hinderacker answers the question, “Why would anyone pitch a tent outside a shelter when they could just go inside?”

She writes, in part, “When I speak with community members about homelessness and why some solutions seem too easy from the perspective of a stable, housed individual who experiences a decent night’s rest on a regular basis, eats regularly, manages their physical health through preventive measures, and relaxes now and again with friends and family...sometimes the answer is as simple as — ‘If you had none of those things going for you — how would you be functioning on a daily basis?’

“Now add years of trauma, perhaps incarceration, debilitating illness or addiction, suddenly nothing is easy and more solutions are so far out of your view that survival is the only mindset possible.”

Hinderacker also said her role, at times, is mediator between unhoused and housed community members; she speaks to the latter often at panel discussions that include shelter providers, outreach teams and police officers, among others. “My job is to help both of you ... And what I need from both of you is patience and if we can find that place where we understand this isn’t a quick fix overnight, then we’re going to be able to make progress.”

A particular challenge for many who are unsheltered is seeking shelter availability when places fill up quickly. In recent years, Hinderacker said, “shelters have become residences, so you know, they’re full almost every night.”

The amount of time it takes someone to find stable housing is critical; “The increased likelihood of long-term homelessness after being homeless for one night, it just ramps up so quickly after 24 hours,” Rios-Keating said.

Hinderacker said she’s hopeful local efforts to create and convert spaces for transitional and permanent affordable housing will generate “movement from the street level to the housing level.”

Hennepin County invested over $55.8 million, across multiple funding sources, last year to finance about 3,300 affordable rental units and affordable home ownership opportunities. This year, county and Housing and Redevelopment Authority representatives

UPPER have so far budgeted $15.2 million for housing development. Meanwhile, Ramsey County invested over $29 million, across multiple funding sources, last year to support affordable housing — those investments will lead to 1,128 new rental units and the preservation of 1,029 rental units.

One of HART’s goals, Hinderacker said, is not to continually move people from one location to the next, further displacing them, but rather to “do one move to something better.”

This is Michels’ work as well. “If we could serve people in a more dignified way, we could speed up the revolving door of people in and out of shelter to better destinations.”

Wholehearted care

Two weeks after the unseasonably warm April 12, Minnesota spring returned with a cool and wet vengeance. On the second floor of the St. Paul Opportunity Center, people eased their feet into warm footbaths that Andrea Arntzen and several of her fellow nursing program participants prepared.

St. Paul-based St. Catherine University nursing program students have been holding therapeutic foot care clinics at Catholic Charities sites for the past 15 years.

“People just love it, especially in the wintertime, when folks are outside in the cold a lot, you know, feet getting wet … it’s just such a service,” said Lauren Erchul McCabe, resource coordinator at the St. Paul Opportunity Center.

It was Arntzen’s first time providing such foot care; her focus was on providing “holistic, wholehearted care and just recognizing everyone’s human.” Wholehearted care, the 23-year-old said, “is just really listening from the heart and providing care from the heart … providing dignity and just doing whatever that means for the patient … you go based off their needs and try to really support them.”

Megan Williams, assistant professor of nursing at the St. Catherine University, said