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This past Monday was World Homeless Day, a time to pay extra attention to the struggles of those experiencing homelessness and work toward meaningful solutions. In honor of the day, the nonprofit newsroom Street Sense Media partnered with news organizations across D.C., including The Eagle, to report on local homelessness and potential solutions in our city throughout the week.
The result is the Homeless Crisis Reporting Project, a collection of stories published throughout this week taking a hard look at the district’s efforts to combat homelessness. Many of the stories are focused on solutions, like this podcast on tiny homes and this Q&A about Shepherd’s Table, a food-focused nonprofit in Silver Spring. For The Eagle’s part of the project, I wrote about Friendship Place, a housing service provider based in Tenleytown. Friendship Place opened 30 years ago on Wisconsin Avenue and today has nearly 170 employees running programs across the DMV.
I visited Friendship Place’s Tenleytown site earlier this month to learn about what they do. The building has everything from a medical clinic to a computer station to a washing machine and a mailroom for those without an address. Friendship Place’s chief program officer for community solutions, Sean Read, showed me around before we sat down for an interview. Read has worked at Friendship Place for 11 years. After all this time, he said, he still finds his work incredibly meaningful.
One of his main motivations for working at Friendship Place is helping people experiencing homelessness find a job.
“Everyone has something that they can use to be leveraged into an employment opportunity,” he said. “When we can get people working, they're getting that income which helps them with other basic needs, which helps support housing. It’s breaking a cycle of joblessness and homelessness.”
You can read my story on Friendship Place here.
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