At Weaver Library in East Providence Monday night, Wilma Smith recalled the first night she spent in a homeless shelter.

Smith was 18 years old, and she had just given up her child to the foster care system that had failed her. That night, she lay on a cot with just a pillow and a green army blanket, surrounded by her belongings and 80 to 100 other women.

Every morning, the shelter in Massachusetts closed and its occupants wandered the streets for the day. At 4pm, the women lined up to wait for cots. Spots were never guaranteed.

Smith, 35, now lives in Pawtucket with her partner of 14 years and her four children. She told her story at Monday night’s Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless Voices of Homelessness Speakers Bureau event, which 40 community members attended.

Bureau members, many of whom were at one time homeless, share their stories with church groups, schools, and communities around the state. Their mission is to educate the public about the issue, communicating the need for affordable permanent housing programs, rather than shelters. Smith said permanent housing could break the cycle of homelessness that many people experience.

Smith grew up between Rhode Island and Massachusetts in what she called a broken family. When she was 4, the state deemed her mother unfit to parent her and placed her in foster care. Smith gave birth to her first child when she was 15 and declined her acceptance to Duke University at 18, when she left the foster system, ill equipped to manage her finances or support herself.

 “No one taught me the skills I needed to survive as an adult,” Smith said.

 At 18, Smith lost custody of her daughter and spent four years wandering the streets of Massachusetts, wondering where she would shower and whether she would have a bed each night. For years, she was in and out of homelessness, despite earning a degree in Criminal Law at Bunker Hill Community College and taking classes at Rhode Island Community College. Her situation is more positive now: she made her way out of homelessness and lives in Pawtucket with her family. She said she hopes to start a permanent housing program for children aging out of foster care, like she was half a lifetime ago.

Apart from its relatively happy ending, Smith’s story is not unusual. In 2009, the National Coalition for the Homeless estimated that there were 15,482 homeless people in Massachusetts and 1,607 in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless found that the population in the state has increased in recent years, with growing unemployment. Eighteen percent of this population is chronically homeless.

For years, Carleton Freese, who also spoke Monday, was among the homeless in Rhode Island. Unlike Smith, Freese did not grow up into a hopeless situation, but fell into one a decade after graduating from the University of Rhode Island. In 2002, Freese was diagnosed with heart failure and put on a transplant list. His insurance company determined his condition pre-existing and dropped his coverage because he could no longer pay premiums.

Freese lost his apartment in 2005. He received Social Security checks by the end of the year, but because he had no permanent address, he could not open a bank account and cash them. He couch-surfed for months. His family helped him when they could. Eventually, he forged an address to obtain the money.

“There are lines you end up crossing pretty quickly in life when you’re in dire straits,” Freese said.

In 2006, Freese began living at a permanent residence of the House of Hope Community Development Corporation in Warwick, which offers transitional and permanent housing and support services for the homeless.

While waiting for a transplant, Freese was diagnosed with cancer and underwent radiation and surgery. In 2008, he received a heart transplant. He is currently in remission from cancer. He has lived on House of Hope property for four years and is on the Board of Directors for the organization.

Freese said his story is a classic example of someone slipping through Rhode Island’s safety net. And shelters, he said, are not an adequate solution.

“We need to introduce more economically effective ways to stop homelessness,” he said.

He cited House of Hope’s Harrington Hall in Cranston, which Smithfield state Sen. John Tassoni Jr. recently deemed unfit to serve the homeless population. Tassoni, Chair of the Senate Committee on Housing and Municipal Government, said the shelter was overcrowded and inhumane, Freese said.  

Providing a gymnasium full of cots, with no privacy and one bathroom for up to one hundred people, treats the immediate symptoms of homelessness, but does not address the root of the problem, Freese said. Permanent housing, offered by corporations like House of Hope, is more effective both economically and socially, he argued.

One way to acquire permanent housing is through the National Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, which helps low-income families and elderly and disabled people afford private housing. The National Coalition for the Homeless has recommended that two million vouchers be added to the program.

Permanent supportive housing not only provides low-income homes to the homeless, but it also gives them medical assistance, drug and alcohol treatment and other services that can stop the cycle of homelessness both he and Smith experienced, Freese said.

“Affordable housing isn’t enough,” he said. “(House of Hope) has a philosophy – supportive housing. You don’t take someone who’s homeless, put them in a shelter, give them food stamps and say, 'Bye bye, have fun, good luck.'”

Permanent housing allows the homeless to maintain their individual identities, Freese said.

“(People) need a place where they can go in and close their doors at the end of the day,” Freese said. “No one should ever be denied their humanity the way I felt I was throughout some parts of that process,” he added.

Programs that offer people permanent housing and support services pre-empt expensive emergency room visits and added costs of having people sleeping on the streets, he added.

On Monday, audience members said they could not put a face to the problem of homelessness in East Providence. Some said they knew there were homeless people in the city but they could not find them, because the homeless must go to Providence for shelter. 

There are no shelters in East Providence. The East Providence Senior Center ran one five or six years ago, but a representative said its facilities were not adequate. And a shelter run out of an old convent on Turner Avenue has also closed. Programs and shelters like Crossroads Rhode Island, operate out of Providence.

A retired city police officer in the audience said dealing with homelessness used to mean ushering the homeless to city borders and leaving them there.

“At that time, there was really no place to go. If someone was found, they were transported into Providence,” he said.

The population was visible in East Providence in 2009 at Camp Runamuck, a tent city of homeless people living under Washington Bridge. They were eventually ordered to move.

East Providence does have several apartments that serve as permanent and transitional housing for the city’s homeless and are run by the East Bay Coalition for the Homeless.

Audience members asked the panel what they could do to help the homeless community.

Seven members of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in East Providence attended the meeting.

“We came to find out how we can help,” said Reverend Jennifer Pedrick.

The church does not see many homeless, but Pedrick said she thinks the problem may just not be as visible in East Providence, since there are not as many services as there are in Providence.

“It’s hard for us to find out about how to serve (the community),” Pedrick said.

Smith and Freese asked the community to send letters to city officials. But they also asked residents to change the way they think about the problem.

“We need to stop looking at the person as a homeless individual and start looking at the circumstances that got them there,” Smith said.