Outreach aims to aid homeless

Barbara Cooper Cutts has three minutes to decide if her clients have drug, alcohol or mental health concerns. And based on this decision, Cutts places her clients into shelters to meet their needs. Her clients do not pay her for the love and effort she puts into her work, but this does not stop Cutts, an outreach worker for Horizon House, from watching over the streets of West Philadelphia, hoping to help people in need. "My job is to get to know the clients, so that if something happens, they can find me," she said. Christine Morgan, an HIV-positive pregnant homeless woman, first met Cutts after the evacuation of People's Park. Since, she has been in and out of shelters, often finding herself on the street. "If it weren't for Brenda, I would be on the street again," Morgan said. "She's like a second mother to me." Cutts is the liaison between homeless individuals and the shelters and services set up to help them. While there are shelters that house the homeless, getting there can pose a problem. And although there is also a wide range of services available to the homeless, such as detoxification and rehabilitation programs, as well as mental health evaluations, the client must have medical coverage to receive these and other services, University Police Lieutenant Susan Holmes said. That is where Cutts' outreach work and the University City Hospitality Coalition comes in. When Cutts learned that Adult Services, a city-run organization which helps the homeless, told Morgan she had to find her own transportation to a Center City shelter, she took action. From the UCHC-run eatery in the Newman Center at 37th and Chestnut streets where they met, she escorted Morgan in her van to a downtown shelter. Before leaving, Cutts also picked up a homeless man "who had fallen through the cracks" of the system, and placed him into the Girard Medical Center's crisis unit. In this specific case, though, Cutts had been informed by her client's intensive case manager that he needed to be treated for mental health issues, she said. The next day, she called her client's case manager so he could try to help find the right services, Cutts said. Over the years, Cutts has built up a rapport with the area homeless population. She has also collaborated with the University Police recently, making her outreach work much more effective, she said. "This is the first time there's ever been a collaboration of this nature," Cutts said. No matter how many area homeless people she may know, or how effective this new collaboration may be, there is still one major loophole in the outreach process, she said. For outreach to be fully effective, a homeless individual whom Cutts picks up should be able to get health care and access to the various services offered by UCHC and other organizations, she contended. "The irony is, there are all benefits and services available, but you can't access them without an address, but if you have an address, you're not homeless," Holmes said. She added that this is why UCHC is so essential to the outreach process -- they provide an address to anyone who needs one. UCHC thus allows the homeless to receive welfare benefits, giving them access to the medical coverage and the various services they need. Cutts said her biggest problem in outreach work is getting clients to accept some kind of structure. Clients who have "fallen" want to restructure their lives, but clients who have never had any structure do not easily accept it, she said. Despite the many obstacles Cutts faces in her work, she is still optimistic about the collaboration of UCHC, Horizon House and the University Police. "The problem is so severe that it takes all of us working together and pooling our resources to make an impact," she said.