Combatting Homelessness by Looking at the Totality of an Individuals Needs
People tend to want to rise to the level of their environment. That’s something I learned from Brent Crane with The Food and Care Coalition in Provo, UT. When they built their facility to help those experiencing homelessness, there were so many decisions they made to respect the dignity of the clients the serve – and to create an environment where they felt seen as valuable human beings.
“Some well-meaning individuals come in with the idea of, I’m gonna fix them. You can’t, no more than I can fix you or you can fix me. That’s not really our role. Our role is to love one another. And to be compassionate.”
“Far too many social services are siloed and don’t look at the totality of an individual with their holistic needs – and so often people are pulled in competing directions that can undermine their overall wellbeing.”
The Food and Care Coalition integrates a network of partners to deliver mental health, medical care, education and career services, showers, clothing, laundry, food, shelter, etc. in a collaborative resource center. They even have a hydroponic greenhouse on site. And 90% of their funding comes from private sources.
This unique approach won them the Innovator of the Year award in the State of Utah. Grateful to chat with Brent about his 3 decades of investment in this community on our Impact Stories podcast.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] I am here with Brent Crane with the Food and Care Coalition. Brent, introduce yourself?
Brent: I’ve been the director here at the Food and Care Coalition since 1993. I’ve been involved with the organization since almost its birth, which happened in the fall of ’88. I got involved as an intern in the spring of 1989. Married, have four kids, four grandkids, one on the way. And a boxer dog named Bosco that keeps us on our toes.
Jacob: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the Food and Care Coalition?
Brent: So the Food and Care Coalition really was a grassroot response to the issue of homelessness in Utah County. Back in the late seventies, there was what we call the Deinstitutionalization Movement, which was a public policy shift in defunding mental health institutions and state hospitals. And of course Provo City houses one of those for the state.
So when that policy went into [00:01:00] effect, a lot of individuals did not have support systems to return to or because of their mental illness, they had a difficult time reintegrating back into the community. And the agency was essentially founded by a lot of downtown churches here in Provo that were individually seeing the need and collectively, I think, did the smart thing. They got together and said, Hey, this is more than any one of us can handle or bear alone. And those discussions led to the creation of the Food and Care Coalition as a non profit 501-C3.
And so we’ve always stayed true to our roots there. We’ve always had either board members or individuals that have been involved with those churches. We’re essentially a homeless resource center, the only one I think of its kind. Honestly, as we did a lot of site visits and research and put together our model I didn’t see anything like it. And it’s [00:02:00] highly collaborative as well, which I think makes us unique.
Jacob: Paint for me a picture of how it is different? What’s the norm and how is this different from what everyone else is doing?
Brent: Yeah I think the norm in our industry, you had all these organizations that had a peripheral involvement with our population, employment agencies, or you had, mental health institutions, or you had, faith-based groups or food banks or, things of that nature. And they’re all very siloed. There was very little communication, very little collaboration. You had one agency that’s pulling someone maybe towards applying for disability and then you’ve got another group that’s pulling them towards employment. Those are two divergent paths. And so the client is here stuck between two different agencies’ agendas and not really fully considering the totality and the holistic nature of their [00:03:00] needs and both short-term and long term.
In our arena, in social services, I thought there would be a more cooperative spirit. And collaboration in working together because resources are scarce, whether that’s government funding or community funding, funding from the philanthropic community. They expect you to make that dollar go as far as you can. And yet, there were a lot of inefficiencies because so many institutions were siloed in their approach.
So that was something that we tackled head on, and when we built our facility here after doing about three years worth of research. We went all over the country looking at what was being done and we didn’t wanna reinvent the wheel if we didn’t have to. And we learned a lot from each of those site visits. And probably the thing that I learned the most was that when I sat down with those organizational leaders the one question that I asked was, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? And I learned far [00:04:00] more from that question than any other question I posed .
And then incorporated that into this new, collaborative resource center. We sit on four and a half acres in Provo, and we have three permanent on-site partners in Wasatch Behavioral Health.
For me, sending a client with mental illness three miles up the road they’re not gonna get there. Medical, our homeless community, they either go completely without medical or they go to our most costly point of entry, which is our ERs. And then the third partner we have on site is a group called My Story Matters that helps us with educational curriculum. So Maslow’s, hierarchy of needs, right? If you take care of those basic needs, like we do with our meal program and other things like that, showers and laundry and clothes that’s all well and good. But I’ve, I look at those as gateway programs to, let’s identify why you’re homeless and what’s keeping you [00:05:00] homeless. And education is vital in that component.
We don’t do it all ourselves, but we own the space. We’ve created a collaborative network and we’ve received a, I think a fair amount of acknowledgement both within the state, within the community, and even outside of it. We won the Innovator of the Year award from the state of Utah when we built this facility back in 2012.
And then just the dignity in which we exchange our services. It’s a tough issue to handle. It’s not like going to an orphanage and holding cute little, adorable babies. We’re working with adults that have dysfunction in their lives. Some created by choices and others that are extenuating and outside of their control with mental health challenges, for example. We do everything that we can and have to have enough left in the tank when we go home to self-care and care for family and then come back the next day with a full tank and ready to [00:06:00] go at it again.
Jacob: How have you had such longevity there? Because it’d be easy to be burned out.
Brent: This year is my thirty-fifth year.
Jacob: Wow.
Brent: Going on thirty-one as the director. And I think to answer your question, it’s a couple things. I think once I was passionate about it, it was something that I wanted to do. I was a business major prior to coming into this space and, I was probably a little naive, I just didn’t wanna make money just to make money. And for me, I really wanted to help people and this was a population that I felt was really misunderstood and was oftentimes villainized. And certainly there’s some in that space that belong in maybe more of an incarceration type setting. But for the most part, the people are just struggling to navigate life and they’re doing so with challenges that most of [00:07:00] us just will never understand. It’s balancing compassion on one side and accountability on the other.
There are days when it is hard. There are days when you do, despite my advice to the contrary, you do take it home. And I think it forces you to find life balance and understanding what’s within your control and what’s not within your control, and doing everything that you can. And leaving the rest, into the Lord’s hands.
Jacob: How is the Food and Care Coalition funded?
Brent: Because of our grassroot nature a lot of people go, oh, are you doing this elsewhere in the country? No, we’re a standalone entity and because of that, we’re local and because of that, 90% of our funding comes from private sources.
So individuals donating $5 a month to, maybe I write out a check at the end of the year for $250 or $500. To the [00:08:00] foundations that we write grants to, that can range from a few thousand dollars, to when we build our new housing project we had a couple of donors that donated a million dollars to that project.
And some of that is also in kind non-cash value items. So we, as part of our services, we’re doing laundry and showers and clothing people and feeding people. Food that I can get donated from the community or clothing I can get donated from the community, or hygiene items or blankets or sleeping bags or warm gloves, hand warmers, those kinds of things. We put those on our needs list on our website and the public will donate those items.
Our cash budgets just about $2.4 million and over a third of that is in kind non-cash. So I feel pretty good about that because we’re on a four and a half acre campus. We have 11 buildings here on campus from housing to the main facility to [00:09:00] hydroponic greenhouse . We have drop-in meal services and showers and laundry. We have transitional housing upstairs. We have permanent housing out back. We have 112 units of housing.
We’ve really tried to create that collaborative model and because of that connective tissue with the community, the cash budget is only about 1.4 million a year. And for an agency that’s open 365 days a year, 24/7, and has all the services that we do that’s pretty much unheard of. And so we’re very frugal with those funds. We make them go a long way. And we leverage probably another $3 million in leveraged services with our community partners that we have here on site. Three on-site ones, but we also have probably 15 or so visiting partners that come on site and perform some kind of service for our client.
And then the last piece of the pie is the government funding. So we get [00:10:00] about 10%. Those are all competitive grants. There’s no entitlement money. Those community dollars keep us unencumbered and I think allow us to do things practically and sensibly and not that we don’t appreciate our government partners, we do. But I can tell you if the government was to take over our program. Their annual budget would be in excess of 10 to 15 million, and we’re doing it for less than a million and a half cash.
Jacob: And about how many people are you servicing in a year?
Brent: We serve about twenty-five hundred unique individuals a year. And on any given day, there may be 200 to 300 homeless somewhere in Utah County’s geographic boundaries.
Jacob: What are some of the things that you find you have to educate the community on that are surprising to them about the nature of the population that you’re serving, the way that you do it, like what are those, ah-hahs that people are like, [00:11:00] oh, I had no idea.
Brent: A lot of people assume that nonprofits everything is free to them or they don’t have expenses. We have every expense that a for-profit enterprise would have, except two. And that is property tax and FICA tax on employees. Those are the only two expenses we don’t have. We have every other insurance utilities. Until the utility company will take canned food in exchange for doing our power which they have not done yet.
We go out of business if we do not raise enough funds to carry out our mission or we have to scale back our mission if we don’t have enough funds. So we still operate much like a business. I think for some people that’s a surprise.
Number two, I think a lot of times the community by coming here and serving, or when they see people on the streets, they have compassion, or sometimes angst or maybe fear, or maybe disdain, maybe because of their choices that have led them there. [00:12:00] We have to be really slow to judge but we also have to be careful, right? The community’s gotta understand their involvement can help alleviate the needs of our homeless community. But they can’t come in with the idea of, I’m gonna fix them no more than I can fix you or you can fix me. That’s not really our role. Our role is to love one another.
One thing that the public could understand too is there’s some of our population, even if I had enough beds for every homeless person out there, there’s some because of mental illness, maybe because of distrust, they want to be on their own accord out on the street.
Our hope here is that they are treated with dignity and that we hold them accountable to the extent that they can be held accountable. That we provide good, healthy boundaries. And we provide them as many tools as they can to find their best self and live their best life that they potentially can.
Jacob: How would you respond to someone [00:13:00] who says Utah County doesn’t really have a homeless problem. That’s a Salt Lake thing. What kinda stats can you share on that?
Brent: Yeah. The fact that we serve 2,500 unduplicated clients a year that are homeless at some point in their life this year. Should tell you that there’s an issue.
Jacob: What is it that you’re most looking for right now?
Brent: If you go to our website, which is just foodandcare.org, there’s a donation link. There’s a link where you can see what our in-kind needs are, there’s a link there where you can donate financially, and we certainly do need that. We’re competing with universities and non-profit hospitals and faith-based groups and what have you and so it’s never easy to raise the funds to operate.
So that is needed, but I think more on a systemic level, we are really searching and we’re working with BYU and UVU right now trying to research why people are in poverty. It’s not just and I’m not saying poverty as in I don’t have [00:14:00] enough money to pay the bills. I’m talking about poverty of spirit, poverty of mind, poverty of opportunity. I think it’s about instilling hope in people and becoming their best self.
So if people out there feel like Hey I may have a part of that puzzle. That I think, there’s been some life altering educational or curriculum that they’ve been exposed to, that they think would be helpful down here. And so we’re on a search right now for that.
Jacob: If they were interested in connecting, is it best to go to Foodandcare.org?
Brent: foodincare.org, I personally read all of the emails that come through the contact page.
Jacob: Thank you so much. Appreciate you sharing your story and keep up the good work
Brent: Appreciate all the good you do.
Jacob: Thank you.
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