Homelessness—It Lives In Your Neighborhood

A plain cinder-block building sits on an Alexandria street corner, across the street from a McDonald’s and beside an auto repair shop. The sign by the door says it’s Carpenter’s Shelter. But Executive Director Fran Becker has a punchier name for it.

She calls it the first chance and the last chance.
Carpenter’s Shelter is a 22-year-old center for Alexandria’s homeless. In 2009, Carpenter’s took in about 1,000 homeless people, the vast majority of them residents of Alexandria.

But Carpenter’s isn’t just somewhere to sleep. It’s a place where the homeless are coached, wheedled and helped not to be homeless any more.

Carpenter’s can house as many as 80 people on any one night. But it will not offer a bed for more than three nights to anyone who doesn’t agree to take financial literacy training, undergo health screening and look for a job.

“Our core values, they’ve never changed,” says Becker. “Our mission is to end and prevent homelessness.”

United Way funds have underwritten that effort from the beginning. Carpenter’s Shelter receives about 1.5 percent of its $1.6 million annual budget from United Way grants or workplace donors.

“We’re very conscious of any workplace giving we get,” says Becker, who has run Carpenter’s for the last 12 years. “We put it right to work in our programming.”

The population at Carpenter’s runs the gamut from men to women, from families to singles, from longtime Alexandrians to people who’ve just blown into town on the bus. On a recent Thursday afternoon, three men in work boots were eating lunch in the brightly lit Carpenter’s lunch room. But so were a mother and her infant daughter.

Residents can live at Carpenter’s indefinitely, as long as they “buy into what we demand,” says Becker.

“For the first time, we’re in their face,” she says. “We insist that they accept the idea that they’re responsible for their own life.” If they won’t look for a job or attend education classes, “we tell them, ‘Sorry, this isn’t the place for you.’ ”
Carpenter’s is rare among Washington-area homeless programs in the way it remains available to its alumni.

More than 400 former residents are enrolled in “after care.” That means that even after they’ve moved on and out, they can call Carpenter’s for a booster shot of confidence, counseling and (in some circumstances) cash.

“We continue to support the life skills that will mean they never come back here,” says Becker.
Like every community-based nonprofit, Carpenter’s could use much more United Way money. If it came, “we’d partner for more education or job training,” says Becker.

In the meantime, Carpenter’s logs more than $500,000 a year in volunteer labor and donations. The agency is about to finish a second consecutive year of deliberately spending beyond its budget. “The need is that great,” says Jasmin Witcher, director of development and strategic alliances.

“What we try to instill here is the responsibility,” says Becker. “It’s you. It’s no one else.”

And it’s a problem that ranges far beyond any one Alexandria neighborhood. The sign on the wall of the Carpenter’s executive offices makes the point quite crisply:
“Homelessness—It Lives In Your Neighborhood,” the sign says. Carpenter’s aims to change that—and keep it changed.