ANNUAL REPORT 2012 Harvard Square Homeless Shelter WELCOME BACK HOME

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1 ANNUAL REPORT 2012 Harvard Square Homeless Shelter WELCOME BACK HOME

2 Photos courtesy of Kris Snibbe/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Message from our Staff 4 Message from our Finance Director 6 Profit and Loss May June HSHS over the Years 8 Staff Notes 9 MISSION STATEMENT The Harvard Square Homeless Shelter serves the homeless community of Cambridge and Boston. The student staff and the University Lutheran Church work together to provide guests with shelter, food, security, and a supportive environment of mutual respect. In addition to providing these fundamental needs, we work individually with those who seek our assistance as they strive to attain their own goals and make the transition into independent living. The shelter also serves as a bridge between the homeless and student populations of Cambridge and Boston. By bringing ourselves into closer contact with the homeless, we aim to increase our understanding of the challenges and aspirations of the individuals we serve. By working together in this endeavor, we hope to make a difference in the larger effort to confront homelessness.

4 MESSAGE FROM OUR STAFF Dear Friends, Welcome home! Some of you have been away from the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter (HSHS) for many years, while others were here just yesterday. We welcome you back to a community of dedicated volunteers working tirelessly to run an emergency shelter in the heart of Harvard Square. We hope that with this annual report you will join us in reflecting on our accomplishments, our challenges, and the work that lies before us. The staff of HSHS also hopes that you will take this time to reflect on all the contributions you have made to the shelter as former volunteers, staff members, and dedicated community partners. HSHS could not open every fall without the tremendous support of the Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston communities. Our volunteers, past and present, are the lifeblood of our organization, enabling us to operate the only student-run emergency shelter in the United States. We hope that this report reminds you of the impact you have on the lives of our guests and serves as a call to action to confront many of the challenges the homeless face each and every day. The Harvard Square Homeless Shelter successfully completed its 28th season this past spring. Serving almost 200 individual guests, HSHS was supported by over 150 volunteers from the Harvard, Boston, and Cambridge communities. This, coupled with support from local restaurants, business associations, churches, law firms, and other homeless shelters has meant that we are well on our way to creating a community for our guests. Life on the streets comes with unimaginable challenges and real barriers develop between those who are homeless and the resources which exist to protect them. At HSHS, we believe that the simple two hot and a cot model is not enough to empower our guests to break out of the shelter system. As a result, we have continued to develop and expand our Resource Advocacy, Street Outreach, and Work Contract programs while maintaining our commitment to serving as many people in Harvard Square as possible. This year, our Work Contract Program worked with several guests as they maintained stable employment to save for more permanent housing. Case managers offered them individual attention, connected them with state services, and advocated on their behalf within the shelter and transitional housing systems. Our Resource Advocates, all volunteers fluent in the services available to people experiencing homelessness, continued to expand their offerings. Advocates assisted guests with everything from renewing forms of identification and accessing Social Security and Veterans benefits to previewing guests stand-up comedy routines and sharing stories during the holidays. 4

5 Our Street Outreach team continues to take the mission of HSHS outside the shelter walls, bringing food, blankets, clothing, and a kind ear to homeless people not staying with us, while raising awareness of the shelter for those new to Harvard Square and perhaps experiencing homelessness for the first time. Lastly, we continued our service-learning experience with high school students from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. With a generous 2:1 matching grant from the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter Corporation, the high schoolers were able to raise over $1,000 to help finance the two meals the students cook from scratch every week for our guests. There is still much to do, however. Changes in national and local funding mechanisms as well as more emergent research in homelessness issues is pushing shelters to adopt longer-term transitional models. This past April, HSHS partnered with Students for Affordable Housing Reform to cohost a panel called, Innovations to End Homelessness, featuring professionals working to end homelessness from across Massachusetts. Many highlighted the need for continued development and support of transitional programs as a key component in fighting homelessness. While still an emergency shelter, HSHS must think about ways to innovate how we provide services and how we connect our guests to long-term housing solutions. MESSAGE FROM OUR STAFF This is where you can help! Many of you volunteered at HSHS and have continued to work to end homelessness in your own communities. We would love to reconnect, to hear your stories, and to learn from your years of experience as volunteers, former directors and supervisors, and community members. To discover concrete ways you can get involved, visit our newly designed website (hshshelter.org) and explore the page established for Alumni. You will be able to receive news and updates from us electronically. You will also find opportunities to volunteer, donate, and share your experiences with us. We thank you for your continued support and for all of your help in making the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter a transformative community for our guests and volunteers. Welcome back home! HSHS Staff 5

6 MESSAGE FROM OUR FINANCE DIRECTOR The beginning of our season at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter marked yet another occasion in which the Harvard Square community offered generosity and support. The Harvard Square Business Association, along with Boston-based business BuyWithMe (which is now part of the firm Gilt Groupe), sold promotional offers for their establishments and donated a portion of the profits to the shelter. This brought in nearly $7,000, starting our year off strong. The Harvard University community provided substantial support as well. At the annual Giving Thanks Fair, staff members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences made both monetary and in-kind contributions to the shelter. The Memorial Church Grants Committee also selected the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter as a recipient this spring. Continued support from our individual donors and the city of Cambridge rounded out our fundraising, allowing us to continue our work and explore potential avenues of improvement for the services we offer. As seen on the following page, the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance (MHSA) supplies a substantial majority of our funding. In addition to financial contributions, MHSA continues to serve as an important partner in developing programming and services that best meet the needs of our guests. The shelter s largest expenses are the essentials: rent and utilities for our space in the University Lutheran Church, security services to ensure the safety of everyone in our shelter, food and supplies, and telephone and internet services. We are happy to provide our guests with a telephone, Internet access, and printing. Our guests also express appreciation for the opportunity to do personal laundry at the shelter. We are able to maintain expenditures at fairly low levels thanks in large part to the tremendous work of our volunteer force. The generosity of local businesses including Au Bon Pain, Darwin s Ltd., and Oggi s Gourmet further reduce our food costs. The following page more explicitly delineates income and expenses for the season. The surplus in our bottom line is great news - it allows us the flexibility to innovate while looking ahead to address more substantial capital expenses. More specifically, as a staff, we are currently working to enhance our use of technology in order to streamline our intake process and hoping to explore how to best meet the nutritional needs of our guests. A degree of flexibility in our budget will certainly help to drive these projects forward in the coming season. Geetika Mehra 12 Finance Director By the numbers: $2,500 Guests with us every night Nights of operation 6 Approximate amount spent per bed over the course of our season

7 Income (USD) Government Grants Harvard Held Endowment Individual Contributions Organizations Contributions and Grants Special Fundraising Events Total Expenses (USD) Telephone and Internet Food and Supplies Security Services Rent and Utilities Repairs and Maintenance Other Total 35, , , , , , , , , , , , , PROFIT AND LOSS MAY JUNE 2012 Net Income (USD) 29,

8 HSHS OVER THE YEARS The Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, then the UniLu Shelter, opens its doors as the first homeless shelter in Harvard Square, serving approximately a dozen men and women. Major renovations transform the shelter, creating an eating area, relaxation spaces, a laundry room, and separate men s and women s sleeping areas. The Work Contract Program is created to provide longer-term beds and one-onone support to employed individuals working to transition to independent living The kitchen is completely remodeled, becoming a safer and more beautiful space with state-of-the-art equipment The Resource Advocacy Program is created, using student volunteers to connect guests with community resources such as healthcare, housing, job search, and more. Former HSHS staff member Scott Seider publishes the book Shelter: Where Harvard Meets the Homeless, drawing national praise for HSHS s unique student-run model The Harvard Square Homeless Shelter continues to have the most volunteers of any single organization on campus, a student-based model we are working to expand by collaborating with students from Villanova and Stanford to help start shelters at those universities. 8

9 Check out the whole range of awesome things that graduating and returning HSHS staff members are doing this summer and will be doing over the course of next year! Jacob Cedarbaum 12 (Supplies Director) will be teaching high school biology in the Chicago Public Schools with the Chicago Teaching Fellows Program. Katie Dahlinghaus 12 (Work Contract Director) will be working next year with the Low Income Investment Fund, a community development financial institution. There, she will be working on a research project for equitable transit-oriented development. STAFF NOTES Peter Grbac 12 (Volunteer Director) was awarded the George H. Handelman Prize and will be attending Oxford University to pursue his Master of Science in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Sam Greenberg 14 (Staff Director) will be interning at Shelter Network, an organization which provides housing and support systems to homeless families in San Francisco, California. Mackenzie Hild 14 (Supervisor) was awarded Harvard s Presidential Public Service Fellowship. This summer, she will be collaborating with a doctor and members of the Navajo tribe in Arizona to improve nutrition and study the incidence of chronic disease on the reservation. Geetika Mehra 12 (Finance Director) was awarded the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship and will be teaching in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, through which she hopes to encourage means of expression in others and herself. Geetika as well as Whitney Donaldson 12 (Resource Advocacy Director) were elected this year to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. AJ Millet 13 (Supervisor) will be volunteering this summer at Saint James Summer Shelter, a 7-week student-run summer transitional housing program in Harvard Square. Conor Walsh 12 (Administrative Director) was awarded the highlyselective George J. Mitchell Scholarship and will be pursuing his MA in Irish Language Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. 9

10 Join our alumni community by visiting us at: hshshelter.org Harvard Square Homeless Shelter 66 Winthrop Street Cambridge, MA Annual Report designed and edited by Peter Grbac 12