I always called Monday Murphy’s Law Day you know everything that could go wrong does and it was always on a Monday. My staff laughed at me because every day was hectic with things that could take hours to solve the system did not work as fast as us.
I called the other site to say Good Morning and always holding my breath because this location was in the ghetto and had constant traffic. Mostly because the woman who was my friend and partner in crime dedicated her life to her clients.Her clients called her MOM because if it were not for her they would be homeless. The vast list of clients were Mental Health so you never knew what was going to happen there. Meltdowns because they needed or did not take their meds, it could be problematic but nothing rattled her and if it did she would throw everyone out of the office until things settled down.
She knew that if she called me the answer would be yes , I had a great deal of faith and trust in her capability. In fact, new hires were sent to her office for a week in the crash course of Case management. My theory there was if they could last a week in Dutchtown they could handle the job! Once a week I would spend a few hours between meetings to visit Dutchtown and make sure all was well and it was.
Then back to my office and on to my work of making sure all of the grants were ok, data was being collected and believe me it was not an easy task, as we had 16 different funding streams all with different reporting forms. Needless to say ,it was no easy task but the team kept the data base current and my grant writing was very successful.
After a couple of hours running to make a food order.doing an intake, and stopping by our Homeless shelter to see if everyone was compliant to the rules. I was ready to call it a day but Murphy’s law hit. A homeless man came in at closing and one of my rules was never turning anyone away so I sent everyone home and he and I tackled his problems.
He was a homeless vet and the VA at that time had no local presence. So I called one of my contacts at the local shelter and begged them to take him in until I could get the VA to make a move and help him. So we got in my car and I dropped him off at the shelter and as I was getting ready to leave he leaned into my car and said “Thank you Maam” I smiled at him and said no problem all the while thinking that this man has defended my liberty and to society is invisable. I could not change the system but I could rattle it a little and somedays that was all I could do!