Emerging leaders are charting a new path toward helping those who are unhoused.
Coach Sue Semrau is retired as FSU Women’s Basketball head coach. Now she’s building a different kind of team. It includes various groups around the Big Bend working to understand and combat homelessness.
"I feel so honored to be able to spend some time in my life doing this,” Semrau says. She says she is looking at nonprofits, businesses, and churches for help.
“Brilliant professors at Florida State are coaching me as to how to operate in this space. They have a wonderful certificate program called Trauma-Informed Care, and we have donated that course to a number of different organizations for them to give to individuals that work there," Semrau says.
"You can't just walk up to somebody and know what to say. You've got to understand that there is trauma that's behind it, and I need to be informed of what that looks like.”
We hear more from Semrau on Speaking Of, plus Leon County Commissioner Brian Welch weighs in on local government efforts in this regard. He says homelessness is a public safety issue.
“It is flatly unsafe, both for those people who are experiencing homelessness and for the community that encounters them,” Welch says. “At the same time, we don't want people sleeping on benches and using the bathroom outside, and so we have an obligation as a government and as a community to do everything that we can to provide opportunities for those people to experience some level of normalcy.”
Welch wants local leaders to find solutions to get people into what he calls permanent supportive housing and off the streets, but he says there are those who are “chronically homeless” who don't want to receive services.
“It becomes a struggle for local governments between the extent to which you can compel people to take and receive services versus their civil liberties to continue to refuse them,” Welch says. “At what point do you have an obligation to protect people from themselves if they are addicted to drugs and alcohol? If they're experiencing mental illness crisis, what ability do we have to intervene and say we're not going to let you live like this?”
Local philanthropist Rick Kearney, founder of The Kearney Center for the unhoused, has joined his son Scott Kearney to develop an app called Casey Chat. It’s being beta-tested and will eventually enable people who are homeless to quickly connect with services.
Dr. Heather Flynn of the FSU College of Medicine has worked with Rick Kearney. She says the app could be revolutionary, especially for those who don’t seem to want to find permanent housing.
“When you factor in a strong history of trauma, and especially if that trauma and mental health starts at a young age,” Flynn says, “it shapes the way that the brain develops such that -- that part of your brain that can do decision making and planning, like the executive secretary of the brain, it never develops fully.”
Flynn says it takes “very strategic and targeted intervention” to help people in this category learn to act in their own best interest.
Hear much more of this conversation on Speaking Of. Click LISTEN above to hear the full segment.
