Q&A: Maureen's Haven Director Says The Homeless Need Help Year Round, But Particularly In Winter

Maureen’s Haven, a homeless outreach nonprofit organization based in Riverhead, provides services to men and women throughout the East End year round, offering food, clothing, connections to social workers and mental health counselors, and referrals to a network of agencies that can give support to the nondomiciled.

But starting November 1, the organization will activate an important program: providing temporary shelters to homeless individuals, using houses of worship and volunteer help from various congregations. They will provide hot meals and a place to sleep, not to mention nonjudgmental human contact.

Daniel O’Shea, who has served as executive director of Maureen’s Haven since the spring of 2018, spoke recently about the reactivation of the shelter program three years ago through the generosity of the local community of faith, and the challenges of providing services during the pandemic.

Q: So, on November 1, you’re going to start providing services again, right?

Yes and no. Yes and no. I guess one of the things I’d like to speak about when I have the opportunity is to say a little bit more about Maureen’s Haven. Because so many people are familiar with our emergency winter shelter program, which you’re speaking about now — and that does start November 1. And that’s a fantastic program, and I’ll get into that in details in a moment.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that we provide services year round. And that’s really where a lot of those critical services get the results that we are trying to obtain. So when people are trying to find housing, or get into treatment programs, or try to get their medications, or need to take showers, or need to take meals — those types of things are happening, that case management component is happening year round.

I think that’s always important, because most people, again, always automatically think that Maureen’s Haven is this emergency winter shelter program. And, again, it’s a fantastic program. But the reality is, we operate year round.

And during the pandemic, we were operating seven days a week, year round, providing services. And then as we go into the winter, we continue with that seven-day-a-week schedule.

Now, to your question, you are correct. November 1 is a start of our emergency winter shelter program. So that does kick off, ooh, three weeks from now.

Q: I imagine there’s quite a bit of planning to do, to get that all in place again.

There really is. I have to say, right off the bat, that I have a fantastic staff. My program manager, Stacy Stanzione, she just does an amazing job. But it is, it’s a lot of planning, it’s a lot of logistics, it’s a lot of moving parts.

In the past, we had a schedule that was pretty routine. And then once the pandemic hit, everything sort of was off the table, and we really had to try and in many ways reinvent that winter shelter program.

Q: I think you make a great point that most of us think about Maureen’s Haven providing help for the homeless in the winter months. In the winter, it’s obviously a life-threatening situation, but you’ve got to provide those services year round, right?

Correct, right. And we actually stay very busy year round, even though when the wintertime ends — and delta season ends — my day center is usually very busy.

The thing I always say about the winter: Yes, it is very much a life-saving program. But the reality of it all is, I have a lot of guests that are over the age of 55, that have underlying health conditions. And when it’s 100, 102 degrees, that’s just as dangerous as somebody sitting out in 33 degree weather.

A lot of my folks do tend to be older, over 55. So for them, their need is going to be a year-round need, as well as the folks who are chronically homeless, the folks who are newly coming into homelessness, the folks who struggle with homelessness. They find a place, they’re homeless, they find a place. Whether it’s because of their financial situation or whether it’s something that might be contributing, like some underlying mental illness or substance abuse program.

And even, starting last year with the pandemic, we noticed right away that there was an immediate need for food. When the pandemic first hit, everything shut down. So my guests couldn’t go to McDonald’s, Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts. They couldn’t.

So what we had coordinated was to make sure that between us, the Salvation Army and the local soup kitchen, that our guests in the community would have had meals seven days a week. And we continued that, we’re continuing that program this year as well.

Q: What can you tell me about the people that you serve, the men and women who take advantage of the services that you offer? What are some things you can tell me? What are some similarities? What are some differences? What are some things that might surprise people about your … you use the word “guests.”

I always like to say that everybody is very unique and very individual. Because everybody does come in here with an individual set of needs and circumstances that brought them to us. So we do try very much to take a very individualized approach with our guests, working with them.

Somebody may have just lost their job, and then they lost their license and their birth certificate, and we help them put those pieces back together. Other people do struggle with long-term substance abuse and alcohol abuse and chronic homelessness, as well as, again, underlying mental illness and other similar circumstances.

Generally we average about — and this fluctuates — it’s usually about 40 percent women, 60 percent men. It’s usually about 40 percent African American, 40 percent white, and about 20 percent Hispanic — those folks do tend to be undocumented, so for that population, they’re not entitled to any services. So if you’re within the undocumented community, especially in the wintertime, you truly don’t have access to food stamps or EBT [cards]. You’re not eligible for any kind of emergency housing.

So for us and the undocumented population, we are a critical component for them. And as I mentioned before, roughly about 40 to 45 percent of my population at any given time is over the age of 55.

Q: Can you put a number on the size of the homeless population on the East End, or in the two towns on the South Fork?

Sure. It’s a little bit difficult to track exactly, because we do have a very transient population. And the one thing I’m always reminding folks who do live here on the East End, you have folks that might be in Southampton or East Hampton, and, for them, Riverhead is a day trip. But the reality of it all is that for my guests, they just hop on a bus, and they’re sitting in East Hampton, they’re going out to Montauk, they might be in Greenport.

I hear it all the time that there aren’t very many homeless people on the East End. And then … I’m talking to a few people, and they’re, like, oh, I knew somebody over here, I knew somebody over here. And I drive around the local community — before I leave, I’ve identified five homeless people.

In general, last year, for 2020, we provided services to approximately 250 to 275 individuals. This year, I’m fully anticipating providing assistance to at least 300 individuals. And I anticipate that to be a conservative number.

A majority of those folks are from the East End. Some may have ended up here — it’s not that uncommon. And I see this quite regularly, that somebody from somewhere else can find their way to a local community. They feel very comfortable in that community. They even have some support systems in that community. And now, suddenly, they are part of that community.

So you may have somebody, say, from out of state, or from off-island, they take the Long Island Rail Road, and now they’ve just claimed Hampton Bays as their home.

Q: But that stresses the local services as well, I’m guessing, right?

Yes. Yes. The challenges that it brings is that it does stretch the services quite a bit. And that, oftentimes, a lot of these folks may not be aware of the services that are available to them.

So we do routinely do outreach, where myself or my staff may be in a local town. And if we do take a ride out to Southampton Village, we might ride around to the library, emergency room, and the train station, some of the other places, just to see if we can identify folks. We do that pretty regularly.

We also do respond very often to calls for assistance, whether it is a concerned community member, or law enforcement, a church leader, somebody from a local business.

… But, yeah, a lot of folks tend to think that there’s not a big problem with homelessness on the East End. And the reality of it all is that there certainly is.

I also remind folks as well, so many of my folks may not present like what you envision a homeless person to be. Not everyone is pushing a cart, completely disheveled. I take my guests for showers twice a week. In the summertime. So twice a week, at least twice a week, they have access to showers. So they’re clean. They have access to clean clothes, socks, and I have a big donation room.

And the other thing I remind folks quite often is that a lot of people are very generous — say they do a coat drive for Maureen’s Haven. And they happen to have donated a coat, a North Face coat that’s two years old, that’s in excellent condition. It’s a $200 coat. That person is walking around with a $200 North Face coat. They probably have a new pair of boots, because I do have a couple of my congregations, and some of my supporters will say, here’s $1,000, go buy boots for them.

… But I tell folks all the time, go in a shopping center at 2 in the morning. Who’s actually parked in the beach parking lot at 11 at night or 2 in the morning? You would be amazed if you go to one of your local towns and you happen to go into one of the shopping centers, or behind some of the buildings. And, oh, there really is a mattress behind a dumpster. It’s very common. Once you know what to look for and you get to see the signs, it is actually pretty prevalent.

Q: In Hampton Bays, there are some communities out along the railroad tracks and in the woods that have been here for years and years. I believe Lieutenant Sue Ralph with the Southampton Town Police started a project where they were helping with outreach, right?

Sure. So I actually work with a number of the local police departments very closely, whether it is some of the village police, Southampton Village or East Hampton Village, as well as some of the towns, East Hampton, Southampton, Riverhead, Southold. So we have a very good relationship with a lot of law enforcement.

Susan Ralph and I, we worked on a number of projects, for lack of better terms. There have been times that she’s called on me for advice and assistance to help coordinate efforts, there’s times I’ve reached out to her and help coordinate some efforts as well. So I do have a great relationship with the Town of Southampton Police Department.

Overall, the law enforcement out here is very understanding, and in many ways very compassionate of the homeless population. Which is a very fortunate thing for them, that they really don’t get a hard time and they really don’t get bothered as much as you would think, as you see on Facebook or on the news or whatever. They are very supportive.

And if anything, when they do call me, or we coordinate efforts, the goal really is to get this person the support that they need, and to get them the help and the services that they need. So I can’t really say enough good things about all the law enforcement. Westhampton Beach Village Police is another one I’ve worked very closely with on a couple of very challenging folks.

Q: Let’s talk about the winter, and the emergency shelter program. So you came on board in 2018, right?

Correct.

Q: And I believe one of the first things you did was bring back the East Hampton outreach program that had been sort of dormant for a while. Correct?

Correct.

Q: Tell me about where it stands now. How many different places do you have, starting November 1, to provide emergency shelters?

You’re right — when I came into the agency, there was a few things that I wanted to look at, and how do we make this agency, from a programmatic standpoint, stronger. And how do we continue to embrace the supporters and the community members that we really do rely on here on the East End?

So, one of the things I did almost immediately was to meet with the folks in East Hampton, all the different congregations out there, and certainly welcomed them back into the family, into the Maureen’s Haven’s family. And, again, they’re a fantastic community.

Pre-pandemic, we probably would have had about 20, 25 houses of worship acting as host sites. And that would have been on a rotating basis. Usually, the most one site would do would maybe be once a week, something like that. But it wasn’t much more than a once a week or, very rarely, a twice-a-week commitment.

And it was very heavily volunteer-driven, that we would provide the guests and then there would be 20 volunteers on site cooking the meals and greeting the guests and helping with showers and doing all that stuff. When the pandemic hit last year, we lost most of them. And, understandably.

… What we were very fortunate to do is, by the end of the 2020-21 winter season, we were able to bring on, I think it was a total of 14 or 15 sites that by the end of the season were back on.

A couple that may have come later on, in January and February, we picked up one or two new sites. But what had happened was we had had, rather than a different church or a different host site each night, we basically would go into a lot of our host sites and our houses of worship, and say, “Just give us the building — we’ll work around it, we will fill in those gaps.”

So several of my houses of worship really, really stepped up. St. Agnes, in Greenport, we would use that facility once a week. During the pandemic, we were using that facility four to five times a week.

Q: How about down here on the South Fork?

Southampton Presbyterian, another one. They really stepped up. Again, they would’ve been, like, a once a week or once every two weeks schedule. They were letting us use that building, I think it was two or three nights a week. Southampton Methodist, another one. They picked up additional nights and they stayed on board with us.

We did have Beach Methodist in Westhampton. As well as, once we started getting into the season, a lot of volunteers in that community, even though they weren’t still doing the host site, or the house of worship may not have been hosting, they were still over time helping us out. So, cooking the meals.

What ended up happening was, instead of having overnight volunteers to be our innkeepers, we ended up having to staff those. So that right off the bat was a tremendous expense to Maureen’s Haven. It was not in our line-item budget. We weren’t prepared to spend quite a bit of money on two overnight, three overnight staff — but it had to be done.

Q: Going into this November 1, what is the program?

I’m anticipating a bit of a hybrid. And what I mean by that is, I don’t know the exact number, but I think it’s 15 to maybe close to 20 host sites we’ll end up with this year. A lot of them are pretty confident they can provide things like volunteers on site and maybe some overnight staff.

But on the flip side of it, there’s going to be a side to it where we’re going to have to, again, let us use your building. And then my staff will provide the overnights and transportation to help coordinate the meal. Yeah. I want to say, by the time all is said and done, we’ll probably, hopefully, be close to maybe 15 to 20 sites this year.

Q: What’s COVID done to the services you provide? What type of precautions do you have to take?

Well, I have to say, from early, early, early on, we really did embrace the science of it all. And we really did embrace being cautious, sometimes overly cautious. So before the pandemic even really hit and everything really got shut down, we were doing temperatures, we were buying the hand sanitizer, we were washing hands. All those things before anybody had to — we quickly, again, went into masks, social distancing, all that.

With our shelter site, that was a problem, too. In the past, we would’ve been able to fit in 30, 35, 40 folks. Because of social distancing, that site that would have taken 35, they have only been able to take 20. So it was oftentimes last year that we would have had to run two simultaneous sites, because we couldn’t fit all 30, 35, 40 guests into one site.

… Once the availability of testing came in, we were on that from the minute. You were not allowed to use our winter shelter without a negative COVID test. So we were very, very aggressive with anybody coming in getting COVID tests, routine COVID tests. Again, the masks, the social distancing, all that.

… What we are doing now is, once we do get into shelter season, November 1, we start doing the overnights, again, we’re going to be strongly encouraging vaccinations. But for those who are vaccinated, and we’re looking at this right now to find the exact schedule, we may look to COVID test people who are vaccinated once a month or once every two weeks, whatever the state feels appropriate.

Q: I’m curious: What’s the vaccination rate among folks who don’t have a place to live right now on the East End? I would’ve thought the vaccination rate would be very low, but it sounds like your efforts may have gotten some folks vaccinated.

We did, we did. Again, some of the folks, a little hard to track, a little too hard to qualify. Our approximate numbers, as of, say, end of September, we’ve got approximately 100 guests and vulnerable individuals vaccinated.

… For the folks who are my regulars, the folks who are here every day, every other day, who are here for a prolonged amount of time, some of my chronic folks, we’re actually about a 71 percent vaccination rate.

Q: What are your funding sources for all of this? You talked about some of the unexpected expenses that came up because of the pandemic. Where do you get your funds?

Most of it does come from private supporters, donations, foundations, private grant writing. Approximately 14 percent of my operating budget this year comes from county and local governments, which at the end of the day is not a lot of money. And this would be local town community development block grants. Or we have a very small contract with Suffolk County.

The other 85 percent, it does come from fundraising, individual private grant writing, foundations, individual supporters, businesses, organizations, and so on.

The one challenge that I’m having this year is that earlier in the year we were not sure what we wanted to do for our annual fundraising events. When the summertime came around, we were very close to debating or very close to deciding whether or not to do an event, because everything was just starting to open up and then the delta variant came out and then all these other things that started to happen.

So we kind of said, well, let’s give it a little bit of a wait and see. And then once we got into August, September, we said, you know, it’s just too risky at this point, for us. I had made it my standpoint: Maureen’s Haven has made it 19 months with one confirmed, mild COVID case. And I’m doing everything in my power to minimize the risk to staff, guests, volunteers, community members.

So looking at the current situation now, we said, well, even if we were to put on a fall event and do a gala, what if that gets shut down? What if the state comes in and says, you can only do 50 percent capacity? What if delta variant comes in?

… So for us, we’re kind of taking a hit or two on our larger fundraising events. So that’s going to be a challenge to make up some of that.

Q: So, my next question is, how can people help? And it sounds like it’s as simple as financial support.

Number one. A lot of people are very generous, and they want to donate food and they want to donate clothing. And all that stuff is fantastic, and I will accept it. It is like the paper towels and the toilet paper — that stuff costs me money, Maureen’s Haven money. So when I get contributions like that, that’s very, very helpful. But at the end of the day, if I can’t put gas in the vans or pay the drivers to pick up those meals, then all of that doesn’t really serve its purpose.

So, something that, again, the overnights. That’s several hundred dollars a night that we’re not expecting, that we have to now provide. … So even the fact of having a driver, or two, year round, that is something that one, we really didn’t need, but it does come at a big expense. But without that driver, for example, we can’t get that person the services that they need.

… Fortunately, again, we do get a lot of support with the meals and stuff, but there’s plenty of times where somehow we didn’t get a meal and then, go buy 10 pizza pies. And again, that starts to add up very quickly.

So, yeah, financial support is by far one of our biggest needs.

Q: If the winter shelter program weren’t offered, what would these men and women do?

A lot of them would struggle. A lot of them would struggle. If you look at the undocumented community, for one, a lot of them truly have no place to go. So if it wasn’t for Maureen’s Haven, a lot of them would have nowhere to go.

In the summertime, or in the season, maybe they work for a farm, or maybe they work for a landscaper, they could stay in the garage, or there’s a couple of trailers in the back. That all stops.

And I’m actually starting to see that earlier this year. We start seeing a lot of my Hispanic population later in the winter, end of November into December. I’m starting to see a lot of them now, and they’re all telling me that there’s not a lot of work out here. We do work with a lot of people that are chronically homeless, and those that are really very reluctant to use services.

These are people who may have been in the system their entire life. These people may have been in and out of shelters their entire life, and emergency housing and transitional housing. So they may be very reluctant by their experiences to use that, to use those services. And that’s very common.

Q: I don’t mean this in a glib sense, I mean this legitimately: Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?

Train stations, behind shopping centers, woods. I have folks who will … As you know, on the South Shore, a lot of these roads sort of dead-end and they lead to the bay. And you usually park your car there, walk your dog, that kind of thing. A lot of folks, you’d be surprised, they show up at 11: “I can tuck in the reeds somewhere where it’s not too windy.”

Emergency rooms, libraries, train stations, I mentioned train stations.

… You know, some of them do have cars. You would be amazed how many people still live in their cars.

… Yeah, they’re out there.