Derrek Vaughn | The Valdosta Daily TimesValdosta's homeless camps pop up, usually near the interstate, and migrate as people come and go, police said.

VALDOSTA — Carla Banks went days without food.

She did what most would consider unthinkable. 

“I got so desperate one time I ate stuff I found in a garbage can,” she said.

The death of her father in 2009 and what she described as “some bad choices” left Banks living in a broken-down SUV in Dalton in January 2010.

“I was all over Dalton,” she said. “I was just looking for a place to park and spend the night. I never knew from day-to-day if the heater was going to work. And those streets got cold.”

But in May 2010, someone told her about Providence Ministries, a rescue mission in Dalton.

“They fed me. Oh, man, they fed me,” she said. “It had been months since I’d had a meal like that.”

Banks said the people at Providence also told her about the shelter. At first, she was hesitant.

“I was ashamed of myself and what I had become, and that just seemed like too much.”

She left that night, but kept returning to Providence for the hot meals.

“They were so nice to me. I finally said, ‘There’s something to this.'”

She entered the shelter. But she admits she chafed at first under the strict rules Providence has for the people who stay there.

“I gave them a lot of backlash. I was very hateful to them,” she said. “But they just loved me. They prayed for me. They loved me.”

One night, about five months after she entered the shelter, she went to a church service at Providence.

“Something began to push me. I couldn’t resist it. I went up to the altar and accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior. From that moment, I had no worries,” she said.

Right after that Roy Johnson, the president of Providence Ministries, told her there was an opening in a women’s residential drug and alcohol treatment center operated by Providence.

She went into treatment the next day. She stayed there for nine months.

“I got healing. I got the the tools I needed to cope,” she said.

Johnson got more than healing at Providence. She met her husband there.

“He works there, and we became friends at first. Then slowly, we fell in love,” she said.

When they were married in August 2012, it was in the chapel at Providence Ministries.

Today, Banks is part of a ministry for the homeless.

She said her experience makes her better able to talk to the men and women there.

“If I see a homeless person, I give them money because I know what they are going through,” she said. “The homeless are human beings. They may have made some bad choices. But they are still human beings.”

Banks’ story is one of new hope, of a life being restored. But it took Providence Ministries, an outside hand, to pull her out of her lonely and desperate life on the streets.

All across the SunLight Project coverage area — Valdosta, Dalton, Tifton, Thomasville, Moultrie and Milledgeville, Ga., along with Live Oak, Jasper and Mayo, Fla., and the surrounding counties — the battle against homelessness is fought not by one but by many.

A mosaic of aid comes from shelters, behavioral health centers, churches, businesses, schools and other local organizations.

Funding for the agencies that help the homeless is just as diverse. A homeless person’s road to rehabilitation is paved with state and federal grants, local donations and money from national nonprofits.

“Overcoming homelessness, I believe, has nothing to do with an individual thing,” said Ronnie Mathis, executive director of the South Georgia Partnership to End Homelessness. “It’s a corporate thing, wherein everybody plays a part. Not just the person that’s homeless.

“The community plays a part. We all at some point have needed a hand. We have to be willing to help our brother that’s beside us, if he’s willing to be helped.”

But to be effective, the help must be comprehensive.

A Holistic Approach To Homelessness

Simply changing someone’s housing situation is not enough, experts said. Getting someone off the street and into a shelter and eventually into a home is only part of the process.

To create a permanent, long-lasting difference for homeless people, their thinking and mental behaviors must be changed as well, aid workers said.

Providing treatment for mental illness and substance abuse — the unseen diseases that ravage a person’s mind — is just as crucial as providing shelter, food and clothing, workers said.

“You give a man a fish sandwich, you feed him for a day. But you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime,” Mathis said. “What good is it to just come in and say, ‘Voilà, here’s your house,’ but you have no training, no knowledge beyond that.

Mathis added that often homeless people are used to living in a filthy camp in the woods surrounded by trash. If not taught any differently, their home will end up the same way, he said.

“Can you imagine if we just took them out of that setting, put them in a house without the training behind it?” Mathis said. “It’s a job to keep a house clean. But you have to know how.

“In order to have a successful transition, there has to be teaching and training with it.”

Roz Johnson, chief clinical officer at Behavioral Health Services of South Georgia, said treatment for mental illness and substance abuse is what will keep people from going back to the streets.

That’s why places like BHS provide an array of mental health and substance abuse services in addition to housing. BHS even provides transportation to make sure people can get to their doctor’s appointments and care meetings.

“If they don’t stay on medication and don’t get the treatment, they’re not going to be successful,” Johnson said. “What we see happening is if they start falling out of treatment for whatever reason, they’re going to start breaking rules and everything’s going to kind of fall apart. You have to have the treatment with the housing.”

Taking into account that the right treatment means the difference between a life restored and a sickness perpetuated, Jon Jackson created Comfort Farms in Milledgeville for veterans, who make up about 10 percent of the nation’s homeless population.

The farm cares for veterans through agri-therapy and provides an open-door office of sorts for veterans to meet with therapists and build relationships with other vets.

In the past, Jackson, a veteran himself, would volunteer for traveling shelters that provided necessities, medical care and job referrals for homeless vets. But he realized it wasn’t enough.

“They were just putting Band-Aids on the problem,” Jackson said. “People high-fiving thinking that they had done something, but at the end of the day, whether you give a vet $1,500 worth of gear, a homeless vet doesn’t have a car, so what’s he going to do with it?

“He’s going to go straight to a pawn shop and pawn it. He doesn’t have any counselors, he’s probably in a lot of pain, and there’s a good chance he’s going to sell it for drugs or alcohol. So what have we accomplished? Nothing.”

Comfort Farms provides an alternative to cookie-cutter, closed-off therapy offices that often make veterans uncomfortable, Jackson said. The farm allows veterans to connect with each other and therapists in an open, quiet, outdoor setting, which Jackson said helps to address the root of the problem rather than just the symptoms.

“Right now, this place is designed to help vets who need to press that reset button so they can go back to doing what they do so that they don’t end up homeless. You have vets who are homeless, and then you have vets who could potentially go through a crisis to end up homeless.

“If you don’t have a place for vets to go to decompress and reset, then we’re only going to have more homeless vets (and) more suicide.

While Comfort Farms is a valuable resource for Milledgeville, some communities have little to no aid to offer to the homeless.

Breaking Down Barriers

Florida’s Suwannee, Hamilton, Lafayette and Columbia Counties have zero homeless shelters for the general population. The nearest shelter is more than 70 miles away in Gainesville.

The only shelters are those for victims of domestic violence.

For anyone else living on the street with a mental disorder or just because of hard times, the resources are limited.

The United Way of Suwannee Valley coalition provides most of the homeless services for these four counties. What the area does have is a government grant that funds a team to seek out and engage homeless people, especially those with mental illness.

The Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) grant gives aid workers the opportunity to break down barriers and gain the trust of homeless people with the hopes of getting them to a shelter and the treatment they need.

Christen Lancaster, outreach case manager for PATH, said it is important to have a regular relationship with the homeless people they talk to.

“We really try to keep the relationship going, because they are usually really shy,” Lancaster said. “But the fifth time you meet them, it might be a different story.”

The case workers first have to find the homeless, which can lead them all across the four counties. For the more rural areas, people tend to believe there are no homeless, case manager Jozlyn Gardner said. But they are there.

“We walk the streets. We go in the woods. We are literally boots on the ground,” Gardner said. “We’ve found that the homeless keep their living spaces away from the high-traffic areas. You won’t find them at the side of the road, but if you go in the woods, you’ll see the tents.”

Rita Dopp, United Way executive director, said helping the homeless isn’t just charity work. It also saves a community money in the long run, she said.

“It’s cheaper to help them find stable places to live then for them to wind up in jail or the hospital,” Dopp said.

Thomasville, often known for its affluency, has its homeless as well. Services available to the homeless population there include the Needham House Shelter, a transitional housing for women and children. While many communities offer similar shelters from women and children, homeless men often have far fewer resources available to them. 

Thomasville, and most communities, have services available through the Salvation Army, including a food bank and outreach center, offering not only a food pantry but clothing, coats and blankets. 

The challenges are often making the homeless aware of what is available and feeling comfortable accessing those services. 

The Rescue Mission and Soup Kitchen in Thomasville goes beyond its daily hot lunch and offers emergency assistance. There are also faith-based organizations that offer a variety of services. 

The Veteran’s Health Administration has a Health Care for Homeless Veterans Program serving North Florida and South Georgia that includes a Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-8255).

BHS in Valdosta also has a PATH team, which Roz Johnson said targets homeless people who otherwise wouldn’t come in for treatment because they are untrusting.

The team has been working to bring one woman in for over a year and a half. While she is still on the street, Johnson said the team is slowly chipping away at the walls she’s built around herself.

Over the months, the team has gained her trust a little more with each interaction and learned a small piece of new information each time as well — her first name, then her last, then her birthday.

“It’s taken that long, and it’s taken being persistent so she can trust the people that are on that team,” Roz Johnson.

Johnson said the PATH grant is essential in caring for homeless people because change does not happen overnight. The grant allows the team to take its time in engaging people that might never get help because of how long it takes for them to let their guard down.

All Hands On Deck

Sgt. Charles Klingemann of the Valdosta Police Department knows how to search out homeless camps in the city, the places hidden in patches of trees and brush just off major roadways. The camps migrate around as homeless people come and go, but they usually stay near the interstate, Klingemann said.

Sometimes a complaint will bring the camp to Klingemann’s attention. Other times he’ll notice trash piling up in an area, causing him to investigate. He makes an effort to build rapport with the people in the camps, and he knows many by name.

VPD Chief Brian Childress trains Klingemann and the rest of his officers to have patience when dealing with homeless people, especially those with mental illness.

“You’re going to understand that they might not grasp everything you’re telling them to do or what’s going on,” Klingemann said. “So you’ve got to be able to sit back and have the patience to actually interact with them on whatever level you see fit.”

Anytime the VPD interacts with a homeless person, a report is sent out to local agencies such as BHS and the South Georgia Partnership to End Homelessness. From there, the agencies will attempt to make contact with the homeless person and connect them with mental health treatment or housing or a job — whatever they need to recover.

“You can try to do it the old-fashioned way and just force these people to leave and go to another area, (but) it’s not right,” Childress said. “I personally believe it invades constitutional rights.

“Instead of sweeping this problem under the rug, you have to deal with it head on. (And) you can’t fix homelessness until you fix their mental health.”

While much is already being done to end homelessness in the region, Mathis said there’s still more to do.

“One of the problems with the community is we suffer from a lack of knowledge,” Mathis said. “They don’t know.”

When Mathis started working with homeless people in 2009, he was shocked to discover the high numbers of homeless students.

Currently, there are 195 homeless students in the county school system and 215 in the city one.

Colquitt County sees about 250 to 300 homeless students each year. That doesn’t always mean they are on the streets. They could be doubled-up in housing with relatives, frequently moving from place to place, or living in substandard housing.

The Colquitt County School System, like many other schools, has a program to assist these students, and it takes many forms. It could be helping students acquire immunization certificates and providing school supplies or paying for school activities and field trips the family cannot afford.

For at least the last 10 years, the school system has received grant funding through federal homeless legislation, said Denise Pope, a social worker based at Norman Park Elementary School.

The school system received $43,000 in funding for the current school year.

Through United Way, the school system receives funding to assist homeless families with an apartment deposit, a month’s rent or utility payments. Of the $6,000 allocated in 2016, $200 remains in the account for the remainder of the school year.

“We appreciate what we get, and it has helped a lot of families,” Pope said.

Additionally, once families are identified as homeless through the annual survey, school social workers make contact with them during the school year, Pope said.

A Choice To Be Made

Despite all the help available, a homeless person won’t get help until they’re ready to change, experts said.

Johnson said while BHS and other agencies do all they can, people have to decide for themselves if they will stay on the path to a better life or return to a life of homelessness, which is where many are comfortable.

“I’ve run across people that don’t want to be helped. I’ve run across people that prefer sleeping in cars, that prefer sleeping in dilapidated buildings,” Mathis said.

“I used to wonder why. But it all goes back to somewhere along the way, that person has lost his or her willingness. They’ve shunned away from society. They feel society hasn’t done good to them. Even that person can be helped, but you just have to go deeper with that person.”

Mark Stone, the shelter director at Brother Charlie’s Rescue Center in Tifton, said he focuses on the people who are actively seeking to change their circumstances. The goal is self-sufficiency.

He said there are usually adequate resources within a community to help those who truly want help.

He cautioned that many homeless people who are more visible, such as those who hold up cardboard signs asking for money, are sometimes supporting a drug habit or just making money off the generosity of compassionate passersby.

Those who truly need and want help out of homelessness will go to the churches and the shelters, and will follow through with appointments and make use of resources, Stone said.

Johnson said that change can’t be forced, especially when dealing with substance abuse.

“As soon as they start getting around people, places and things that remind them of their drug use or where drugs are available, they have to make that decision. We can’t be with them 24/7,” Johnson said.

“You can’t put them on lockdown and make them do right. People have to be ready for change.”

But for the ones open to change, the resources are plenty.

Sharah Denton, development director of the LAMP shelter in Valdosta, said the goal is to offer clients not only housing but also empowerment.

That’s why LAMP and shelters like it offer classes on sewing, cooking, parenting, budgeting, financial management, resume writing and more.

The result is self-worth and a feeling of accomplishment, Denton said.

“Most of our clients just need that extra push of support and encouragement,” She said.

Johnson said working to help the homeless is always worth it, even when many choose to return to the streets.

“As a society we have to (help). If one person out of five can get better and live a good life and be a productive member of society, it’s worth it,” Johnson said. “The more people in our community that are trying to better themselves and contribute, the better our community’s going to be.

“If it was your family member, wouldn’t you want somebody to go the extra mile?

The SunLight Project team of journalists who contributed to this report includes Alan Mauldin, Eve Guevara, Thomas Lynn and Patti Dozier, along with the writers, Charles Oliver and team leader John Stephen. Will Woolever and Gil Pound also contributed.

To contact the team, email sunlightproject@gaflnews.com.

Local Homeless Aid*

LAMP (Lowndes Associated Ministries to People)

Homeless Shelter (both emergency and long-term)

Day Center (for laundry, showers, toiletries, etc.)

Offers classes on money management, parenting, GED classes, resume writing, etc., and connections to community programs such as mental health counseling, marriage and family counseling and post-secondary education services.

Phone: 229-245-7157

Website: www.lampinc.org

South Georgia Partnership to End Homelessness

Offers help with transitional housing.

Provides financial assistance for medical, transportation, education, child care, nutrition and mental health needs.

Phone: 229-293-7301

Website: www.sgpeh.com

Salvation Army

Emergency Men’s Shelter

Offers food, such as canned goods, throughout the week.

Phone: 229-242-6440

Website: www.salvationarmygeorgia.org/valdosta/

Behavioral Health Services

Offers housing and treatment for homeless people struggling with mental illness and substance abuse.

Phone: 229-671-6170

Website: www.bhsga.com

The Haven

Domestic Abuse Shelter

Offers counseling for those faced with domestic violence.

Phone: 229-244-1765

Website: www.valdostahaven.org

*Many local organizations, churches, schools and businesses aid the homeless through programs, such as food banks, and through special events and services that provide necessities, such as toiletries and clothing, to homeless people.