One Man and a Truck

This past week Emory Bryan from News on 6 in Tulsa came out to Eden Village to interview me and film the concrete slab being poured at our Helmerich Community Center, the hub of our entire community. This was a big day for us, after over a year of planning, engineering, meetings with the city, and raising money to construct this.  The news story was great, as Emory always does a great job of accurately telling the story.

I was down where the concrete was being poured and noticed a man with a coat and tie on visiting with Emory as he was filming.  I thought that it may be a guy wanting to stroke us a big check or something, as we don’t have many coming out to our land in a coat and tie. Most are workers, with muddy pants and dirt under their fingernails.  I shook hands with him and he says, “Brad, nice to meet you, as we’ve visited over the phone.”

I could not remember the conversation, but as he told me his name was Don, and he’d been homeless, living in his truck for several years, it came back to me. This was not a possible big-time donor, but a homeless guy, one man and his truck. I remembered the conversation about 6 weeks ago, and that he parked his truck at various places, with all of his possessions in the back of his truck. He had a little window washing business on the side, so with that plus SSDI and Medicare, he would have the needed income to pay our $350/mo bills paid rent. 

Don has been working with case managers at Family & Children’s Services, and they helped him to complete our 16 page application with all the needed documents. His is one of the 60 or so applicants we’ve had so far, without really even asking for them yet. It appears that he meets all of the qualifications.  He has enough income to pay rent, he’s been chronically homeless (living in his truck since 2015, when a house fire took his home), and is willing and able to obey the law and be a good neighbor.  

Each story of homelessness is unique, but with the common threads of sudden loss of family, economic factors, mental health issues, substance abuse, spiritual issues, crime, and physical health. In Don’s case, his issues were 3 or 4 of them, but a lot of folks have them all. This is why homelessness is so difficult to “solve”.

One of his case workers at Family & Children’s stated that if Don was housed, his mental stability will improve greatly, and he’d then be able to focus on long term stability. BOOM!  That’s what we will be doing at Eden Village.  Don was so excited to come out to see Eden Village, he found a coat and tie to put on and made his best impression, like on a job interview. I was touched by Don. And it was no coincidence that he showed up, just him and his truck, while Emory and I were at the land shooting video. Don agreed to have Emory do a brief interview with him, which aired on the news story.  We can’t wait to possibly welcome Don as one of our first 9 new neighbors later this summer. And, I know who we will hire to clean our windows at the Helmerich Community Center when it’s done later this year!