It’s unfortunate I have to write another article like this about A-Hope, when they provide the most services to homeless people in Asheville, and the staff there are usually friendly. (My other article here is titled “A-Hope in Need of New Direction” from 4-30-2010.) The names of the involved persons are omitted here for privacy reasons.
The director was given a written suggestion, written nicely, as to how to improve how laundry is handled. The suggestion would change a policy that currently encourages people to sleep downtown on Sunday night. That suggestion was included in a grievance the client filed against a staff member who allegedly intentionally denied information the client needed because the staff member was in a bad mood. In the written reply to the grievance & suggestion, the Director threatened to ban the client from laundry for a month (for something she carelessly misread), and said “You are always free to do your laundry elsewhere if you do not agree with our system.” She did not address the merits of the suggestion. That’s pretty nice – it sounds a lot like “we don’t want your suggestions, we’ll retaliate like this if you write them, and if you don’t like it then get services somewhere else.” (In case you don’t know, A-Hope is funded with taxpayers dollars and donations. The Director and staff is paid from that money, although there are a couple of volunteers.) The client appealed the reply to this grievance & suggestion. At both of the available appeal levels, they said the reply to the grievance from the Director was inappropriate and “didn’t reflect well” on A-Hope, that the Director “clearly misread” the part the resulted in her threatened ban, and said the staff member acknowledged some impatience on his part, but they failed to address the merits of the laundry suggestion. (I should add the the client currently says the staff member he complained about has been friendly ever since the incident.)
Laundry works as follows: On Mondays, people who sign in on the hour between 7:00am and 11:00am are given lottery tickets, and some tickets are drawn and the winners get a laundry slot for a day during the current week. (You can only do lottery the first hour you sign in on Monday.) There are 2 slots for 7:00am and 2 for 9:00am, for each day – Monday through Sunday. If you don’t win the lottery, you can ask to be put on the standby list. If someone doesn’t show up to do laundry, they use the standby list, based on who is on there first. So the people who did lottery at 7:00am are in front of the people who did lottery at a later hour.
The suggestion was that there be separate standby lists for the 7:00am and 9:00am laundry slots. The people that did lottery at 7:00am and 8:00am would get on the 7:00am standby list, and the people that did lottery at 9:00am or later would get on the 9:00am standby list. The reason being that people that do lottery earlier CAN GET to A-Hope earlier – because they WERE THERE earlier on Monday. It was argued that it is not fair that people that can get there earlier on Monday get to use standby at both 7:00am and 9:00am during the week, and they also get priority over people who can’t get there at 7:00am regarding the later 9:00am slot. Some people take the city bus into town, or maybe get a ride with someone who starts work after 7:00am, and therefore can’t get there that early. The client also had an alternate suggestion that if there’s a slot open and more than one person checks in at the desk for standby (to see if a lottery winner didn’t show up), then the staff could flip a coin, or roll a dice (or do a mini-lottery) – again, so priority isn’t given to people who can get there at 7:00 and it’s fair (but they’d still have the advantage of trying at both 7:00am and 9:00am standby). The reason there is a sign-in every hour is that people get there at different times, and you get an hour to take a shower, get stuff out of your storage container, etc. (You can now sign in again the next hour, which you couldn’t do back when A-Hope used to be open in the afternoon – back then you only got 1 hour in the morning.)
The final/2nd appeal was to the President of the Board of Homeward Bound, who said he read through the appeal, and said “I understand that the initial response to you did not reflect well on the staff and agency.” In his brief reply he had no response to the suggestion about laundry. The client followed up on this with an e-mail to him saying “So you don’t have a problem with A-Hope ENCOURAGING people to camp in the city so they can do laundry at A-Hope, when I have a suggestion that solves the problem, and creates no new problems.” That e-mail was never replied to. (The appeal was filed by e-mail.)
This appeal was from a few weeks ago. I checked the laundry list (it’s on the wall behind the desk) on 2 of the last 3 weeks (while I was thinking about writing this article), and on both of those weeks 9 names were crossed off the standby list by Sunday. There are 28 total slots available during the week, so 32% of the people doing laundry are doing it on standby (the two weeks I checked). It seems this may be because they just give a lottery ticket to everyone as they come in the door, and some of those people actually have other laundry options available – so they don’t show up.
The existing policy certainly encourages people to sleep downtown on Sunday night to get high on the standby list. The suggestion of two standby lists would solve that problem, and it would be fair, and it does not seem it would create any new problems. A-Hope is not interested in listening and changing procedures, or they are not interested in communicating what new problem would be created that is sufficient to justify keeping the current policy. With this policy, A-Hope is encouraging people to sleep downtown, when they could have a safe, dry place to sleep outside of the downtown area.
(This article is my opinion, and does not express any official position of the Asheville Homeless Network.)
