Boston Globe Article:
A Port in the Storm
By Sam Allis | May 14, 2006
You're climbing your way out of homelessness and trying to get a job. And a place to live. And meds for your bipolar illness. And school placement for your 8-year-old who's in a shelter with you.
Do you know what you need on the way back up? A phone. That's what you need.
A number where prospective employers and landlords, doctors and school administrators can reach you. If they call the pay phone at the shelter, it's anybody's guess what kind of reception they'll get or whether the message will ever reach you. And, besides, who wants an employer to know you're on the streets?
''It's critical," says Carol Fabyan, who runs the social services at the city's homeless shelter on Long Island. ''No one would think of it, but try getting a job or a doctor's appointment without a phone."
Why am I telling you this? Because when walking down that wonderful stretch of Beacon Street from Park to Tremont a few weeks ago I noticed a storefront sandwiched between the Boston Bar Association offices and the Athenaeum with the words ''Project Connect" on the door.
I must have passed this place a hundred times in the three years it has been there but never saw it before. I peered into the windows and found a bunch of men hunched over computers. They didn't resemble your average IT geeks. Some wore parkas, patched and shiny from wear. Others were in sweatshirts and watch caps. A lot of dufflebags and backpacks on the floor. Not a $50 haircut to be found.
Try computer access and 2,500 phone lines available to the homeless for voice mail. Project Connect also extends computer use to the low-income unemployed and disabled. It has been providing voice mail to the homeless since 1996 and computers at this site since 2003. Regular phones and faxes too. If this is new to me, I'm betting it's new to a lot of you too.
This outfit is another of those nano nonprofits that address holes in our sorry social safety net we don't even see. Christian Brunner, an international credit specialist for a big Austrian bank in a previous life -- that's a whole other story -- runs the operation on a shoestring budget of about $130,000. Laura Vitagliano helps out three days a week. That's it. Project Connect survives on money raised by Shelter Inc., its Cambridge-based parent organization charged with providing housing to the homeless, and HUD, whose federal dollars will end soon.
Brunner works with 107 programs among 60 agencies in Greater Boston like the St. Francis House downtown and the Friends of the Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain. These places have counselors on site who help homeless men and women set up their voice mailboxes. Some of them have never had a phone before, explains Patty Murdock at Long Island, and they are clueless about recorded greetings, so she offers short scripts for them to use.
There are waiting lists every day for the 10 desktops Brunner provides. People use them to check e-mail, search for jobs, investigate their medical conditions, pursue legal action. Each machine has software built in to limit usage to two hours. There is also software to block websites trafficking in porn and drugs. No games either.
Victor Tammi, 63, who has been homeless since 1988, checks e-mail and writes letters at Project Connect. Nicole Wallace, 20, has been sporadically homeless since she graduated from West Roxbury High two years ago. She has spent a few nights in her car, when she had one, and bounced around from job to job. She now works as a security guard and lives with her sister in Mattapan while waiting to hear from Nextel about a cellphone technician job.
''I come here when I'm down and out," she says. ''I use it for job searching and e-mail. I was at Shattuck for awhile, and this is the only place I can come to talk to an employer. You want private conversations. Also, I send letters from here and there's no shelter logo, so it's not embarrassing."
The first such voice mail operation surfaced in 1991 in Seattle, home to the umbrella agency for local operations like Project Connect in 19 states called Community Voice Mail National Office. Recently, it has worked with Cisco Systems to provide a central voice mail server that will eventually handle the traffic of all 46,000 users of such systems across the country.
Project Connect used to pay Verizon 25 cents every time a homeless person dialed a toll-free number from a pay phone to check voice mail. Then the phone companies doubled the cost of a pay phone call to 50 cents. That meant an increase from $4,000 to more than $10,000 a year, and Brunner had to drop the whole thing. Voice mail is now a lot harder for the homeless to access.
Verizon could get some decent publicity for chump change by eating the increase for Project Connect or, better yet, providing the access for free. The company has not exactly bathed itself in glory by coughing up millions of our phone records to the NSA without a fight. So, yo, Verizon, do the right thing. Your stockholders might even like it.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
