Students to help homeless get out of the cold

University City Hospitality Coalition and Horizon House will begin training students tonight to work for a new program to help area homeless people find shelter on cold nights. UCHC Executive Director David Lynn said the program, called Cold Watch, will take effect during severe cold conditions. On those nights, students will form teams and walk through the streets around the University between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., offering to take homeless people to city shelters that make extra beds available in severe cold. Tonight's training session will begin at 7:30 at St. Mary's Church in Superblock and is open to all interested students. UCHC members said it is appropriate that the area's first cold watch program should be started by UCHC, because the organization itself was started in response to the death of a man who died on campus in 1984 as a result of overexposure to the cold. Brenda Cooper-Cutt, homeless outreach coordinator for the city-funded Horizon House, said she will be responsible for the training. She will tell volunteers about how to approach a homeless person and the safety issues that may arise when they do. Cooper-Cutt said the main point of the training will be to teach students that they must first observe the situation before approaching a homeless person. Then, she said, they must engage the person in conversation before talking to them about the shelter. "Leave people's options open and listen," Cooper-Cutt said. "They'll tell you [if they want help.]" Lee Ann Draud, the meal coordinator for UCHC, echoed this view. "Sometimes you have to work on people for a while," she said. Cooper-Cutt also said she will stress the importance of working in teams of at least four volunteers. Groups will probably carry police radios when they do a walk-through. She added that she will be training University and Philadelphia police, as well as students, to maximize awareness of the Cold Watch. "The more eyes the more you can see," Cooper-Cutt said. Lynn said that these precautions must be taken because many people are extremely unwilling to go to a shelter. Many people, he said, have had negative experiences at the shelter system. "Not everybody you offer services to is going to come in," Lynn said. "Some of them have had bad experiences ? [or] hated the system. Some are mentally ill." William Armour, a UCHC volunteer who used to be homeless, said that even when people are unwilling to go to a shelter on a Cold Watch night, he will "just give them a blanket and tell them to stay warm." Cooper-Cutt said homeless or formerly homeless clients of UCHC could be vital in getting people off the street in cold weather, because they could "relate to the street sense." In addition, Gerber said, involving homeless people who are already UCHC clients would help foster the sense of community that UCHC strives to achieve. "It gives them a sense of pride and really makes the organization work," said Gerber. "It's not like we're serving them, but that we're working together."