Homelessness forum encourages volunteering, political action

Mike Wurschmidt was driving through suburban Aurora, Colo., one day 22 years ago when he passed a fancy sports car with a hose blocking the exhaust pipe.

Noticing a man inside was trying to kill himself, Wurschmidt ran to the car, knocked and, when the man inside didn’t answer, smashed the window.

Wurschmidt pulled the man out of the car, held him and began crying for help. It was around 3 a.m. and during the age before cell phones.

“As I’m holding this man on my knees, I began weeping. I began asking this rhetorical question: ‘Why? What could be so bad to make this man want to kill himself?” Wurschmidt said.

But he already knew the answer to that — because earlier that day, Wurschmidt, recently homeless, nearly tried to kill himself.

Unable to hold a job as a businessman and to support his wife, daughter and the son they were expecting, Wurschmidt nearly drove off a cliff.

As he cradled the unconscious man, Wurschmidt “just said, ‘God, will you give me a chance?’ I knew as I was holding that man that I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live.”

With help from Christian charity organization World Vision, Wurschmidt and his family moved to Pittsburgh, where he attended seminary.

Today, Wurschmidt, the rector at Shepherd’s Heart parish Downtown, devotes his time to providing food, shelter and laundry services to some of Pittsburgh’s nearly 2,000 homeless people.

Wurschmidt was one of six people to speak at a forum for homelessness at Carnegie Mellon yesterday. Other speakers included U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Allegheny County; Sarah Kahn, director of field mobilization for the National Alliance to End Homelessness; Mike Lindsay, from the country Department of Human Services; Adrienne Walnoha, executive director of the Oakland-based Community Human Services Corporation; and Wurschmidt.

Wurschmidt encouraged the 40 to 50 people who attended the forum to work toward “overcoming the face of homelessness.” Many of the attendees worked in organizations dedicated to serving homeless people.

“It is not limited to that one person digging out of a trash can,” Wurschmidt said. “There are so many different faces.”

Walnoha said after the forum that while specific numbers aren’t available — many surveys tend to be city- or county-wide — Oakland has a significant homeless population, and its members don’t appear where most students might think.

She said the majority of Oakland’s homeless people don’t panhandle along Forbes or Fifth avenues. Instead, they hide away from the hustle and bustle, often spending the night behind businesses so they can use the heat from their vents to keep warm.

They tend to be single adults, she said, because homeless families tend to stay away from the hectic environment that is sometimes Oakland.

Lindsay said about 44 percent of adults using the county’s homeless services have either a college degree or credit toward one.

Preventing homelessness, Walnoha said, is becoming more difficult than before. The program had the title “A Pay Away: The Realities of Homelessness.”

“We aren’t even lucky enough for it to be one paycheck [away],” she said. “Six months of earned income is what we need to have saved at this moment to prevent homelessness.”

Estimates from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development show that the number of homeless people across the nation remained almost the same in 2008 as it was in 2007 — 664,414 on an average night in 2008, compared to an estimated 671,888 in 2007.

But that in and of itself is “alarming,” Kahn said.

In the years prior to the recession, levels of homelessness were dipping off because of an increase in federal funding for homelessness prevention programs, she said.

But aid organizations nationwide are struggling to keep up with a spike in homelessness since the recession, Kahn said, adding that she wanted attendees to encourage their legislators to pass initiatives aimed at offering more comprehensive care — such as mental health and substance abuse services — to homeless people and ending homelessness amongst veterans and children.

Yesterday’s forum is the kick-off event for a sleep-out for the homeless that will occur on the steps of the City-County Building, Downtown, Oct. 9-10.