Vacaville City Councilman Nolan Sullivan will be leading Vacaville employees on a trip to West Sacramento Thursday to view the city’s Downtown Streets program, which aims to provide job skills to homeless individuals through beautification projects.
Downtown Streets Team is a San Jose-based nonprofit that operates in several Northern California communities and provides a structured work program for the homeless. As part of the program, homeless individuals come in five days a week and can receive coaching, mentoring and even an opportunity to go out and clean up litter, remove graffiti, do landscaping and perform other beautification tasks. As part of their service, the participants receive a gift card for their work.
Sullivan, who sits on Vacaville’s Homeless Roundtable, became familiar with Downtown Streets Team through his day job as a service centers branch director for Yolo County’s Health & Human Services Agency, which has partnered with the city of West Sacramento to host the program. Having seen the program in action, Sullivan figured Vacaville should see how it operates and adopt it in this city.
“I kind of connected the dots between my day job and City Council in Vacaville,” he said.
Sullivan said the idea behind the Downtown Streets Team is to help homeless individuals transition back into employment, which can often be a struggle for many of them.
“A lot of folks talk about homelessness and say, ‘Oh, just give them a job. They’ll do fine’ or ‘All they need to do is put in a little elbow grease and get back to work,'” he said. “For a lot of people that are chronically homeless, especially for years and years and years at a time, are really dealing with some mental health or substance abuse or trauma, it’s really hard to jump back into a job. This program actually allows them to phase into that. They can dive into the employment pool slowly and really figure out how to get back to a place where they can work a 9-to-5 job.”
Members of the program are easily recognized in the communities by their yellow T-shirts, and the individuals themselves are called “Yellow Shirts.” Once they begin making improvements at their tasks and start becoming more self-reliant, they move on to wearing green shirts where they gain the title of volunteer supervisors.
“Typically, those Green Shirts get hired at a local job almost immediately,” Sullivan said. “They’re pretty much ready, they’re back on track, they’re really only missing the final pieces.”
The model is one that Sullivan hopes to bring to Vacaville.
“I think it would be an excellent program for us to clean up our downtown and help with some of the creeks that are just completely trashed with waste from homeless encampments,” he said. “It would be a pretty big asset to the Police Department and some of the homeless service folks that are working with individuals.”
The day will begin with field trip attendees shadowing the Downtown Streets work crew in West Sacramento. After a 30-minute break, they will meet West Sac’s homeless services coordinator and other navigators at the Yolo County Social Service Department building. Finally, they will be able to attend a Downtown Streets Team meeting to ask questions of program coordinators.
Sullivan said that 18 individuals had signed up, including representatives of the Police Department, Housing Authority and city manager’s office. He also sent invitations to his fellow council members but has not heard back from them. Nonetheless, he will be reporting back on the trip at the next council meeting.
“My goal ultimately is to get this program launched in Vacaville,” he said. “I hopefully will have some sort of positive report to bring back to council after that. I already have a program budget and some of the information from Downtown Streets on what it would take to launch a program at home.”
Sullivan said he would be talking to the Homeless Roundtable to see if they can get enough community support to get a similar program going.
Ultimately, Sullivan hopes that the trip will dispel the misconception that getting a job is easy for homeless individuals.
“It’s a really difficult transition for a lot of folks,” he said. “There’s all kinds of barriers and trauma and things that get in the way of that, and you need creative programs like this that allow folks to gradually get back into the workforce. I’ve just seen this program be really, really effective in West Sacramento.”
Sullivan said that no matter what side of the political spectrum people are on, they can agree about helping homeless people find employment.
“I think this could be a great tool in our toolkit to address our local homeless issues,” he said.
More information on Downtown Streets Team can be found at streetsteam.org/index.
