A social worker sat down at an encampment in a wooded area on the West Side on a cold January morning, taking information from a homeless person to try to find him help.

“I don’t want to go to Haven for Hope,” the homeless man said, brooking no argument. “I’ve tried it and it’s not for me.”

That’s not an uncommon reaction among the chronic homeless to perhaps the most well-known shelter in San Antonio, a 22-acre campus that serves 1,700 people daily. Not everyone can accept the rules at Haven for Hope and others don’t like sleeping outdoors in the courtyard when it gets crowded.

That’s OK. Haven for Hope isn’t the only entity that offers help — there are more than 100 other organizations providing everything from transportation to food and a warm bed, even haircuts and tattoo removal — but a series of public forums has revealed a significant lack of coordination between those groups and the city officials and volunteers working with the homeless in the streets.

“Communication. That is something that is coming up quite often in the community input forums,” said Morjoriee White, the homeless administrator for the city’s Department of Human Services.

The forums are part of the city’s efforts to conduct an assessment of the current situation of the homeless living in San Antonio and gather ideas, in conjunction with the South Alamo Regional Alliance for the Homeless and Homebase, a San Francisco-based company hired by the city to develop a strategic plan to address homelessness. Initially, only three forums had been scheduled, but two more were added this week as interest and attendance has grown.

“You must see it,” Jeroen Ziljema , a member of the Dellview Area Neighborhood Association, said to White at a forum this week.

“There is a complete disconnect between you and the gentleman sitting over there and the lady sitting over there” Ziljema said, pointing at a pastor who provides homeless services and a woman who said she used to be homeless.

“I think that’s where this is going wrong,” the Dellview resident added. “You don’t work with them and they don’t work with you. They don’t know what you’re doing and it’s vice versa.”

The woman who was once homeless voiced the frustrations of not knowing where to go or who to turn to when you are suddenly out in the streets.

“I went to Haven for Hope. I went to the Salvation Army. It is not all that it is cracked up to be,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “I did contact the City of San Antonio. A lot of it you kinda have to do on your own. But not everybody has the know-how.”

Greg Goodrich, interim senior pastor for Church Under the Bridge — a church specifically created for the homeless community — said his volunteers want to provide more help, but it hasn’t been an easy process.

“We had to wait an entire year to partner with the city because our bookkeeping wasn’t to the city’s standards,” he said. “Simple things like that that kept us out of the picture last year.”

“In cooperation with the city, the churches are ready,” he said. “They have outreach ministries, evangelism ministries, that are just waiting to go out there and help find people.”

Patrick Wigmore, the deputy managing director of HomeBase, was at the Monday forum nodding along with what residents were saying.

“When it comes to the coordination piece, I completely agree,” Wigmore said. “We are seeing from the interviews, that there needs to be better coordination.”

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Wigmore, who has conducted fieldwork in San Antonio since November, talking with dozens of stakeholders and learning about homeless programs and visting shelters, has said he’s impressed with the resources San Antonio has to offer. But more coordination is needed, he said.

HomeBase won’t be presenting their plan until April, but it likely will note that San Antonio needs to take better advantage of its strengths, including the extensive involvement of its faith-based community and the high number of volunteers.

“Part of the plan we are trying to detail is ways we can create coordination and create a much more seamless process,” Wigmore said. “And not make it where it’s kind of thought of that Haven is the only option or entity in town that can solve homelessness.”

Resource Directory

One option that needs more publicity, officials acknowledge, is the San Antonio Community Resource Directory, a kind of map-based app that pinpoints services for San Antonio’s homeless and impoverished residents.

Where is the nearest food pantry? What can you go to take a shower? Who do you call if you want counseling for anger management? If your grandma needs a ride to a doctor’s appointment, but she can’t afford an Uber, is there a service for that?

“SACRD was created to answer questions like this,” said Bill Neely, treasurer of the organization that created the app.

The directory includes information about organizations, churches and individuals all over San Antonio and Bexar County who provide free human services for the homeless population and impoverished.

When you go to sacrd.org there are more than 150 services listed — shelters, counseling, transportation, foster care, tenants rights, ID recovery, pregnancy services, free meals, education, tattoo removal, resume development, pet supplies, laundry and more.

All a user has to do, Neely said, is click on the type of service needed, put in the current address or zip code and the closest places that offer the needed service pop up on the map — along with the address, distance, contact information and hours of operation.

“People can find something that is close to them and not a two-hour bus ride away,” Neely said. “Something that is in their neighborhood, that is somewhere they may be a able to form a relationship with the community.”

sara.cline@express-news.net