08/10/2026
Sunday Ramblings with my dog Stanley
Trigger warning. This post is raw and real, and I feel like it is necessary to share because only we, as a community, can make necessary change happen. This post is about what last week looked like at our Shelter Home. I am lifting up two stories that broke our hearts and spirits for a minute, but have now added fuel to the fire for us to figure out how we stop these heartbreaking things from being allowed to happen.
We received an email informing us that an 87-year-old woman was going to be evicted from her apartment. The email was asking if we could help so she, her cat and her dog did not end up out on the street.
We began the process of working with this sweet woman to help her manage all the things she needed to do to walk away from her home. She needed a place to store her things. She needed to find a temporary home for her cat. We would help move her into our Shelter Home with her service dog.
She has never been homeless. She is terrified.
We went to pick her up to bring her to the Shelter Home and she just couldn't do it. She told us she was going to stay until the sheriff arrived at her door and told her she had to leave. So we called and checked on her every day. She would tell us she was still trying to pack up her things but she was completely overwhelmed.
Finally, Friday came and the police showed up at her door and told her she had to be out by Monday at 11:30 a.m.
She called us crying. She didn't know what she was going to do with all of her things.
We made a call to Two Men and a Truck and explained the situation. Zach, the owner, immediately stepped into action and arranged for two men and a truck to meet us Monday morning. We will pack up her things with her and they will move everything into a storage unit.
Then this 87-year-old woman will leave her home and move into a homeless shelter for the first time in her life.
How is this possible?
We will take good care of her. She will have a place to be morning, noon and night. She will have a healthy breakfast, lunch and dinner. Our staff and guests will wrap her in support and services and hopefully she will begin to feel safe while we work to find her a permanent housing solution.
But she has been living in trauma for months while lawyers fought to try to keep her in her home. Nothing worked. So now she will be homeless.
At least she will not end up on the street.
Unfortunately, that cannot be said for the next situation.
On Wednesday, a private ambulance company, not Ada County Paramedics, showed up at our Shelter Home with a very medically fragile person. We learned that this person was a recent amputee, had a very serious wound on their remaining leg and was not ambulatory.
We explained that our Medical Dorm works through our hospital partners. They call ahead, we do an intake and assessment and, if someone requires a significant level of care, there has to be support in place for home health, respite care, wound care or whatever is necessary to make sure that person can safely stay with us.
After we explained all of this, they got back into their ambulance, drove across the street and proceeded to drop this person in a wheelchair on the sidewalk next to a restaurant.
Then they drove away.
We watched the whole thing happen.
I went across the street to check on them. This person was sitting in the heat and smoke, soaked in their own urine.
I gathered their things and said, "We will take you to the Shelter Home and see how we can help."
This person was over 300 pounds and as I started pushing the wheelchair to get them across State Street, one of the wheels began to fall off.
The wheelchair was broken.
Somehow we made it across State Street and into the shelter.
The immediate need was to cool this person off and get them cleaned up. But how? They could not move themselves from the wheelchair onto the bench in our ADA shower.
I went into our adult family room and found Steve, one of our guests who worked in healthcare for years before he lost his housing. I asked if he could help me.
He said, "Let me change my clothes and I will be right there."
Then, coming down the hall, was Clark, our Sous Chef in Mercy Kitchen. He had heard that I needed help.
Clark and Steve did everything they could to try to get this person cleaned up, but there was simply no way to safely get them out of the wheelchair and into the shower. So they took down the shower nozzle and gave them a wheelchair shower.
Then they unwrapped the wound on the remaining leg to make sure it was okay.
It was not okay.
It was terribly infected.
Another one of our guests who is staying in the Medical Dorm while his own very severe wound heals immediately got to work helping clean and bandage the wound.
While all of this was happening, we reached out to one of our hospital partners and explained what was going on. They told us this patient should not have been discharged and needed to be returned to the hospital immediately.
We called non-emergency dispatch and fire, EMT and police came to help. They were so kind. They got this person safely loaded into the ambulance and transported back to the hospital.
Our staff was broken.
How could someone do this? How could you leave another human being sitting on a sidewalk in the heat and smoke, in a broken wheelchair, unable to care for themselves, and just drive away?
I immediately reached out to our healthcare group and shared the story. There was outrage. There was confusion. And then there were a lot of phone calls.
A few calls later, once the whole story was being revealed, we finally received some good news. Our new friend was going to be moved into a residential medical setting where they could receive the care they actually needed.
We had the name of the ambulance company. We knew who had been involved in their care. We were ready to go to war.
Luckily, we didn't have to.
But this is not a standalone story.
The number of unsafe discharges into homelessness that we are seeing is growing. People are coming from assisted living facilities, skilled nursing facilities, memory care facilities and medical settings. People who need levels of care that a homeless shelter was never designed to provide.
We were able to keep these two stories from having really bad endings, but at a very high cost to the people these things are happening to, to the staff who step up and try to right the wrongs, and to a system that somehow keeps finding ways to spit people out when their needs become too complicated.
I keep thinking about these two people.
An 87-year-old woman sitting in the home she is about to lose, overwhelmed by boxes and terrified about what comes next.
And another human being sitting on a sidewalk across the street from our Shelter Home in a broken wheelchair because someone decided that was an acceptable place to leave them.
Neither one of these stories should have gotten this far.
That is the part I want our community to understand.
By the time someone arrives at our Shelter Home, there has often been a long line of places where something could have gone differently. A housing intervention. A medical plan. A caregiver. A benefit. A phone call. A little more time. Someone willing to stay at the table and figure out the hard answer instead of passing the person to the next system.
I love that our Shelter Home can be the place that catches people when everything else has fallen apart. I am incredibly proud of the way our staff and our guests show up for people. I watched it happen this week in ways I will never forget.
But I don't want us to just get better at catching people.
I want fewer people to be dropped.
That takes all of us.
It means showing up for this work. It means asking questions when something does not make sense. It means expecting more from healthcare, housing, senior care and every other system that touches the lives of vulnerable people. It means paying attention when decisions are being made in our community and asking the people who want to represent us what they are going to do about these huge gaps in care. And when it is time to vote, it means listening carefully to their answers and deciding who you believe is willing to do the hard work of fixing them.
Mostly, it means not looking away.
Because once you have seen an 87-year-old woman terrified of becoming homeless, or watched an ambulance leave someone on a sidewalk in a broken wheelchair, it becomes really hard to pretend these gaps aren't there.
They are there.
They are huge.
And we have a lot of work to do.
