(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Hello and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in the show we'll hear music from Rachel Meyer.

But first, our guest joining me now is Jan Eliassen, the Harm and Reduction programs director for the City of Fargo.

Jan, thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you.

- We're here today to talk about homelessness, and what you do and the programs you have.

But before we do that, tell the folks a little bit about yourself, maybe your background.

- Sure, I was born and raised in western North Dakota, up in the northwest corner.

I guess some people think about it as the oil patch.

It's northwest of Williston.

I'm a very proud North Dakotan, and I love that I've lived here all of my life.

And I moved to Fargo in 1990 as part of my work with Dakota Boys Ranch.

I worked with kids for many different years in many different programs and eventually took on the responsibility for starting the Gladys Ray Shelter with the support of a number of community partners in the City of Fargo.

Eventually growing that program to a number of different services that we offer and becoming part of Fargo Cass Public Health.

My history is social work and just interested in making sure everybody can do better.

- Okay, well, I understand you wear a few hats.

But tell us a little bit about what the Harm Reduction programs, tell us about that.

You know, how do they work, and how do you coordinate them?

- Sure, when the Gladys Ray Shelter opened, we knew that we had to have a little bit different approach.

We had this shelter system that was doing a great job of meeting the needs of most people that were facing or experiencing homelessness.

We had to start a program, the Gladys Ray Shelter, that was considered very low barrier and rooted in harm reduction, in order to meet the needs of that part of the population that wasn't seeing a lot of success in that traditional shelter system.

They were typically people who really struggled with some substance use disorder, mental health, or challenges related to mental health, and people who had lost access to the rest of the shelter system because of behaviors, usually associated with those things.

Harm reduction is, you know, the idea behind harm reduction is that we're helping people, or educating, providing options for making different decisions, and then ultimately trying to avoid the adverse consequences that are associated with really risky behaviors.

It's really rooted in the fact that we have to accept that humans in general, take risks.

And humans in general, have to do some risk mitigation in their lives.

And it shouldn't be any different with people who are substance users, or people who have been homeless, whatever the case is.

You know, our role isn't necessary.

A great example would be, I'm not necessarily going to tell somebody, "Okay, it's time to quit drinking," because that's not a reality for them right now.

But let's talk about some of the things you can do to be a little bit safer to make sure the community around you is a little bit safer until we can get to a place where maybe stopping, or just reducing how you use altogether happens for you.

I always tell people it's a show-stopper when I tell somebody to stop using, the conversation generally ends.

Let's talk about ways to be safer.

- Now I understand, and tell me if I'm wrong.

The Harms Reduction programs, there are nine different programs, is that right?

- Yeah, we have a number of different programs and services that we offer, including the Gladys Ray Shelter and the Withdrawal Management Unit, which a lot of people remember as detox.

We also have the Syringe Services Program, Overdose Response, a number of substance-use related programs.

the Gladys Ray, oh, I mentioned that, I'm sorry.

The Downtown Engagement Center, mobile outreach, straight outreach.

Just yeah, many different services.

Again, we tried to make sure that as we grew, we started programs that weren't being offered anywhere else in our community, and that were again, guided by the principles of harm reduction.

And that's just, you know, making the community a safer place to be.

- Well, you mentioned shelters.

I understand that you have two key shelter areas you coordinate.

Talk about first the Downtown Engagement Center.

What is that?

When was it founded?

Who does it serve?

- Right, so the Downtown Engagement Center was an idea we had tossed around for many years.

We knew that if we had kind of a one-stop shop, it's more than just a drop-in center, because we knew that we had to start engaging with the individuals we were serving, but also engaging with community members.

I learned early on that there were a lot of folks in the community, whether it was service providers or community members, that didn't work in this arena, that they wanted to be able to help when they saw situations where somebody was really in need.

And so I believe that the Engagement Center is gonna provide the platform for all of that.

When we first were able to move into the building, the things that were appealing about it, is it's downtown, which is where the people we serve are.

It had lockers, which we know people have really struggled with hanging onto their belongings.

They're often taken from them, or they have to give them up in order to stay wherever it is that they're staying.

So there were lockers, showers, and we created a laundry facility in there as well.

So those were the three primary basic needs, items that we were really interested in finding a place to offer those to the folks that we were serving.

When we first moved in there we did primarily quarantine and isolation for people who had COVID or had been exposed to COVID.

Eventually, the Gladys Ray Shelter made a temporary stop and was relocated to this location, which is why a lot of people I think, think that it provides shelter, which it doesn't.

We're open 8 to 8.

We don't provide any overnight shelter there at all, but we do provide access to other shelters and try to connect people to services.

So the Gladys Ray had moved in there for a little while, as we were doing some improvements on that building after many years, of course, of being there.

So it's the idea behind it, again, it's about engagement.

It's about offering opportunities for people to engage with many different types of services.

Housing, there's a healthcare clinic there.

Homeless Health is located on site.

We have Housing Navigators to Presentation Partners, Native Ink out of Bismark.

They have a Fargo office.

They provide care coordination and a number of things.

Southeast Human Service Center comes in and provides a ton of great supports and services.

And we have a lot more folks coming as well.

We have the office space, and we have the meeting space to start providing opportunities for people to engage in meaningful activity.

Even those folks who are getting housed, which we are housing people at a higher rate than we have often seen historically.

But people who get into housing, you know, housing can be really isolating, can be really lonely.

We need to make sure those folks have supports in order to stay housed.

Otherwise, we're just continuing this cycle and playing a part in making that cycle continue.

We don't wanna do that.

- Is your, these shelter, are these shelters similar in other cities in North Dakota in the region, or in Minnesota?

Or do you find that Fargo has more resources for the homeless?

- Certainly Fargo being, you know, as large as it is, provides a lot more resources.

And sometimes people come here because they are looking for resources.

But more often than not, a lot of the folks we serve consider Fargo their community, Fargo-Moorhead.

But they also, you know, we saw a number of people come during the initial stages of the oil boom, and then end up staying here.

For folks, you know, we were really promoting our state as like, you know opportunities to pursue the American dream.

And a lot of the people that had that dream were also people who, wherever they were living, didn't have some of the resources, or maybe had challenges.

So we didn't pick and choose who got to come, right?

But we ended up seeing a number of people stay that might, that were at least safer here than if they were on the streets in a bigger area, for example.

We have a number of shelters in our state.

The Gladys Ray is very different in the sense that it's extremely low barrier, and we work hard to be low barrier, meaning people don't have to be sober to walk in the door.

You know, essentially people have to be safe to walk in the door.

If you're not at risk to yourself or others, you get to be there.

- I understand money and funding is always a concern for these programs.

But how are you funded?

What are your needs?

- Well, all of our programs are funded through various funding streams.

A lot of it is federal.

We have some state funding, but even some of those dollars come down through federal funding streams.

I do pursue a number of different grants.

The State of North Dakota provides support for some of our programs.

The city provides some limited support, but like for example, starting the Engagement Center, we were able to pursue that through federal funding that was related to COVID at the time, and we continue to operate under that.

It's, you know, small grants, large grants, private donors.

We have different funds, like a housing fund and a veterans' fund that, you know, like the veterans' fund, it might be different auxiliaries across the state that provide some donations to that.

So we can provide some really specific supports, you know, like a deposit for an apartment, or a phone when somebody gets a job, or excuse me, gas for transportation, or whatever the case might be.

- Well, let's talk in general just a moment.

Maybe because homelessness doesn't mean you're on the street.

Can you give us kind of a broad definition of homelessness, and what are the root causes of the problem in the United States, for that matter.

We're not just talking about Fargo.

- Right, we know that the cause of homelessness is people don't have a place to live.

And we certainly, you know the solution to homelessness is housing.

Finding and giving and providing access to affordable housing is critical.

We are in the situation that we're in, in our nation with 600, 700,000 homeless people on any given day.

We're in that situation because of the lack of affordable housing, because of a number of different factors and things that happened in the last several decades, that resulted in this just significant lack of affordable housing for people.

You know, in Fargo-Moorhead, you know, we do have live data on the FM Coalition to END Homelessness website, that's fmhomeless.org.

And you can take a look at a snapshot of what homelessness looks like in our community.

And really it looks the same as it looks anywhere else.

When you take a look at the overall population of people that are experiencing homelessness today, we know that there are this many men, women, and children, this many family units, this many veterans, this many people of color, which inevitably are disproportionately represented within that population.

So we know that race, and we have a lot of work to do on a really robust anti-racism campaign, because we can't solve homelessness without having that really hard conversation around how racism has contributed to that.

We have, you know, we've got a lot of momentum right now, but we have a lot of work to do as a city, as a state, and across the nation, if we're gonna figure this out.

Costs us an incredible amount of money to keep things the way they are.

And it's much cheaper actually to develop housing supports, and provide opportunities for people to get off the streets and get out of those situations.

I think that one of the recent pieces, one of the recent numbers I took a look at is that Fargo and Moorhead, or Cass County and Clay County combined, had served upwards of 4,000 people in any given 90-day period, or at least in that 90-day period.

So we have a lot of need out there.

It's really invisible here.

Sometimes that's weather, sometimes that's ordinances.

There's a number of different reasons that, you know, people that are experiencing homelessness aren't seen.

So there's a lot more out there than people realize.

- How hard is it to reverse the cycle of homelessness, and how much does addiction play into this?

- So I don't know if we can reverse it necessarily.

I know that we can address things better than we have addressed them in the past.

We have to, you know, talk with, some of the things that we're doing as a community is really getting better at coordinated entry.

So, you know, many, many years ago it was kind of a pick-and-choose who was going into what program to help them get off the streets, or out of their homeless situation.

And now we have some different tools that are are evidence-based that we use to assess a person's situation or a family situation, and determine who's the most vulnerable, who needs housing now versus, you know, who might have to wait a little bit longer.

So we're using prioritization tools, and that's helping quite a bit.

And I think that that does address the root causes as well.

Because we know that some folks who are episodically homeless, often resolve that on their own, or they rely on the shelter system for a very short period of time.

And then we have these folks who fall to the street and have stayed there for over and over, or for very long periods of time.

No doubt, substance use disorders, mental health challenges, those contribute to that.

But it certainly shouldn't be a life sentence to the streets, and I don't believe that it is.

I think that we've just had to change how we work with those folks, so that they can feel more confidence in a system that's intended to help.

- You know, can you talk a little bit about how homelessness has changed over the years, and maybe like what it was like when services were not in place to help those in need?

- You know, when we opened the Gladys Ray Shelter, I had a lot of learning to do.

You know, I really relied on the people that showed up for shelter, they were the experts.

They had been in far more shelters than I.

And they were able to teach me an awful lot about what it was going to take to truly provide a shelter that could help lead them, if anything was a respite from what was going on in their lives or outside, but also help lead them toward whatever their goals were for housing.

But what I learned early on at that time, our community was very, in the very early stages of becoming better at what we do and becoming more coordinated.

We had some people stay in the shelter for many years, and it wasn't because, you know, we were trying to enable or perpetuate their homelessness.

It was, we knew that putting limits on length of stay didn't work for the people that we were serving, and that we had to stick by people until there were resources available.

We had to know that there, we weren't gonna just send people back out if there wasn't some place to send them to, if there there weren't housing programs and housing supports available in the community that could help them succeed.

Otherwise, we were just feeding that same cycle you mentioned.

- Well, Jan, I understand you have a Homeless Person Memorial Day coming up.

Can you talk a little bit about that and what that means, and what you do on that day?

- Yes, every year across the nation on December 21st, there's typically some memorial takes place in communities across the nation to bring awareness to the issue of homelessness, and that people in our community still die while homeless.

And I don't believe that has to be the case.

We've seen a number of folks in our community die while they were homeless over the years.

It's always on the solstice, so it's on the 21st, which is the longest night of the year.

And of course that's symbolic for a number of reasons.

If people want more information about that they can go to fmhomeless.org.

We're in the very early stages.

We kind of do some of the same things each year, where we have a casket that represents all of the people that have died in our community.

We have a list of names of people that we've lost.

And then a number of service providers and people from the faith community and people from the community of homeless folks, they show up and we carry that casket, and we talk about the people we've lost and just try to honor them the best we can.

And in the meantime, be really public with that memorial so that we can bring awareness to that conversation.

- So where do the homeless go at night, especially here in the winter season, to stay warm and to get sleep and rest?

- You know, that's been a challenge that, you know, every community, especially communities that have cold weather.

But warm weather poses plenty of hazards as well.

But you know, all of our shelters are full, and the cities are working on, the City of Fargo is working on a plan to maybe figure out how can we, you know, provide some limited overflow.

What triggers that?

How do we provide the supports at that without relying on myself and my staff, of course, because we're a little short-staffed ourselves right now, and it'd be tough for us to take that on.

But the shelter system in our community, Fargo-Moorhead works really well together to try to make sure as many people as possible have a place to be at night.

Some folks actually choose not to go to the shelter system.

You know, last winter we had people that slept outside the entire winter, and you know, they amaze me.

They're incredibly resilient and resourceful, and they figure a lot of things out.

Other folks that may be, you know, might be walking the streets at night, and don't have a place to be, are not electing to go to those places.

They will take shelter in the entrances to buildings and apartment buildings.

You know, they're, again, they're survivors, and that's what they're trying to do, is survive, and that's all they're thinking about.

So they're not thinking about trespass rules, and they're not thinking about who owns this, or who wants me here.

They're thinking about how can I make sure I don't freeze to death tonight, and how do I make sure I don't end up with frostbite?

It compromises my health forever and ever as well.

- So what do you say to critics of what you do and the services you provide?

- I think that, you know, anytime you're providing services to a population that, where there's a lot of stigma.

You know, we know when we're working with, not only with substance use disorder and some mental health stuff, but also, you know, a very large representation of people of color that we're serving in the population that we serve.

And so I think that racism does contribute to some of the challenges that we face when it comes to criticisms.

And again, we have to be able to have conversations about what people's needs are.

I don't believe for a minute that there's a citizen or a community member here that hasn't loved somebody who struggled with mental health, that hasn't loved somebody who's struggled with substance use disorder.

And I think that, you know, in general, once somebody ends up out on the streets or homeless, that stigma follows them, and then suddenly we lose our compassion and empathy.

But it doesn't happen often, I don't think, that there are that many critics.

And those that are out there, I'm happy to sit down and talk with them, as well as the number of people I serve and talk.

You know, it's a moment for education, right?

It's an opportunity for education.

- Well, that's what we like to do, is try to educate and inform people.

But we are running out of time Jan.

But if people wanna get more information, wanna find out more and are interested maybe in helping your cause, where can they go, who can they contact?

- So they can go to the Fargo Cast Public Health website.

We have links and a little bit of information that is in the process of being updated, but there's contact information there.

I believe that a number of our programs are listed if people Google those programs.

You know, for example, the Gladys Ray Shelter, the detox unit and the Downtown Engagement Center, which of course is located next door to you guys.

So they can find info on the Fargo Cass Public Health website.

They can contact public health or any of those numbers, and we could steer people in the right direction.

- All right, well, we're out of time, but thank you for joining us today.

- Thanks for having me.

- Stay tuned for more.

(upbeat music) Rachel Meyer is a Fargo-Moorhead musician with aspirations for a career in music.

She can be found playing throughout the region and brought her ukulele to the Prairie Musician's stage, performing "Neon Lights" and "Beautiful Soul."

(easy music) ♪ First heartbreak, never felt a pain like this ♪ ♪ Closed off, and scared to talk to my friends again ♪ ♪ I fled home, didn't want the memories ♪ ♪ Of endless nights under neon lights ♪ (easy music) ♪ I was scared to move on, didn't know how to love again ♪ ♪ You said that I gotta get out ♪ ♪ It wouldn't be hard on me anyway ♪ ♪ And to talk to some guys ♪ ♪ But none of them were just quite right ♪ ♪ First heartbreak, never felt a pain like this ♪ ♪ Closed off, and scared to talk to our friends again ♪ ♪ I fled home, didn't want the memories ♪ ♪ Of endless nights under neon lights ♪ (easy music) ♪ Stepped into the dating game, met a couple strangers ♪ ♪ Fell in and out of love, made some choices I might regret ♪ ♪ I'm wanting to settle, but come home to the neon lights ♪ ♪ Sat alone, wrote another song about the breakup ♪ ♪ Sat alone, wrote another song about moving on ♪ ♪ Sat alone, wrote another song about finding love ♪ ♪ Sat alone, wrote another song about being lonely ♪ ♪ First heartbreak, you never felt a pain like this ♪ ♪ Closed off, and scared to talk to my friends again ♪ ♪ I fled home, didn't want the memories ♪ ♪ Of endless nights under neon lights ♪ ♪ And at the end of the day, I'm still lonely ♪ ♪ And now I'm seeing everything in neon lights ♪ (gentle music) ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Don't you dare break down yourself ♪ ♪ You've worked so hard to get here ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ You deserve the whole world ♪ ♪ Just let yourself ♪ ♪ Let it all come rushing in ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ You've built great big walls around your heart ♪ ♪ So you don't get hurt again ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ (gentle music) ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ (gentle music) ♪ Smile in your heart ♪ ♪ Full of joy you radiate only light ♪ ♪ You don't show the dark days ♪ ♪ Passion and fire ♪ ♪ You're not afraid to pave your own path ♪ ♪ Jump into the unknown ♪ ♪ Passion and fire, you walk with purpose ♪ ♪ Showing only confidence ♪ ♪ Not to show any struggle inside ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ (gentle music) ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Don't you dare break down yourself ♪ ♪ You deserve happiness ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ You deserve the whole world ♪ ♪ Just let yourself ♪ ♪ Let it all come rushing in ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ ♪ Beautiful soul ♪ (gentle music) - Well, that's all we have for "Prairie Pulse" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.