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4 | ST. VINCENT'S LEARN: PAUL LIBERATORE INTERVIEWS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR CHRISTINE PAQUETTE Q The Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) helps the neediest people first, the chronically homeless. But wasn't that always the case? A In the past people said, "It feels almost impossible to help the people hardest to serve, so we'll do our best to help everyone else." But that was backwards thinking. So, we actually turned that system upside down. Now the people we're going to help first are the people who are the hardest to serve. And, by doing that, MASH has permanently housed more than 329 people that everyone said were too tough to help. We've housed them in Marin and they're staying housed at a 94% success rate, higher than the nationwide average of 85%. Q How often does the collaborative meet and who's involved? Is there good news in Marin about veteran and chronic homelessness? A We meet every week for at least two hours. More than 12 agencies get together, including Marin County Health and Human Services. We also have a whole team focused on housing veterans. St. Vincent's received a Kaiser grant which gives us a full-time veteran's outreach person out there every day. As a community, we will soon end veteran homelessness in Marin. Q During the lock down, were you able to serve meals at your free Dining Room? A When the governor said to go home, I worried about what that meant for St. Vincent's and the people who rely on us. But by the next day we were serving takeout meals and the county was pitching in to help us with emergency food until we were able to supply hot to-go meals ourselves. Q The pandemic was hard on everyone, particularly people experiencing homelessness. But were there some silver linings that actually helped your effort to house people? I'm thinking of the state's Project Homekey, which turns motels into shelter for homeless people. A This is the first time we've been able to put groups of people experiencing homelessness into motel programs. There have been a lot of silver linings in the For the people struggling with homelessness for the longest time, the system wasn't working. As the executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marin, Paquette knew someone had to shake it up, to turn it on its head. Not only to help get chronically homeless people off the streets with a roof over their heads — but to give them dignity with a decent place to live. Like many of you, I looked at homelessness as this headache- inducing problem that seemed impossible to solve. In the Bay Area, for example, it's just gotten worse and worse, increasing by double digits in most places in 2019. But not in Marin. Incredibly, the number of chronically homeless people on the streets here has gone down by 28%. Is this an anomaly, or have Paquette and the county's Marin Alliance to Solve Homelessness (MASH) found a cure for chronic homelessness that could be a model for the rest of the country? The tide began to turn in 2016 when Paquette and her colleague Howard Schwartz helped launch the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT), a collaborative effort that brought together various nonprofit organizations, law enforcement and government agencies and got them all working together together to end chronic home- lessness. As she says, "one person at a time," beginning with the most hard-core cases. "Now the most desperate people on our streets are getting the help they need," says Andrew Hening, director of homeless planning for the City of San Rafael, praising St. Vincent's as an "innovative and dedicated partner." At 55, Paquette is no newcomer to Marin or the homeless issue. She grew up in Tiburon, graduated from Redwood High in 1984 and went on to get a bachelor's degree in English from UC Berkeley. In college, living near Peoples' Park, she saw homelessness close up. Later, balancing the demands of being a mother of two children with a career in public service, Paquette first raised money to support the work of St. Vincent's and became executive director in 2013. For her work to end home- lessness, she was honored in 2020 with a Heart of Marin Excellence in Leadership Award by the Center for Volunteer & Nonprofit Leadership in San Rafael. IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG FOR CHRISTINE PAQUETTE TO SEE THAT THE WAY MARIN COUNTY WAS TRYING TO COME TO GRIPS WITH ITS HOMELESS CRISIS WAS ALL WRONG.

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