News Photo by Julie Riddle From left, Ashley Gagnon, Victoria Purvis, Ashley Smart, Simone Latuszek, and Jaime Gabriel, members of the Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency Homeless Response Team, get silly with donated supplies at the agency’s Kindness Closet on Thursday.

ALPENA — Fighting homelessness in Northeast Michigan takes determination, empathy, and colleagues as close as family, say advocates recently tapped for a statewide homelessness award.

The Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness recently selected the Homeless Response Team from the Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency, centered in Alpena, as Homeless Awareness Champions for 2022.

It’s the first time the organization has included an awareness champions award in its annual recognition of people who fight on behalf of people experiencing homelessness.

The coalition’s awards usually go to individuals, but, in the case of NEMCSA’s Homeless Response Team, recognition of the whole team was a natural decision, said Victoria Purvis, director of homeless and prevention community programs division for NEMCSA.

The team met around a table at the Alpena NEMCSA office on Thursday.

Over bagged lunches, they talked about the people they help every day from their stations across northern Michigan.

Eagerly they updated their colleagues on a man who’d found a job, a woman they’d helped into a home, another who called to thank one of the team for finding her a home two years ago.

“Aaaaw,” the team said in unison.

One of the smallest teams handling the largest community action agency in the state, the team has to function like family, Purvis said.

Messages and calls fly between workers all day long, keeping tabs on each other’s efforts from Alpena to Cheboygan to Grayling to Tawas City.

They celebrate each other’s birthdays and make a fuss over holidays and have each other’s backs, providing the support it takes to do a job that exacts a cruel emotional toll, the group said.

The people they help come up against sometimes impossible obstacles, they explained.

They can’t get a job because, if they do, they’ll lose their benefits but won’t earn enough to make ends meet.

They have jobs and enough money to pay rent, but they can’t find a place that’s vacant.

They can’t find a rental that accepts pets, and their dog is their lifeline.

Sometimes, all Homeless Response Team members can do is sit with those struggling people and cry, listening to their pain without being able to fix it, the team said, talking around the table.

Their work is an ongoing fight to find landlords willing to consider joining a voucher program that helps house people without homes.

It’s walking alongside people as they step into a new home, connecting them to the supplies they need to restart and teaching them how to cook, how to manage their money, how to keep homelessness from happening to them again.

Their job, the team said, is becoming the support system many people experiencing homelessness don’t have.

For that, to be strong enough for that task, they have to be a family themselves, the team said.

With weather warming up, the team will soon encounter more people without homes, they know.

“Simone’s about to get real busy,” Purvis said of Street Outreach Coordinator Simone Latuszek, the team’s go-to person for connecting one-on-one with people living in garages, campers, and other places not fit for human habitation.

New to the team, Latuszek said she’s never seen such communication and unity among a community action agency team.

Some team members scramble to get people past the barriers that keep them out of homes. Others try to track down places those people could live, while still others teach budgeting to high schoolers, wrangle government dollars, or make sure the community knows that homelessness in Northeast Michigan doesn’t look like homelessness in a big city.

An old effort with a new name, a Kindness Closet housed in the Alpena Public Schools building holds community-donated items team members have for years had to store in their garages and closets.

Soon, that closet will be full, and the community that has supported NEMCSA’s efforts generously for years will keep giving more, Purvis said.

In the meantime, the team will keep trying to find homes, keep providing a shoulder to cry on and an arm to lean on, and keep having each other’s backs, just like family.

The work is tough, Purvis said.

“But they want to be here. They like what they do. They enjoy it. I think,” she added, to the laughter of the group. “We’re just one unit. Solid.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693 or jriddle@thealpenanews.com. Follow her on Twitter @jriddleX.