Shelter seeks helping hand for homeless

LYNN – Escalating worries about winter potentially taking a fatal toll on local homeless individuals are prompting the Lynn Shelter Association to turn to local businesses and Partners HealthCare for help.?All we want is a little action,” said former Mayor Thomas P. Costin Jr.Costin joined forces with Shelter Association street advocate Pat Byrne to reach out to Partners to finds ways to provide space for the shelter?s all-but-closed day program. Once a source of daytime counseling and other help that kept roughly 80 homeless individuals off local streets, the program now serves, at most, 25 people daily.The rest wander downtown streets or, said Byrne, spend the day in the North Shore Community College cafeteria, the public library and on the Lynn Commons. Many homeless spend nights in the Willow Street shelter but the facility closes at 8 a.m. and reopens at 4 p.m.?Winter is approaching and we will have homeless folks turned loose on the city at 8 a.m. with nowhere to go until 4 p.m. It was our hope we might form a partnership with Partners,” Byrne said.Partners community relations director Lori Long said she would convey that offer to Partners executives and told Lynn Area Chamber of Commerce government affairs members that Partners enjoys a “pretty strong” relationship with the Lynn Shelter Association and My Brother?s Table, a Lynn soup kitchen.She said Union Hospital temporarily houses homeless families who come to the hospital when they run out of shelter options. Costin said local community resistance to Partners? plans to revamp Union Hospital makes now a good time for the company to help the shelter.?Show you really mean business about taking care of the local neighborhood – really, the whole city,” Costin told Long during Wednesday?s meeting.The longtime local political figure and business leader said his alliance with Byrne and the Shelter Association is grounded in his experiences as a young mayor 58 years ago when the city had a “poor farm” on Boston Street.?The police picked up all the drunks, gave them new clothes and fed them for three days,” Costin recalled.The shelter day program provided activities and counseling, including job search help, for homeless individuals during the hours the shelter was closed – until April when Byrne said the association lost $178,000 in state and federal money.Shelter workers organized a makeshift program in the shelter for six hours a day but Byrne stressed that arrangement helps barely 30 percent of the former day program attendees. He said efforts to find additional space in the association?s Willow Street building have been frustrated by plans to open a clinic in the building.Byrne said he is aware of “antisocial behavior,” but not any reports of crimes committed by homeless individuals formerly involved in the day program. But he cautioned that many homeless individuals in Lynn suffer from mental health problems much more complicated than the substance-abuse problems that plagued poor farm residents in the 1950s.?It?s a much more formidable group of clients,” he said.