photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

One of the agencies serving the homeless population in Fayetteville, Arkansas, 7hills Homeless Center, is pictured Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023. The center is located right next door to Fayetteville's Pallet community, New Beginnings NWA.

At one point in the thin tree line along the road leading up to New Beginnings NWA, the Pallet shelter community in Fayetteville, Arkansas, there’s a gap large enough to pass through comfortably. Comers and goers are a frequent sight in both directions, mainly the 20 residents staying there.

That’s because 7hills Homeless Center is waiting for them just a short walk away on the other side. A day center for people experiencing homelessness, the center has served the northwest Arkansas area for more than two decades — and it’s a crucial resource for not just the 20 residents at New Beginnings NWA but for hundreds in the region.

The website for 7hills Homeless Center says that on any given night in northwest Arkansas, there are approximately 900 individuals experiencing homelessness, whether that be couch surfing or camping outdoors. The region’s Point-in-Time count — a federally mandated survey to determine the number of people experiencing homelessness on a given night — was about half that number, 436, when it was taken Jan. 26. Those counts happen here in Lawrence, too, and they’re usually facilitated through local agencies that work more directly with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The day center, along with New Beginnings NWA, is one of the agencies in Fayetteville that the Journal-World toured on a recent visit to Arkansas in early November, in an effort to learn how it works together with Fayetteville’s Pallet community. It, too, demonstrates how the resources for people experiencing homelessness in Lawrence and Fayetteville have plenty in common — and also plenty they can learn from one another.

A change of mindset

Though CEO Becci Sisson is originally from the northwest Arkansas area, she only just returned to Arkansas to lead 7hills in January following an eight-year stint as the director of development at the Rescue Mission of Roanoke, Virginia. That facility was much different than 7hills, she told the Journal-World earlier this month; it’s open around the clock 365 days of the year and provides an array of wrap-around services, whereas 7hills is only open seven hours a day on weekdays.

That perspective was especially helpful when Sisson came back to northwest Arkansas. She said she saw what struggles people experiencing homelessness in the area were dealing with and quickly realized 7hills probably needed to make some changes.

“Right now what we do at the day center is ‘cute,’ but it’s not critical,” Sisson said. “We’re here from 8:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m., you can get case management, you can get a shower, you can get your clothes washed, you can get new clothes, you can get some food. But if you have a job, well, too bad. You get off the bus at 4 p.m. — we’re not here. Weekends? Sorry, we’re closed. And I love our staff and I love our board, but homelessness doesn’t take a holiday, and it doesn’t get a weekend. Trying to really make that shift and help community leaders see it, that we need to do something … we’re just a day center, we’re just that.”

But what should those changes look like? Sisson said in her view, agencies like 7hills have a duty to work collaboratively with other partners to develop an “A to Z” system that currently doesn’t exist in the region. New Beginnings NWA is a portion of that — three of its current residents ended up there after receiving services at 7hills, Sisson said, and both agencies are working together to house people.

Achieving that goal could require developing a more formal diversion system to help people at risk of homelessness connect directly with the right resources to avoid becoming homeless in the first place. But Sisson said it also will take adjusting the idea of what “housing first” means, to accept that not all housing is permanent.

What’s clear, Sisson said, is that there needs to be “something in the middle.” She said the lack of such options is one of the reasons why Fayetteville has dealt with similar outdoor camping issues as Lawrence — the problem emerged because of a lack of response.

What services are on offer?

Like New Beginnings NWA, 7hills is just one of a number of resources serving Fayetteville’s homeless population. But residents of the Pallet community like Mark Webster, who spoke with the Journal-World about his experience living there, told the Journal-World they rely just as much on the services at 7hills as the case management services at New Beginnings NWA.

For instance, 7hills keeps files — nearly 400 of them — for each client’s mail, since they’re able to use the day center as a mailing address. The agency also keeps a stock of shower and hygiene items and a full clothing and shoe closet.

For all the services that are only accessible at 7hills, there are others that overlap with what’s available next door. At both 7hills and New Beginnings NWA, people can do their laundry and work with a case manager on assistance with getting identification documents and other “triage services.” Both facilities also serve meals, though the day center fills a need not fulfilled next door by serving lunch.

There’s also overlap in the presence of regular volunteers who are students at the University of Arkansas. When the Journal-World toured the day center, student athletes from the university were helping to serve lunch; medical students also work at the site under the guidance of a nursing instructor two days a week.

Guests at 7hills start by checking in at one of the two small buildings on site, which is also where meals are served. The check-in process contributes to the area’s data management and collection process for the Homeless Management Information System, a platform used to log that data with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The other services Sisson described, including laundry and shower facilities and the agency’s case managers, are housed in the other building.

Bridging the gaps

Along with its day center, 7hills also operates Walker Family Residential Community, a transitional and permanent supportive housing community located 2 miles away. Currently, the community includes eight permanent supportive housing units, three units for women and families and a transitional housing dormitory with 16 boarding-house style units with shared living, dining and bathroom facilities.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The dormitory building at 7hills Homeless Center’s Walker Family Residential Community is pictured Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023.

But Sisson highlighted some planned changes for the new year that will involve converting the dormitory into an immediate shelter resource with four beds per room, open year-round. It’s part of an effort on her part to more critically examine the “housing first” approach, itself a strategy that the City of Lawrence and Douglas County have expressed a desire to emphasize. The strategy, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, which can serve as a platform from which they can pursue their personal goals and improve the quality of their lives.

“Having immediate shelter is still housing someone, it’s just not permanent housing,” Sisson said. “And I think that it’s taken that shift for people to realize that, for (our) city council to realize that, for other agencies. Having an immediate shelter doesn’t mean we’re not going to house (people).”

Sisson said her time on the East Coast also caused her to examine the difference between “immediate shelter” — a place for someone to go who needs something right away — and “emergency shelter,” places for people to go during extreme weather events or when they’re experiencing a crisis.

In a sense, the converted dormitory would provide a similar service as the limited number of slots available via the Lawrence Community Shelter’s continuous stay program, which allows 25 guests to stay at the shelter 24/7 and receive case management and day services. That would in turn fill a gap in Fayetteville that Lawrence is already addressing — a lack of night-by-night beds. There are about 100 of them on offer at the Lawrence Community Shelter, but guests in that program must leave the shelter from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day. Fayetteville, meanwhile, is lacking on that front, outside of an existing Salvation Army shelter.

“All of the sudden, that ‘cute (but not) critical’ becomes ‘critical to success,’ critical to competence,” Sisson said. “Because all of the sudden, people have had a good night’s sleep. They’re able to meet with a case manager, and it’s not ‘I need to survive today and get through until I go back to sleep. I know I have a place to stay tonight, so I’m going to go out and maybe I’ll go to my mental health appointment, meet with legal aid, do all of these other things.’ Hopefully, we can start getting people on the flip side of that survival mode and then get them housed.”

Sisson calls 7hills a “high expectation, low barrier” resource, especially the transitional housing at Walker Family Residential Community, in that staff will do everything it can to make it as easy as possible for someone to stay. But at the same time, she said having expectations — and by extension, letting individuals know that someone believes in them enough to successfully find permanent housing — is just as important.

“It’s not punitive, and I think it’s easy to do that,” Sisson said. “And I think that whenever we get regulations down from cities … people feel the pressure, people who are service providers feel the pressure, and it will stay punitive for people who are staying in the shelter.”

How should Lawrence approach homelessness?

Sisson said her advice for how other communities should approach homelessness is simple — you have to be people-focused. Though homelessness might be an uncomfortable issue, she said the people doing the work to address it, as well as the community at large, first have to understand why people experience homelessness to begin with.

Sisson guessed without prior knowledge that Lawrence was probably installing its Pallet Shelter Village in a residential area, and that’s because she sees that sort of location as an opportunity to generate more of that understanding from neighbors — that homelessness can happen to any and all of us.

“I spend probably 50% of my time educating people on (how) the person that’s here (at the day center), this is their teacher from high school,” Sisson said. “This is someone that maybe you grew up next door to. It’s one situation that happened that caused them to experience this. And I think when everyone else understands, it makes those opportunities to help and to grow and expand and be better.”

Sisson also shared a piece of advice that isn’t exactly unfamiliar for people in Lawrence — that there isn’t just one answer to addressing homelessness. That’s a trap that northwest Arkansas fell into, she said; for a while, the solution for many was to simply send people over to 7hills without regard for what they might do when the facility wasn’t open.

Finding those answers must happen as a result of a community “moving together,” Sisson said, and shifting the narrative.

“People don’t want to be homeless,” Sisson said. “… If we go out today and ask 10 people at the day center if they wanted to be homeless, the choice is probably not. We’ve got to help people.”

— This story is part of a series focused on the nearest city to Lawrence with an operating community of Pallet cabins — New Beginnings NWA in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The last story in this series will focus on the Fayetteville municipal government’s housing and homelessness efforts, how they more broadly supplement the work taking place to combat homelessness in Fayetteville, and how they compare to the City of Lawrence’s city-led homeless initiatives.