Mike is the director of Sienna Francis, Omaha, Nebraska's largest homeless shelter. Sienna Francis does not turn anyone away, even if they are currently using drugs and alcohol as long as they are not violent. The shelter therefore works with the city's most isolated and stigmatized populations.

Q: How did you got to Sienna Francis?

I did city planning for 28 years. I was assistant planning director here with the city. Mid ’86, after they passed the Stewart McKinney Homelessness Assistance Act, I started allocating grants to cities and I got involved in doing these area-wide planning for homeless.

We started receiving annual entitlements. I managed housing and human development, block grants, home loans…

Q: How did you transition from that to director here?

Well, I guess I thought I could have a second career in my life. I had a lot of opportunities for consulting and different stuff, but once I got involved in the homeless issue and planning, I got real interested in it. I was able to retire from the city, take early retirement, when this job came open. I knew that this place was a great place, but maybe we could try to bring it up to another level, a higher level, so I jumped at it. City planning has this macro sense of strategy, applying for funds, but here, it is more hands on. It is a totally different perspective.

I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been doing this work 32 months now. I have learned so much about really what’s going on with homeless people. The reasons for homelessness, why people become homeless. I’ve come to a lot of conclusions in that regard. My perspective has changed considerably.

I see some common denominators, which, my conclusion is that it really starts at the family level- people growing up, being raised in dysfunctional families. There is certainly a lot of mental health. But I think growing up in a dysfunctional family affects people- how they act, how they think. Certainly, a child growing up being sexually abused, physically abused, emotionally abused, it’s pretty stressful. I know the adrenal gland can increase in size, medically speaking, which can interfere you know, serotonin, other chemicals in the brain, as far as their being able to be receptive and function properly which can lead to depression and other forms of mental illness, but I’m not a professional on that. Just as an aside, some young African-American, working his way out of the ghetto, many will be fine in these stressful situations, but maybe some 5% won’t ever recover from this stressful childhood. I’m not sure exactly what percentage, I’m just throwing that out there. But these people are just not able to overcome that dysfunctional childhood setting and end up homeless. They slowly turn to drugs or alcohol, mental illness becomes more severe, or they’ve never been able to be successful in life, keep jobs, housing, relationships. They end up on the streets and come to us.

If you rated shelters in Omaha, we’re the bottom rung. We don’t turn anybody away. We take in people actively addicted, actively using drugs and alcohol, have severe mi, a lot of developmental and physical disabilities, maybe their emotional age is 15 and they are a 50 year old man. The other places won’t take these people, the others are mostly church-related. We welcome anyone unless they are violent or could hurt somebody. Most of these people, I talk to them, I hang out with them. Some of them have been in and out of the foster care system their whole life. Maybe their parents turned them on to drugs and alcohol. I am working with a Native American here about 20 years old who I am working really hard with. He is just about the most dysfunctional person, best I can tell when he was about 8 years old his parents taught him how to huff paint fumes. He walks around with a rag soaked in paint thinner, smelling it. When he’s not using, which is seldom, he’s a nice kid. But he’s fighting, causing disruptions. I’ve got him sleeping outside because he’s fighting all the time. I am trying to make sure the staff don’t get hurt, while I give this guy a chance.

There are a lot of young kids. This methamphetamine is bad. In Nebraska it is a huge problem. We’ve got a lot of 19 and 21-year-olds who are so strung out on meth, who’ve burned their bridges with family, it is hard to convince them there is a future, that they might have another life.

People ask me how to end homelessness, ahh. How do you end dysfunctional families? How do you cure mi? How do you repair a broken foster care system? How do you repair a mental health system that doesn’t work? All these things go hand in hand?

Q: Was this a revelation after working with the city on similar issues?

It was really on this macro sense. I listened to the experts, directors who serve the homeless. I tried to get Omaha ahead of the curve. When I was there, I was really pushing special needs housing and transition housing. I worked with non-profits to work on special projects. We tried to create like a school system here where a home of emergency shelter was like Kindergarten and transitional housing was like 2 nd grade and then group living maybe and then graduation was independent living in the community- whatever level was practical for that individual. We wanted to have advocates who could serve like school counselors to guide somebody through this process, help them graduate.

Q: It sounds like you know the issues now in a much more intimate way?

Absolutely. I’ve made all of these personal relationships, gotten to know people and their life histories, why they’re here. Some people have been homeless for a long time. Some have been in shelters for years. Others are here one night and you never see them again. When we would place them in jobs or housing, invariably two months later, or two weeks later they are homeless again- they didn’t have the tools to succeed. Their life had been a failure they would think. They would leave here and expect to fail. You have all these issues, low self-esteem to a point where they don’t take care of themselves so you have health issues. Health issues are huge in this population. We don’t have preventative health care, so it is all emergency room related care.

Q: What is the role of drugs within this population?

Our primary mission is to not turn away. We help those who couldn’t get into other shelters because of their drug use. What I’m seeing here, 95% of the people are mentally ill on some level, whether depression, severe depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia. And at least 90% are using drugs and alcohol. Maybe just 10% of that 90% are not using on a daily basis. Even those not using, what you might call a “dry drunk,” they act just as an addicted person acts. They are still dysfunctional for whatever reason.

We do have and have had a lot of people with disabilities, physical and mental. Last summer we were like this little hearing impaired community. We had people who were deaf, couldn’t speak, were blind.

I found that these people never received special education for whatever reason. They didn’t have that opportunity presented. They continued also to live in a dysfunctional household. When they are 15 you know, they are out on their own. So, many of them had turned to drugs and alcohol. Much of this use is masking all these deep issues, all these deep problems associated with their childhood. The drug use, the alcohol use, is more a symptom of a deeper problem.

Q: Did you see this the same way on a macro level?

Absolutely not. I had heard, okay, a woman is homeless with children because of domestic violence, sure. Every woman that comes in is a victim of abuse and violence, but coming here, I have learned there is a history of abuse with this woman through her entire life, all her relationships. An abused person typically hooks up with an abusive person. It’s like magnets. Seldom do they end up in a relationship that’s not dysfunctional. I didn’t realize that doing planning. I never connected a broken down foster care system to homelessness until I came here and saw so many people who bounced around from house to house and were abused by foster parents.

Q: So were you all doing the wrong things, should you have done something differently?

I don’t think so. On the planning side, it was really listening to the professionals and trying to create programs for these clients. I am assuming that a YWCA domestic violence program has counselors who are well aware of the fact that these women tend to hook up with abusive people not once, but again and again.

In terms of numbers housed and people fed we are the largest shelter in Nebraska. Budget-wise, we are one of the smallest, we barely survive. Sixty-eight percent of our funds come from houses we send fundraising letters to. Eleven percent comes from government grants, FEMA, etc. And 28% of our funds come from foundations, which is competitive funding. Some of the nationwide shelters- their advertising budgets are larger than our entire annual operating budget.

We have eleven full-time staff here, including a licensed mental health practitioner and three certified drug and alcohol addiction recovery counselors. We are able to function because the 50 or 60 people in our addiction recovery program work for us in a job training atmosphere. We pay them a stipend that starts at $22 every two weeks. Otherwise, I don’t know how we would do this. We do almost all of our own maintenance here.

Q: Do you have a thrift store here?

No, it’s all free.

We are here helping this community tremendously. We averaged 240 people per night last year. We provided 255,000 meals as well as addiction recovery services and we don’t get one dollar of general fund tax support from the city, county, or state.

Local, regional and state government- it’s like, go ahead and raise your own money and keep these people out of our business district and off our streets so we don’t have this huge problem… It’s a struggle. I don’t know what to do other than keep doing what we’re doing and do our best. Utilities- we’ve got a $6,000+ monthly utility bill here. We have to go hike to raise money to pay for water to shower.

If we fail, these people don’t have anybody else to turn to. I suspect this is pretty common throughout the country. People in Omaha don’t realize that if you go up and down the Missouri River at night you would see campfires of homeless camps. There are families with kids. I would assume we would have more people sleeping in alleys and abandoned cars and bus stations.

I didn’t realize how big a problem methamphetamines was until I came here. I knew cocaine was. I started seeing all these young people filtering in, most of them from the smaller communities. We have Youth Emergency Services out there working with younger kids, under 19. I have spoken with them in meetings. I would assume if we shut down there would be a lot of people outside.

We are overcapacity. We sleep more men on the floor that beds. Every night we clear out the dining room and lobby. We have space for 84 beds and 85 mats, so we have people sleeping in chairs every night. And the numbers are always increasing.

The week of Christmas is always the lowest count of the year. You would think with the cold weather… I guess family and friends let people stay with them then. I was amazed at that after I became director here.

I think that a lot of people want to blame somebody for being homeless or being mentally ill or an alcoholic or drug addict. It’s like, all that person has to do is get a job and be more responsible like the rest of us. It doesn’t work that way for these people. They need places to stay that are safe, where they can eat, get some clothing, a helping hand. Hopefully that helping hand can you know, be a long term effort to really work with them and get them to whatever level is practical and to a higher standard of living in their community.

I think, especially an alcoholic, you want to blame that person, “He’s just an alcoholic, he chose to drink.” It’s so much deeper than that. Most of it is masking the mental illness or all these other issues. It’s a disease. It’s really hard for people to accept the fact that it’s a disease or that mental illness is, that you can treat these things just like diabetes.