Dr. Tyler Taylor, left, and Dena Moscola were the guest speakers at the November League of Women Voters Lunch with a Leader. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com

BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

The League of Women Voters of Los Alamos recently heard in depth accounts of the activities of the Espanola Pathways Shelter from director Dena Moscola, and the Interfaith Coalition on Homelessness coordinator Dr. Tyler Taylor, during the monthly LWV Lunch with a Leader event.

INTERFAITH COALITION ON HOMELESSNESS

Dr. Taylor started by noting that the bigger picture for the Coalition is that members really had to evolve a lot in their understanding of all the complexities in terms of what the homeless really need.

“Homeless is a whole lot to understand. About midpoint in this process for us, we learned that the Presbyterian Hospital in Espanola is opening a huge clinic to greatly expand treatment for addiction disorders in the Espanola area and it is going to be so big that it’s going to serve all the surrounding counties. Their capacity to treat patients is 1,900 a year and they are not even the only ones. There are four other entities in Espanola that are also doing this,just on a smaller scale,” he said.

The capacity for addiction treatment is expected to be way higher then the past, Taylor said.

“When we learned about that – we saw that there is a really bright light at the end of the tunnel that we can hold onto. We also learned that there are two counties, two pueblos and the City of Espanola involved. Think of the challenges if Los Alamos County had five municipalities that all had to work together. And you’ve got ethnic mixes and you’ve got all the other historical issues. It was just our deepening understanding of why things as they are,” Taylor said. “Then coming from my medical background, it has also been very important to just keep remembering that addictions are a true brain-hijacking disorder once somebody has gone down that path, whatever the reasons are, there’s a whole lot of reasons – their brain has been hijacked and it’s going to be extremely hard for them to undo that. It’s a true disorder where they didn’t realize where they were going to end up at, and that’s where they are. And so it just helps us stay compassionate, I think.”

He went to focus on the organizing principles of the Coalition noting that he thinks it is different to a lot of organizations in that it is keeping front and center the continuous learning that the Coalition felt is important.

“Even though there are all these complexities, I think it would have been real easy for us to say it’s too complicated, it’s too foreign, there’s nothing we can do, we don’t know what to do. How can we be impactful with what we know and not be going too far beyond what makes sense?,” Taylor asked. “This where our parters come in. We really wanted to have this from the start so we are working with partners who have been in the Valley for a long time and who know the issues far better than us, and together we are making a difference.”

“Over time, it has been helpful for me to come up with a little mantra – “We’re supporters, we’re advocates, and we’re catalysts,’: he continued. “Each of these roles is what we do.. We’ve been very clear from the beginning that we’re not going to be focused on fundraising, that if we were focused on fundraising, that would probably become our main focus, and while that might do a lot of good, it wouldn’tbbe as galvanizing or as valuable in the long haul for all of us who want to get a lot more involved in exactly the kinds of work that n eeds to be done in Espanola. We sometimes have to do some fundraising because some things we do cost money, but we’ve kept that on the back burner for the most part.”

Taylor said the Coalition is definitely an interfaith group so the focus is that the members share deep values around compassion, justice and wise action.

“It’s really heartwarming to see13 different congregations – people really working together – because we all know that we share these deep values. It’s also meant big bridges between congregations and people that never knew each other before. There’s the trickiness of learning that in this congregation, things can be done this way, but don’t try to do it that way in that congregation because they won’t relate to that at all. So I’ve had to do a lot of that circling,” he said.

Taylor noted that a big goal that he thinks is long overdue is building bridges between Los Alamos County and Espanola Valley – meaningful bridges that will last.

“In the process of doing that, there’s no real way to know where that might lead, but in a year, it might lead to aomething we never expected. In three years, it might lead to something else, so we’ve got to get the bridges built first. We’re now connecting with a dozen different entities in the Valley that we have great respect for what they’re doing, and they appreciate what we’re doing. It’s just been marvelous bridge-building success<” he said.

He asked his audience to imagine the kind of stuff he imagines every now and then that really energizes him.

“I want you to imagine two years from now, that this Coalition has added six more congregations – maybe three in Los Alamos County and three more in the Valley. We’re up to 19 congregations. Those congregations are knowing more and more about what we do. About 50 people from Los Alamos County have said, ‘I want to get personally involved, how can I help,’ and they’ve seen that there’s five or 10 things they can do to plug themselves in,” Taylor said,

One of the huge gaps that kept coming up when talking to organizations on the ground was the need a transportation system that will make it very easy for people to get to all of the healthcare services that they need, Dr. Taylor noted.

“People who are unhoused, people with disabilities, people who don’t have a car, people whose daughter has a car but it’s at work. There are so many people that need a better way to get to healthcare transportation, but especially if you’re going to lower homelessness rates, this is critical. Imagine that being in place,” Taylor said. “What we’ve envisioned is a healthcare transportation system that would run seven days a week all day long, making a loop through all the major parts of town and stopping at the front door of each of these healthcare facilities, including the pharmacies, including the counselors’ office, that would have a peer support on each bus, that would be there to be a resource, would be there to help the people with mental health conditions, be there to help the people that are going into withdrawal. The driver can just drive.”

“Imagine that being in place two years from now. I like to think how many people, how many families in Espanola Valley would be talking about the recovery stories that are now growing in numbers and what that’s doing to healing families, healing individuaols and getting individuals and getting people to where they can work again,” he said

The work being done is creating a new sense of hope that has been so hard to find, Taylor noted. The crime rate is going down. The overdose rate is going down.

‘The Espanola Valley has Four times the level of overdoses per capita that the nation has. There’s tremendous room for improvement. If we can lower that to twice the amount or the same as the national level. These are the kinds of things that new hope would be all about. Imagine a few journalists beginning to say, ‘Look at this place. This place was in real trouble. Look what they’ve accomplished in two years’. If this was showing up in news outlets around the state about this amazing community that’s turning itself around…” he said.

“What we’ve learned too is there’s all these great frontline organizatrions: McCurdy Ministries noq has a whole family resource center. The Pathways Shelter, Inside Out Recovery, the Mountain Center – there’s a bunch of them that have been doing good work for quite a while and getting them and the providers of these new improved medical trearments for addiction (MATs) getting the treaters, the providers, the frontline troops and finally, the City, on board, on the same page, all working together in a much more collaborative way is what I enjoy imagining,” Taylor said. “And finally, imagine the pueblos, which have trouble trusting these other municipalities because they have been through so much over so long, and they keep at arms length as much as they can. Imagine them starting to say, ‘Maybe now we can begin to get involved too in some of these ways that we are seeing our communiy improve.'”

He said that’s kind of the vision the Coalition operates under and that he thinks it’s so powerful that it’s the reason things have grown so fast for the Coalition.

“We’re now doing eight projects ant any given time. We welcome new people to participate. You don’t have to be part of one of our congregations. What I find is that sometimes people say they want to get involved and they ask what that might look like for them,” Taylor said, adding that he invites them to have coffee and to work out what will work for them. “A whole lot of people have just joined this team or that team, or they only show up for our quarterly meetings because that’s what works for them. But we find a niche for amybody that wants to get involved.”

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The full video is available here: Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIoA8plLE90