Help Right Here - Mobile Outreach for the Homeless
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Help Right Here
We are Ann-Marie Fitzsimmons and Niki Keck, friends and educators in the public education system in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who saw inadequacies in the services for our homeless and resolved to find a solution. We are the founders of Help Right Here, a proposed mobile bus service that will deliver survival support and career assistance to the underprivileged. We need $6,000 by the end of March to secure the bus for our program.
For its size, Chattanooga has a significant number of homeless citizens. Currently, we are the 139th largest city in the country with a population of around 177,000. We have seen a steady growth in population as new industries and ventures have settled in our city. New construction and gentrification have happened simultaneously. This has led to a lack of affordable housing in the downtown area, becoming a major factor in the homeless crisis in Chattanooga.
Three low-income establishments - Chatt City Suites, Economy Inn and Lookout Mountain Suites - have all recently, or will very shortly, close their doors. These places allow for a rent more affordable than most. Rooms can be rented for around $650 a month without a credit or background check.
What this comes down to is that services and transportation are often not in close proximity to where these disadvantaged citizens are now forced to live - and it doesn't seem likely to get any better, or even stabilize any time soon. It is disturbing that between 2016 and 2018, the HUD Point in Time survey showed an increase of 117 people living on the streets of our city.
This disconnect makes it much more difficult to take advantage of agencies that provide necessities crucial to surviving the elements like clothing, sleeping bags, tents, tarps and food, as well the career assistance essential for long term success in becoming employed and housed.
Meeting them where they are, with our bus, will alleviate some of this stress. Help Right Here’s mission is to deliver these services straight to where our most vulnerable citizens reside. We will be a traveling storage unit and office that will provide clothing, tents, tarps, food and fuel, as well as offer GED services, teach resume writing and interview skills on-site. We will also have a shower available, and tools and parts to help with bike maintenance. We aren’t asking people to come to us; we are intent and content to go to them; to forge relationships and instill in them that we see them as members of our community, not as unimportant problems to be merely be dealt with.
Not as afterthoughts.
Our second hope is that by offering these services to our most at-risk citizens, empathy for and engagement with them will emerge from other sectors of the population in the form of volunteers and donors.
It’s a big endeavor, this project of ours. Being two single, working mothers with seven children between the two of us comes with at least seven challenges, but the real problem is that there is no stopping this now.
It’s come too far. It’s too real. It’s too important.
Through a friend, we’ve found a bus. One with solar panels, covered in prayer flags.
It’s meant for this task we have in mind.
There is no doubt here.
None at all.
We have until the end of March to raise the $6,000 to purchase the bus itself. The rest we can work on later this spring - for maintenance and retrofitting it to meet our needs. The man we are purchasing the bus from is currently out of the country, but will need the money from the bus to buy transportation when he returns to the States next month. Hence, the urgency. If we cannot raise the funds, he has to take the bus with him on his next project out West.
So please, please, please help us help the homeless!!
Email with questions: [email redacted]. Link to Volunteer Form . Link to Facebook (which is under construction.)
If you’re interested in what homelessness looks like here in Chattanooga, our students are creating a documentary that should be done in a few weeks! The link to our Facebook is A Drop in the Bucket.
Documentary trailer here .
I was going through my photos this morning (3/9) and wanted to share photos of some of the people you could be helping with your donations
Sam
Jeff
David and Little Bit
Bobby
Sweet Jack
Ronnie
Darryl
Chuck
Michael
Irvin (and his pup, Hurst)
We are Ann-Marie Fitzsimmons and Niki Keck, friends and educators in the public education system in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who saw inadequacies in the services for our homeless and resolved to find a solution. We are the founders of Help Right Here, a proposed mobile bus service that will deliver survival support and career assistance to the underprivileged. We need $6,000 by the end of March to secure the bus for our program.
For its size, Chattanooga has a significant number of homeless citizens. Currently, we are the 139th largest city in the country with a population of around 177,000. We have seen a steady growth in population as new industries and ventures have settled in our city. New construction and gentrification have happened simultaneously. This has led to a lack of affordable housing in the downtown area, becoming a major factor in the homeless crisis in Chattanooga.
Three low-income establishments - Chatt City Suites, Economy Inn and Lookout Mountain Suites - have all recently, or will very shortly, close their doors. These places allow for a rent more affordable than most. Rooms can be rented for around $650 a month without a credit or background check.
What this comes down to is that services and transportation are often not in close proximity to where these disadvantaged citizens are now forced to live - and it doesn't seem likely to get any better, or even stabilize any time soon. It is disturbing that between 2016 and 2018, the HUD Point in Time survey showed an increase of 117 people living on the streets of our city.
This disconnect makes it much more difficult to take advantage of agencies that provide necessities crucial to surviving the elements like clothing, sleeping bags, tents, tarps and food, as well the career assistance essential for long term success in becoming employed and housed.
Meeting them where they are, with our bus, will alleviate some of this stress. Help Right Here’s mission is to deliver these services straight to where our most vulnerable citizens reside. We will be a traveling storage unit and office that will provide clothing, tents, tarps, food and fuel, as well as offer GED services, teach resume writing and interview skills on-site. We will also have a shower available, and tools and parts to help with bike maintenance. We aren’t asking people to come to us; we are intent and content to go to them; to forge relationships and instill in them that we see them as members of our community, not as unimportant problems to be merely be dealt with.
Not as afterthoughts.
Our second hope is that by offering these services to our most at-risk citizens, empathy for and engagement with them will emerge from other sectors of the population in the form of volunteers and donors.
It’s a big endeavor, this project of ours. Being two single, working mothers with seven children between the two of us comes with at least seven challenges, but the real problem is that there is no stopping this now.
It’s come too far. It’s too real. It’s too important.
Through a friend, we’ve found a bus. One with solar panels, covered in prayer flags.
It’s meant for this task we have in mind.
There is no doubt here.
None at all.
We have until the end of March to raise the $6,000 to purchase the bus itself. The rest we can work on later this spring - for maintenance and retrofitting it to meet our needs. The man we are purchasing the bus from is currently out of the country, but will need the money from the bus to buy transportation when he returns to the States next month. Hence, the urgency. If we cannot raise the funds, he has to take the bus with him on his next project out West.
So please, please, please help us help the homeless!!
Email with questions: [email redacted]. Link to Volunteer Form . Link to Facebook (which is under construction.)
If you’re interested in what homelessness looks like here in Chattanooga, our students are creating a documentary that should be done in a few weeks! The link to our Facebook is A Drop in the Bucket.
Documentary trailer here .
I was going through my photos this morning (3/9) and wanted to share photos of some of the people you could be helping with your donations
Sam
Jeff
David and Little Bit
Bobby
Sweet Jack
Ronnie
Darryl
Chuck
Michael
Irvin (and his pup, Hurst)
Organizer
Ann-Marie Jerman Fitzsimmons
Organizer
Chattanooga, TN
