Steering the ship: Lancaster County outreach workers act as crucial piece to homelessness response

• By Jade Campos/LNP | LancasterOnline

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story contained an incorrect spelling of Thomas Tuten.

On an unseasonably warm day in February, Milan Koneff and Thomas Tuten are looking for people.

Some days, they know exactly who they’re looking for. On other days, like this one, they just hope to get lucky.

Koneff and Tuten know they’re in the right spot when they come across a row of three tents in a grassy field behind a cluster of trees in the southern end of Lancaster city.

Everything is still.

“Hello!” Koneff calls out. “We’re outreach workers with Tenfold. We’re here to help you.”

A few seconds of silence before a rustling in one of the tents. A man’s voice responds, asking for snacks and a few sleeping bags.

Not a problem. The men head back to a car parked about a five minute walk away to pack a few bags with water bottles and hygiene products, which Tutten keeps stocked in his trunk at all times.

Professional outreach workers like Koneff and Tuten are on the streets every day trying to respond to Lancaster County’s homelessness crisis. Countywide, the number of outreach workers is fairly small — seven work at various social services agencies — compared to the nearly 600 people who were reported to be homeless last year.

At the most basic level, their job is to help any person in the county who is experiencing homelessness. Help usually includes handing out water bottles and socks whenever they can, and the ultimate goal is to find housing for everyone they meet.

But outreach work is more complex than that, and it is the essential front line of the county’s homelessness response. Workers don’t just hand out freebies; they pinpoint shelter for people in life-threatening situations; they navigate complicated paperwork to help people obtain basic essentials such as proper identification. They also take on the heavy burden of being an emotional support system for hundreds of people every day.

All of those responsibilities come with an annual paycheck of $36,000, far below the county’s median salary of about $55,000, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Pair that with limited staffing and the resulting long hours, and Koneff says it’s understandable why the job feels “so harsh for most workers and why the turnover has been historically high.”

“It’s chaotic and overwhelming,” Koneff says. “We have to make sense of (a person’s situation) and try to steer a ship in the storm.”

Eventually, a man and a woman come out of the tent. They’ve never met Koneff or Tuten, but they’re ready to open up a little bit about their experiences with homelessness. The woman is new to Lancaster County, coming from another state after escaping domestic violence.

In return, Koneff and Tuten share as much information as they can about their work with Tenfold, a local social services nonprofit, in an effort to build trust. They pass the bags of supplies to the man and woman, along with a few business cards tucked inside. The outreach workers are serious when they ask the pair to call them.

Outreach involves significant trust and collaboration, not just among the workers but with the people they serve, whom Koneff and Tuten refer to as their “clients.” Tuten says clients often face significant trauma and struggle to trust people enough to accept help. As a result, workers can spend months curating a relationship with a person before moving forward.

Big picture ideas

Culliton Park on South Water Street is a regular stop for Koneff and Tuten, where familiar faces gather daily. The park has been a safe space for unhoused people for years, though the crowd grew bigger last summer when the homeless community was told to leave their normal spots near the county government building on North Queen Street.

One woman at Culliton hugs Koneff tightly. She tells him it was a miracle from God that he stopped by the park that day because she’s been struggling to access her benefits and needs help. Koneff knows her well and agrees to meet her at a later date to sort everything out.

The woman has struggled to maintain housing for years. In fact, Koneff hasn’t seen her in the park in months because she’s been housed. Nonchalantly, she says she expects to be sleeping in the park later that night.

Tuten says most clients become homeless because they lack a human support system. Maybe their spouse died or their parents kicked them out.

More housing is the key to prevent people from slipping back into homelessness again and again, Tuten says. Officials countywide have made strides to grow the affordable housing stock in the past decade with 361 affordable units coming online since 2015. Lancaster city has also earmarked $10 million in federal grant money to fund 300 more affordable units.

Still, Tuten says, it’s not enough.

“The fact that (homelessness) keeps getting worse with investments can just mean that the problem is growing so fast that the investments … can’t keep up,” he says.

Koneff says local housing leaders have struggled to plan ahead when it comes to housing solutions, leaving outreach workers scrambling to provide short-term solutions. Instead of putting a band-aid on homelessness, he says, the community needs to be thinking about the big picture.

Take, for example, the county’s new 80-bed shelter on East Clay Street in Lancaster. Koneff calls it an excellent and necessary step for the community, but notes the new location reinstated only the number of beds that were in place last winter before the shelter temporarily closed. He worries some officials see the Clay Street shelter as the solution to solving the county’s growing homelessness problem and will “stop short and celebrate too early.”

Deb Jones, director of the county’s Homelessness Coalition, agrees a shelter is not the end-all, be-all. The county is developing a wraparound services hub in the city on South Prince Street, she says, where unhoused people can find more than just a bed. The hub, slated to open next year, will offer case management, a day center and affordable housing units.

Housing leaders are also working on a countywide strategic plan to tackle homelessness, Jones says. The intent of the plan, expected to be completed by the end of the year, is to get ahead of problems facing the homeless community.

“We are working to create a system that anticipates and prevents homelessness, rather than just responding to it,” Jones says via email.

‘Crushing need’

Koneff and Tuten are becoming as well acquainted with the Route 30 corridor as they are with city parks like Culliton. Encampments in wooded areas along the highway have grown since the summer order to stay away from the county government building.

Behind a fast food chain restaurant, they spend 10 minutes peering through branches and climbing over debris in the hopes they’ll find one man. Koneff met him a few weeks earlier and wants to check on him. Eventually, the pair spot a tent just below a steep hill. No one’s there.

It’s not a waste of time though. Koneff already feels deeply bonded to his new client, so they plan to come back another day.

The job is deeply emotional, Tuten says, which has its pros and cons. Empathy is critical for outreach workers who interact with people in their lowest moments. Koneff says the emotional connection makes it easier to advocate for their clients.

Koneff jokes that he and Tuten are the “rowdy boots on the ground” — actively engaged with people who, for the higher-ups in local homelessness work, may be perceived only as numbers on a spreadsheet. Occasionally the emotional connection they have with clients, Koneff says, can cause him to become angry and hot-headed when progress doesn’t happen fast enough.

“I don’t want to be like that all of the time. But I feel like I have to play into that role for my client, and it’s kind of expected of a person who is around all of the turmoil that we are around,” Koneff says.

That turmoil can turn into real mental strife. Tuten says he’s struggled to sleep at night in the past knowing he could crawl into bed while his clients are sleeping on benches and sidewalks.

“I had times where I didn’t know if I could handle that,” he says.

Some people can’t handle the mental pressures of the job. With the long hours, it’s easy for outreach workers to become burnt out and leave the industry entirely.

“Street outreach is a challenging position where you are constantly faced with a crushing need and not enough resources to feel that you are making a meaningful impact,” Jones says.

Demand for social services nationwide is expected to outpace the available resources, including outreach workers, over the next decade. According to the Columbia School of Social Work, the country will experience a deficit of 74,000 social workers each year for the next 10 years.

Tuten says the impacts are already being felt locally as homelessness grows. The core of their outreach work — meeting new people on the streets — is steadily being chipped away because they have so many existing clients who need their help, and there’s less time to go looking for new ones.

“In theory, that’s one of the most important things (about our jobs), because we are the only ones who do that,” Tuten says.