Forty-six-year-old Rick Martin lives a happy and fulfilling life. He has been married for several years, has a baby on the way and has a rewarding career as an at-risk youth coordinator at the Fan Free Clinic in Richmond. He sings with several choirs, works as a personal trainer and in his limited free time enjoys writing about himself, planning one day to publish an autobiography.
But Rick's writings are not focused on the successful and secure life he lives today. He wants to tell a more difficult story -- his account of the 10 years during which he was homeless on and off and facing a bleak future of substance abuse, crime and hunger.
Rick is one of five speakers who will address the members of the University community this evening at the Hoos Against Hunger and Homelessness Symposium in the Dome Room of the Rotunda from 7 to 9.
Hoos Against Hunger and Homelessness hopes the symposium will clear up some myths about homelessness and encourage students to take a closer look at the problem through the eyes of someone who has lived through it. This is where Rick Martin comes in.
The Life on the Streets
It was drugs that caused Martin to become homeless. When he moved to New York at the age of 11, he was introduced to the city's drug scene and began experimenting at 14. This experimentation "rapidly progressed to harder and harder things," Martin said. He quickly became addicted and spent any money he had on his habit. He couldn't hold down a job, and what little income he produced came from the occasional day laboring job.
"If I was using," he said, "hat money would be gone in 24 hours."
A typical day in Rick's life as a homeless man in New York would begin with waking up "God knows where, and being very, very hungry." Some days he would walk to a day labor pick-up area in hopes of finding some work to make enough money to buy the next round of drugs. If he did not find work, he and his friends would walk to the nearest soup kitchen for breakfast, traveling from kitchen to kitchen throughout the day.
Struggling with an ever-worsening drug habit and without a steady cash flow, Martin turned to crime. He began robbing banks, for which he was arrested in 1985 and spent five years in prison.
Finally, after 10 years of being on the streets, Rick had had enough. He left New York and traveled around the South until he ended up in Richmond. It was there that he decided he wanted to turn his life around. But he knew he couldn't do it alone.
"I figured I really needed some long-term help," he said.
He found that aid in a drug-treatment center in Richmond. He completed the program, then spent a year in aftercare and an additional nine months at a halfway house where he was able to work, yet still receive support in his recovery.
He worked a while at a Richmond car dealership, a place where Martin said, "I started growing, I wasn't the cracked out guy scared of everyone."
He was fired from that job, but rather than being a setback, it marked a turning point in his life -- it led to his employment as a youth counselor.
Getting fired "was the best thing that could have happened to me because it led me to what I'm doing now," he said. Martin found his ideal vocation at the Fan Free Clinic
-- no one was better suited to work with teens headed down the wrong life path than someone who had been there and lived the harsh consequences of going down that road.
Rick's duties as project coordinator at the clinic include running a hip-hop dance group, mentoring individual kids and leading educational programspromoting abstinence and a drug and alcohol-free lifestyle. He warns teens that he was one of lucky ones who turned his life around, because homelessness and substance abuse "can take you to a bottom you can't come back from."
The Larger Problem
Estimates of the number of homeless in America today range from 500,000 to 7 million. There has never been a comprehensive statistical study of homeless populations, making it difficult for aid programs to gauge need, according to Evan Scully, who works at the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville.
With money from a Department of Housing and Urban Development grant, the Commission is beginning a project of collecting data on homeless populations.HUD's goal is to end chronic homelessness within 10 years, and building an accurate and diverse database of information about the situation is a key step in the process, Scully said.
In the city of Charlottesville, and its five surrounding counties, the need for emergency shelter for families with children is only 38 percent met and 65 percent met for individuals, according to statistics provided by the Planning District. For families seeking permanent housing, only 0.04 percent of the need is met, Scully said.
"When people hear the word 'homelessness' they think of one population, but there are distinct groups," Scully said.
Children mark a typically forgotten group, and they make up one-third of Charlottesville's homeless population, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. Some other groups susceptible to becoming homeless are the mentally-disabled, the physically-handicapped and the drug-addicted, Scully added.
The Charlottesville Effort
Rick's story is a individual victory in the fight against homelessness, due in no small part to the help he received at the Richmond clinic. Charlottesville provides several facilities geared toward helping people like Rick make positive changes in their lives.
One such organization in Charlottesville, On Our Own, offers aid specifically to the mentally-disabled, many of whom also are homeless. Will Gallik, On Our Own executive director, describes it as, "a place for folks who have mental health issues to come and be a part of something. The organization provides a drop-in center, peer support groups, social activities, kitchen, laundry and shower facilities.
The organization does its best to provide support for the needy in the area, but Gallick said he feels that on the whole the aid available to the homeless in Charlottesville is inadequate.
"There is no place to provide general services to individuals who are just homeless. It seems to be an area that has not been addressed," he said.
Reed Banks, co-chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless in Charlottesville, agrees there is room for improvement in homeless programs.
"I think the area Salvation Army does fairly well providing emergency shelter
and providing an immediate place to go for people to get off the streets," Banks said. "We don't have enough affordable permanent housing. You can get 50 people into the Salvation Army shelter but where do they go from there?"
The Coalition aims to create a continuum of housing options through a progression from emergency to transitional to permanent housing and eventually to private homes, but the resources simply aren't currently enough to support this plan, he said.
University students, in fact, are unknowing contributors to the lack of affordable housing for needy families because they both take up much of the reasonably-priced housing in Charlottesville and cause rents to go up because of the high demand, he said.
Banks commends the efforts of the Mohr Center, a public inebriate shelter, and the Dual Recovery Center, a center for both drug and alcohol abuse support. But both of these treatment centers are "small and don't nearly meet the need," he said.
Despite the discouraging statistics about the severity of the problem at the local, state and national levels, Rick feels the fight against homelessness must begin with the individual. He believes that any homeless person or troubled teen can transform his or her life. The best advice he offers the youth he counsels is, "No matter how low you get, you can always come back up. Anyone can change"
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