Roger is a Case Manager for The People Concern’s Skid Row C3 Outreach Team. During his nearly two years working for The People Concern, his entire outlook on life has changed, “it has brought out empathy and compassion in me that I didn’t think I had,” says Roger. “My previous career was completely different. I come from the construction business. I was in a world where I wasn’t finding happiness anymore. I wasn’t content with my life. I wasn’t happy with what I was doing and something just didn’t feel right.”
When homelessness hit his own community and the people he knew, Roger had to make a career switch. Once Roger came to work for The People Concern his life was completely changed. “I now feel fulfilled by the success that I have with program participants here. One of the most rewarding things is working with a program participant who has lost hope and showing them that they matter by helping them with the little things in life. A lot of our program participants have been dehumanized and stripped of having any worth in life. Once you get someone housed and you see the way they look at a bed, in fear, it really hits home how much suffering they have endured. Program participants teach us how to be better people. I definitely feel blessed to be in this position, I definitely feel lucky. This is something I wish I had been doing way before. It’s something I think I was born to do and I love doing it. I love changing lives and their lives changing me.”
The opening of the Mollie Lowery & Frank Rice Center (C3 Center), has allowed Roger to make an even bigger impact with the people he serves by proving them a safe space for respite and to access services. “We’ve had participants who didn’t even want to move from their tent show up at the C3 Center. A program participant came indoors for the first time in 20 or 30 years and that’s not an exaggeration. The C3 Center helps people assimilate and work toward the ultimate goal of finding a place for them to be inside. It offers them a place where they can get comfortable with being indoors, and have a little bit of structure in their lives.”