Journey expands

The Journey Home is ready to grow.

For nearly 10 years, the Winchester organization has operated a transitional housing facility for homeless veterans on Oak Street.

There, a small group of men (the living quarters aren’t set up to accept women veterans) work on whatever issues — credit scores, rental history, legal problems, etc. — prevent them from being eligible for housing programs offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. On average, residents are able to move into their own housing in about four months, according to transitional services supervisor Thereasa Miller.

That facility is not going away.

The Journey Home is not leaving Winchester.

Winchester will become the national headquarters for a network of The Journey Home’s Veteran Outreach Team programs and services in communities throughout the country.

The first new site is in development in Naples, Florida.

“The desire to move our mission nationally is because the homeless issue is a national crisis for veterans,” said Eldon Solomon, CEO of The Journey Home.

Disturbing statistics about homelessness among veterans inspired the formation of the organization in 2013 and the opening of the Oak Street facility in 2014.

The statistics remain dire.

The Point-in-Time count, an annual effort of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to estimate the number of Americans without safe, stable housing, identifies more than 37,000 veterans as homeless. But the count is limited in scope and does not reach into rural areas, so the actual number likely is much higher.

When Solomon became CEO in 2016, The Journey Home’s sole mission was operating the Winchester facility.

“We realized early on that the sustainability of this mission wasn’t going to last based on just (that),” he said.

Solomon and a newly reorganized board of directors shifted to a national focus.

Specifically, they looked at isolated, hidden veterans — the ones not included in any counts.

“Our mission has been to learn how to find them and then to begin to service them,” he said. “And we’ve become, I think, pretty good at it.”

In 2021, The Journey Home’s Veteran Outreach Team provided services to 191 veterans. In 2022, that number jumped to 890 veterans.

How did they do it?

For one thing, they asked residents at the facility what they liked about the place.

One of the things they liked best was Winchester. (Some 60 percent of former residents choose to stay in the area when they find their own housing.)

“That connection means something,” Solomon said. “That connection is empowering. So we began to look at how do we capitalize on that? How do we program around that?”

One way was to create active community partnerships.

Volunteers like Jim Hitchcock are in the facility often. Hitchcock answers the phone a couple of days a week and once a month helps organize the Second Harvest Food Bank food basket giveaway for veterans. Most of the baskets are distributed at the Oak Street facility.

“It’s a great place,” Hitchcock said.

Volunteers also drive veterans to appointments, operate The Journey Home’s thrift shop in Union City, help with fundraisers and organize the annual Christmas party.

It’s all part of a conscious effort to build relationships.

The Journey Home also encouraged churches, doctor’s offices, community event organizers and even grocery stores to talk to their congregations, patients, participants and shoppers. Are they veterans?

“When we start asking these organizations … all of a sudden, those veterans are coming out of the woodwork because someone besides the government is asking,” Solomon said.

What do those isolated, hidden veterans have in common?

“They have cut off, for whatever reason, all social interaction,” said Solomon.

The Journey Home began to focus on bridging that gap, reconnecting veterans to their communities.

At the facility, staff is well versed in community resources and, of course, veterans’ resources.

Caseworker Nila Cones is willing to go to bat with the VA or other service providers. “Trust me,” she said. “I’m not afraid to speak my mind. And these guys know it. I am going to help them get what I feel they deserve if it means I have to push them to want that.”

Pushing residents to want the resources available to them can be a challenge, but it is an essential part of the process.

“We don’t do anything,” Miller said. “It’s the guys that have to do it. We just hold their hand, walk through that with them, assist them where needed, that kind of thing, because if they’re not doing it, they’re not learning and they’re not devoting themselves to that goal.”

Former resident Patrick Read had never heard of Winchester before coming to the facility.

His stay there “… gave me time to kind of come up with a plan as far as what I was going to do next, what steps I needed to take to get housing. … It just gives you a place to kind of … get your life together.”

Solomon believes that kind of safe place allows the development of “borrowed trust.”

“Many of the veterans don’t trust the VA, but we do, and the VA trusts us,” he said. “Because the veterans trust us and we trust the VA, they’ll trust the VA. And when the VA has a problem with a veteran, because they trust us, they will use us to engage the veteran and bring them back.”

But just focusing on lessons learned at the facility might not have spurred growth without a chance opportunity for The Journey Home to assist with disaster relief after a hurricane in Louisiana, helping an acquaintance of Solomon’s serve meals in affected areas.

Cones was one of the Winchester staff who joined the effort.

“We helped the community as a whole, but we were also able to gather information on veterans,” she said. “We did a whole lot of digging (about local resources) before we went down.”

As a result, when they helped a veteran clean up their property or gave them some food, the staff was able to help them connect with resources as well.

The Journey Home also responded to the floods in Kentucky and a hurricane in Naples, Florida.

A veteran there became fascinated with the work they were doing.

“I want to have The Journey Home’s Veterans Outreach Team program and services in Naples. How do I do it?” Solomon remembers Jacqualene Keay asking him.

“You build a strong … grassroots group of individuals that can shake the community,” Solomon told her, “and we’ll come down there.”

He now spends two weeks out of every month in Naples.

Keay has joined The Journey Home board and is head of its National Mission Committee, which is learning “how to plant a Veterans Outreach Team program and services there so we can do it elsewhere. … It’s going to get big,” Solomon said. “This is not a Winchester crisis or a Naples crisis. This is a national crisis.”

But it is a crisis that The Journey Home has a vision to solve.

“Anyone can make a difference in a veteran’s life,” Kaey said. “You just have to connect with them.”

To learn more, visit journeyhomevets.org.