How different would your life be if you didn’t have a car?
For many people, owning a car―like having a home―is one of those invisible necessities. Your life would be impossible without it, but you almost never think about it.
Every now and again something goes wrong with it: you get a flat tire, the battery goes dead, the engine overheats. The price to fix it hurts, but you pay it because you have to, and life goes back to normal.
For Reuben White, a 49-year-old Army veteran from Warner Robins, GA, buying a car is the next step to returning his life to normalcy.
Several years ago, Reuben found himself homeless. As it does for most people, the experience came upon him unexpectedly: a relative he relied on passed away, and suddenly he had no place to go. He ended up living out on the street for a while before he found a temporary place to stay at a homeless shelter.
“I’m all right now,” he says. “But things don’t go the way you think they’re going to go.”
Sharing Experiences, Building Understanding
It’s an experience Chad Cheshire, VOA Southeast’s Director of Homelessness and Prevention Services, knows all too well.
A combat veteran who served in the U.S. Army for eight and a half years and deployed to Iraq in 2004, Cheshire had a rough transition back to civilian life. After he left the military in 2011, he briefly lived out of his car and couch-surfed with friends who could put him up for the night while he spent a year looking for a job.
“When I got out of the Army, I wanted to move back to Kentucky, where I was from,” he said. “I went back home thinking I would have all these resources: my family was there, my friends were there. But being away for nine years from a small town, when I got back it was a shock, and I didn’t have a lot of those supports I thought I was going to have.”
Cheshire was unemployed for a year; he applied for hundreds of jobs, got interviews here and there, but for months nothing ever came through.
“It hurt my pride,” he said. “As a veteran, we’re all really prideful, and having to ask for help was very difficult. I see that in our population that we serve now. That’s one of the biggest barriers that they have to overcome is being willing to ask for help.”
Today, Cheshire’s experiences in the military and after inform the work he does with veterans throughout the Southeast. Many of the people on his team are veterans themselves or have day-to-day connections with service members through family and friends.
Even for veterans who decide to ask for help, many often don’t know about the benefits they can receive, or they don’t have access to the critical paperwork they need to get those benefits―especially in a crisis.
For instance, Reuben knew his mother had received VA benefits, but the Army had been her career. Reuben had served, but only for three years, so he didn’t realize that his honorable discharge was enough to qualify him.
“I knew about social security and benefits but I didn’t know I had access to them,” said Reuben. “You need to have knowledge. If you don’t have knowledge you can’t do anything.”
Finding A Job and a Place to Live
When Reuben was staying at the shelter, he wasn’t receiving any VA benefits, and he didn’t know where to start. Since then, a lot of things have happened for him really fast.
It was actually another veteran at the shelter who told him he could file for benefits. From there he went to the VA and was referred to one of VOA Southeast’s housing case managers, Rhondolyn Johnson. Through the Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program, she got him a place to live at an apartment complex in Macon.
“I met [the representative from VOA Southeast] over here at the library, and they got me in a place the same day,” said White. “It was that quick.”
VOA Southeast’s housing first approach prioritizes finding veterans a place to live as a necessary foundation for overall rehabilitation and reintegration. Programs like Eagle’s Landing, our transitional housing community in Mobile, AL, give homeless or at risk veterans a place where they can live independently for up to two years while they work with VOA Southeast case managers to get their lives back on track
“The main focus of the housing first approach,” says Cheshire, “is to get them out of their circumstances, get them secure, get them safe, and then work with them on everything else.”
Reuben grew up in Warner Robins, but he asked his SSVF case manager to help him get housing in Macon; that way he’d be centrally located with better access to public transportation while he was looking for a job.
Once he’d been housed, Reuben began working with Tiffany Ford, one of VOA Southeast’s Employment Services Case Managers. Working through the Homeless Veterans’ Reintegration Program (HVRP), Ford typically meets with veterans to conduct an initial assessment, in which she learns about their background, their abilities and disabilities, what jobs they want to pursue, etc.
For instance, Reuben experiences pain in his feet that make standing for extended periods of time very difficult―it’s part of the reason he wants to find a car, so he doesn’t have to walk half a mile to the grocery store in the morning.
When Tiffany Ford met with Reuben to do an assessment, she found he already had a job in mind he wanted. From there the process was clear. Ford was able to help him get some documents he needed, such as a high school transcript―not the easiest thing to get a hold of in the middle of the summer when you graduated 30 years ago.
Now he works as an individual support worker at a residential home for people with intellectual and mental disabilities.
Through the VA’s HVRP and SSVF programs, VOA Southeast case managers like Johnson and Ford are able to meet with unhoused and unemployed veterans to get them safe, secure, and back to work quickly.
Ford provides career counseling, mock interviews, assistance with applications, resume building, and support for veterans who need to track down old paperwork, etc. She’s currently working on 48 different cases, 15 of them active.
Once they’ve gotten a job, Ford follows up regularly to make sure everything is going well. One of the most persistent issues when she’s checking on newly re-employed veterans is making sure they’re able to get transportation to their job.
“Transportation is really always the big issue in this area,” she says. For instance, at the facility where Reuben works, employees get assigned shifts on a 24-hour-a-day schedule. If you’re working a night shift or over the weekend and you’re reliant on public transportation, you might have few or no options to get home after work, and Ubers are expensive and unreliable.
That’s why Reuben’s working on getting that car.
“I need something to ride in,” he says. “I’m tired of walking about a half a mile to Kroger and walking back with my groceries.”
Help Veterans Like Reuben Today
At VOA Southeast, we help veterans experiencing homelessness―and countless other people in need―return to a life of stability, safety, and community. That’s why your support is so critical. Our organization positively impacts the lives of over 56,000 people just like Reuben throughout Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
Make a one time donation or consider giving to us monthly to sustain our work!