POSTED: Friday, Mar. 05, 2010

Bellingham event to help homeless draws more this year

BELLINGHAM — More people asked for help this year during the second annual Belling-ham/Whatcom County Project Homeless Connect — a one-day event to bring free services to the needy.

An initial count of those served Thursday, March 4, showed that 467 households, which included 679 people, requested services, according to Greg Winter, director of the Whatcom Homeless Ser-vice Center and chairman of the Whatcom County Coalition for the Homeless.

Last year, 420 households, which included 575 people, asked for help during the inaugural effort.

“We had more families coming in than last year,” said Winter, among the organizers involved with the event, which brought together hundreds of volunteers and service providers to help those in need.

Reasons for the increase included greater outreach efforts on behalf of service organizations, and the recession.

“It’s tough to see real-world examples of how the economy is impacting us locally,” said Dan Hammill, program director at Whatcom Volunteer Center, one of the agencies that organized the effort.

Hammill said he talked to a family at the YWCA, where a free catered lunch was served, who told him they showed up to ask for help because their home was in foreclosure.

Project Homeless Connect is a public-private effort to provide services to the homeless as part of 10-year plans to end homelessness in communities. More than 200 annual events exist in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Dominican Republic.

In Bellingham, more than 30 agencies put on the event to offer various services in six locations downtown.

Their help allowed the homeless to obtain state ID cards, sit down for haircuts, and have a dentist fill their cavities. Assistance also included vision screening, women’s health care, information on veterans’ benefits, housing help, and veterinarian help for animals.

People picked up hygiene kits that included toothpaste and combs, received toys for their chil-dren, and sat down to a meal of grilled teriyaki chicken and macaroni salad dished up by a small army of volunteers, including Ferndale Mayor Gary Jensen.

Jensen led everyone at the YWCA in a rousing round of “happy birthday” after a 6-year-boy told him it was his special day. “That speaks to the spirit of what we do,” Hammill said.

Volunteers said the one-day effort was about acting as neighbors and making connections — with other volunteers and the people asking for help.

The most requested services Thursday were for dental care, haircuts and state ID cards.

“If we didn’t have this here today, it would be hard for people to access those services because they have to pay for it,” Hammill said of the ID cards. “We pay for it today.”

A slew of volunteers from Bellingham Beauty School showed up to cut hair, with one of them say-ing a good clip was a necessity.

“How are you supposed to get a job without the capability of looking presentable?” said Shawnna Vert, a Bellingham resident and volunteer haircutter.

Diamond Haywood, a Blaine resident who is studying to be a cosmetologist, said she volunteered “just to help people, to see a smile on their face.” Haywood was organizing people waiting for haircuts.

Phil Tatman, a Whatcom Community College student, was among the volunteers leading people from service to service. It was his first year helping out, and he said he’ll be back next year.

“It should be commonplace, and it isn’t,” he said of the event. “A lot of other communities could learn from this.”

Among those seeking help was Lynn Vander Woude, a 23-year-old Bellingham resident who has been couch surfing in two places. She had been living in a tent and is waiting for public housing.

This marked her first year at the event, which she attended to see whether she had moved up on the list for public housing. She had, and was at slot 616 on the waiting list. She also was there to get information about education.

“It’s really nice,” she said, while playing with her nephew, 3-year-old Bobby Fox.

The boy’s mother, Tina Vander Woude, was getting her haircut.

Tina lives in a motel with her son. Thursday marked her second year at the event.

“I love it. It’s the best thing, especially for my son. It’s a big help to me. My son is a little boy who needs all the help he can get because he has disabilities,” Tina, 25, said of her son’s developmental delays in speech and problem solving.