Teacher Lives 3 Years In Car

I am coming to you with great need and a heavy heart. Asking for help in this public manner is not easy. Though afraid to expose my vulnerability in such a public way, we truly do need your help; therefore, I am setting all doubt aside to ask for your assistance. I believe that it is important to stand strong and not let fear, shame, or pride be the reason. I believe in a commitment to and the power of community.

We are fundraising to keep housed and not be forced back into homelessness. My spouse and I lived in our car for nearly 3 years and have not been out for long.
Neither of us wants to be on Gofundme begging for help, but we cannot go back to the car without a good fight. 

Please do not assess our need based on the current Gofundme balance you see. While the fundraising total has reached over 11K, this Gofundme balance does not reflect what we currently have because this fundraiser began in February, over 7 months ago.

All of  the donations  we have fundraised to date have been spent on keeping us housed and on bare bones basic living expenses such as  electric, gas, water and food. There is no reserve excess that we are sitting on.
Additionally, Gofundme does charge a processing fee of 7.9 % per each donation, so it is important to deduct that percentage from the total reflected to best calculate how much of the proceeds we get to keep. 

Donations are still desperately needed and appreciated. We are still in dire emergent need of assistance and are not yet out of jeopardy. It is scary to think that after living in the streets for so long we might have to return. If we have to return to live in our car, I am afraid that we will die there. I try not to think about it but the fear is real. My health is already compromised and my spouse is not in much better shape.

As a 60 year old elder, my spouse has experienced relentless long-term unemployment and an inability to find employment again in this current market. It has been brutal. Ageism and work discrimination is real and bouncing back after a layoff has not been easy for my spouse, who is also a Black butch and obviously very queer in appearance. I am 51, disabled, and have been unable to work. We started this campaign out of shear desperation and dire need because we had hit rock bottom, broke, nothing. 

We are hoping to reach our fundraising goal or at best raise enough to create a small financial buffer between us and eminent homelessness. Creating a buffer will help us climb out of this vicious cycle. It will allow us to keep a roof over our heads as we progress toward procuring permanent sustainable employment and not have to live in constant fear, distress, and in this perpetual anxiety ridden hellish space, worried about if we are going to be able to make rent next month or end up back in our car. 

The stress and fear is killing us. We don’t want to end up back in our car only to have to re-start from scratch. We do believe that we can make it and that your help and donations are a worthy investment. We recognize that fundraising is neither a panacea nor a long term solution, but with your help we hope to raise enough funds to break this cycle of homelessness, rebuild, and restore our lives. 

Please help keep us housed and not return to living in our car homeless. We need your tenderness, kindness, and generosity. We have nowhere to go, no money, no resources, no family to turn to, nothing. You are indeed our last resort. 

I'd like to share with you a snippet of what it was like for us to live in our car and why we cannot go back. 

This Is Real Life Our Life

So imagine living and working from a cramped car, at 60 and 51 years old. We are big, the car is small. We are tall, the car is short. We lived in the car, day in and day out. There were few to no breaks. We did not house sit, or couch surf, or stay in our car part time. There was no reprieve. We moved from parking lot to parking lot, day after day. Exposed. No place to go. No family to count on. Few to no real friends to reach out to. Nowhere to turn. 

I have heard people reference their besties, their family of choice. Many have said, "It will never happen to me because I have friends."  We thought the same thing too, until. And yes, everyone is your friend until you hit hard times, and then.

Now imagine sleeping upright behind the steering wheel of a compact car, cramped unable to stretch out, night after night. What many people don't know is that when you sleep sitting up for too long, if you are unable to lie flat and stretch out on a regular basis, you will swell up like a big fat grape. It physically hurts. You bloat. You ache. You can feel your skin tearing. You get water blisters on your swollen legs and bladder infections from sitting too long.  You often cannot fit into clothing or shoes. And surely, if you are homeless living in a car you likely cannot afford to purchase new shoes every time you out swell a pair. 

But worse, sleeping upright for extended periods can lead to a quick sudden death if you get a blood clot that travels to your lungs or brain.  As a disabled person with certain health issues, I am particularly vulnerable to developing blood clots or having a pulmonary embolism. Anyone in this circumstance is vulnerable, and of course nobody wants to die this way. 

Now imagine getting up early before dawn. It’s cold. You are tired from a night of little to no rest. You have to get up extra early to find an acceptable public bathroom to bathe in because the monthly gym membership became too expensive to afford. And if this is not stressful enough you then have to go to work. Swollen body, swollen feet, my spouse squeezed into her work clothes, then drove 10-20 miles from whichever parking lot we last slept in to go work a full-time teaching job. 

Living in a car is complicated, burdensome, and a lot of work.  While my spouse was at work I did everything else to keep us going.  My day was consumed with hiding out in parking lots to avoid being overly conspicuous because in many places it is illegal to live in your car. 

While staying on the down low, I spent endless hours seeking out resources, locating places to park and sleep,  finding laundromats to wash clothes, preparing her work clothes for the next day, maintaining  our car, trying to find food to eat that is healthy and affordable because there is no place to cook, bringing her lunch to work because there is no place to store perishable foods in the car, organizing and reorganizing the cramped car trying to find a way to make everything fit so we can sleep better,  and the list goes on. 

Most of these tasks seem simple. They are the kind of things we easily do on a daily basis and take for granted the ease, but trying to do them from a car is difficult. 
Your life, your possessions are jammed into the trunk and back seat of a car. So for every task that needs to be done, you often have to dig through the organized piles to find what you need. And no matter how organized you are---I am an obsessive compulsive queen of organization, it is never organized enough. If you have ever witnessed a homeless person methodically and meticulously organizing their shopping cart, it is because that is their home, their life, right there in that cart.

There is no multi-tasking from the car. You cannot start a load of laundry, start dinner, and search the internet for resources simultaneously. If you need the internet you must drive to a Wi-Fi hot spot. If you are using Wi-Fi and nature calls, you must leave and go search for a public bathroom.

Car living is laborious and stressful because what should only take hours takes all day. And while doing daily tasks, I could barely walk; health issues left me more susceptible to excessive swelling as well as pain management issues. And if that wasn't enough, it was often cold, rainy and occasionally snowing, which exacerbated my health conditions. Just writing about all of this makes me tired.

After a full day teaching, my spouse leaves work only to come back to the cramped car. We search for a place to microwave our food, eat, and decide on a place to park for the evening. She does lesson plans for the next work day, which is difficult to do without resources and from a car.  

We move the car to our final sleeping spot. The hour is late. Finally she drifts off to sleep, sitting upright, scrunched up behind the steering wheel unable to relax, and often in pain, and I do the same. 

Many talk about effort. We have been asked if we are trying “hard enough". To be honest, I do not think you survive living homeless in a car without trying hard. Nobody wants to do this. This is not the kind of choice one makes to avoid life’s responsibilities. Trust me. I don’t know what I would do alone in this situation, neither of us do. Despite circumstances, shaming and judgment we keep going. 

Many ponder work ethic. We have been asked about work. Some say with judgment, "They must not want to work". They say, "If it were me, I’d get a job and help myself".  Well, the proof is in the pudding. While still living in the car my spouse did work. She made it to work on time, with consistency, and always with enthusiasm and a smile.  

Moreover, my spouse not only made it to work under extreme circumstances but worked from a position many would have been ashamed to do. By this, I mean she suited up and showed up despite the obstacles, no matter how difficult, or uncomfortable, or physically painful, or embarrassing.  

She was always swollen and unable to wear her shoes, which was a result of having to sleep in an upright position, so she often went to work in black flip flops, thick black socks covered by long black pants to hide swollen feet; yet none of this dissuaded her. 

She arrived to work ready, prepared, willing and able, and remained committed and hopeful, even when some of her colleagues and superiors snubbed her, turning up their noses when they suspected they had hired a homeless teacher.  Though obvious signs of extreme swelling may have been a tip off to homeless car living, no matter the obstacles she never gave up, and the kids loved her. 

Our hardship began after my spouse got laid off from her teaching job. The layoff coincided with the recession and a job market where the demand for teachers had decreased.  In order to survive, we left our home state of California and relocated to an area with a lower cost of living in order to make ends meet, and where there were higher employment prospects. 

Over three years ago, on February 6, 2012, all money including an exhausted unemployment benefit, savings, emergency funds, rainy day funds, and meager retirement funds ran out. We turned to our families but they denied us help. We are a married Butch-Femme queer couple, and they reject that. 

We did not want to burden friends because this is perceived by many as the kind of problem families help with, but those we told could not or did not want to help us. So, with nowhere to go, we sold damn near everything we had, packed up what we could, and went to our car. Like most, we never thought we would ever be without a home. Once we landed in our car, we did not think we would be there for long, and now, nearly three years later.

We do not fit the catch all stereotypes of homeless or how one gets to that juncture. Neither of us uses drugs or alcohol. We are smart, hardworking, and Ivy League educated. We worked, saved, and were careful, responsible, and frugal. We have always tried like many to do the right things and do not regret our life path; however, we are indeed the new face of homeless.

Once you enter the cycle of homelessness it is like a funnel cloud that sucks you in and eats you up. You become invisible, and discounted. People judge and cast a blind eye. It happens fast and swift. And nobody thinks it will happen to them, until it does.

We never gave up, and finally a job came, a job that paid enough and had some longevity, though not permanent, a job that could take us out of homelessness happened. However, this particular job left us waiting two months to see one month’s full pay. 

Often school districts withhold a percentage of pay which goes towards receiving a year round paycheck summers when school is out. This works for many but was bad timing for us. We were close to dead broke, and it was at this time we first discovered Gofundme.  Out of share desperation we decided to fundraise so that we could stay afloat, just until we could receive that first full month’s pay.

We met our fundraising goal and thought we would be able to finally make it out the car. We were ecstatic because it was a long coming, but then we discovered that working in a rural depressed area there were few to no month to month lease options available. 

We searched everywhere to no avail. Most housing where we were required a year commitment or more. Since the job was not long term, we did not want to sign a year’s lease. We felt trapped and without good options; yet, did not want to waste the money we fundraised by getting in a long-term lease with a short-term job. 

Painfully, we opted to save the money from the Gofundme and add to it from my spouse’s income, but that also meant we had to remain living in the car until we could move to a more permanent location, and that was devastating. Once the job concluded we relocated back to an area where our money could stretch further and where reports revealed that the job market was opening. 

Perseverance, resilience and God’s grace prevailed. We finally did make it out of the car. We were able to do so because we saved every dime from my spouse’s last job, matched the first Gofundme donations we received plus added extra, and with that money we were able to make it out of the car. Though we did work hard and saved our own money, Gofundme saved our lives. Community assistance made the difference. It works. 

Since making it out of our car, my spouse continues to spend countless hours conscientiously and consistently looking for full-time permanent employment but to no avail, and as a result, we remain economically insecure and have barely been able to manage.  It is for this reason we launched this current Gofundme and have had to desperately fundraise trying to remain housed.

For now, my spouse still supports our family and that is a lot of stress. She works hard. She has endured. However, at age 60 this life is taking a toll. Living and working from the car is a daunting task. Please grant her a reprieve. Allow her a bit of dignity which car living does not provide. 

If anyone has a full-time job or job lead, please let us know. My spouse has a Master's in Education from Mills College, Oakland, California, and a California Clear Professional Single-Subject Teaching Credential in Social Science with a supplemental in Introductory Mathematics and English.

I have a Master of Arts in Developmental Psychology and also a Master of Education in Counseling Psychology, both from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. My background is in counseling, coaching, training, editing, and writing. 

Due to disability and health reasons, I have not been able to work; however, I am willing and wanting to re-try despite the challenges because this is urgent. I am seeking freelance project driven jobs, preferably those which allow working remote. 

Finally, we are willing to work period, even if it is not in a professional capacity.  We are willing to consider relocating anywhere for employment. We are willing to consider jobs outside of our specific fields. We have and continue to explore alternative employment options to create financial sustainability. 

Thank you kindly for viewing our campaign. We would deeply appreciate a hand up and look forward to paying it all forward just as soon as we can catch our breath.