“Even if you find out that I relapse tomorrow, I want you to know that you are helping me. Because these 20 minutes that I’ve spent eating lunch with you are 20 full minutes that I haven’t been thinking about drugs or getting high. And that’s a victory.”
Assisting people who are experiencing homelessness as an AmeriCorps member this past year has made me reexamine my definition of success. Serving with the Santa Barbara Public Defender’s Office, I wanted to permanently house clients who were chronically homeless, connect clients who had co-occurring mental health disorders with effective treatment programs, and break the seemingly endless cycle of incarceration, all while ensuring my clients had access to basic necessities like food, soap, and clean socks. I was quickly met with a harsh reality. “You are not an apartment building,” my supervisor informed me on day one. I could not make housing opportunities appear out of thin air.
As for effective treatment programs, residential options for mental health treatment in Santa Barbara County are scarce and if my client had co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders (as most did), they were completely out of luck. My dreams of being a hero in the courtroom also fell flat. While I could try to get bench warrants pushed back, if I could not locate a client in time, jail was often inevitable. So I was often limited to providing basic necessities, but those too, eventually ran out.