Up From Homelessness

As New Haven enters a new phase of tackling homelessness, three people on the front lines charted the way.

The three — social services worker Abu Baker; Alison Cunningham, executive director of Columbus House,; and John Bradley, executive director of Liberty Community Services—reflected on the current and future during a recent forum at Westville’s Congregation Beth-El Keser Israel (BEKI).

The panel discussion traced the rise of homelessness in New Haven since 1980, when the problem became visible in town for the first time since the Great Depression; through the growth of service-backed shelters like Columbus House, Liberty, and Christian Community Action; through a new campaign that seeks to end chronic homelessness altogether and has already succeeded in finding over 100 people homes in the past year through coordinated efforts among different agencies. (Read about that here.) After the panelists spoke, BEKI congregants — who had recently housed a group of homeless people for a week as part of the ​“Abraham’s Tent” program—quizzed the speakers on ways New Haveners can contribute to finding solutions.

Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to listen to a recording of the panel discussion, produced by the Independent’s Brian Slattery.

Baker himself was homeless at one point, then got back on his feet to start helping other people in similar straits. ​“Because I was out of work and became homeless, you start questioning yourself,” he said at the BEKI forum. ​“Fortunately for me, I surrounded myself with some pretty smart people. One of the questions they asked was: Who am I? They explained it to me: The biologists would say I’m a living organism. The religious community would say I’m a soul. The phiolosopher would say, ​‘Well, you’re a certain amount of knowledge and a certain amount of uunderstanding that make you up to be who you are …”