250 Calls

times we go out for outreach and it’s amazing that they remember us, they remember our names, they come to us,” she said of New Haveners she’s encountered consistently on the streets. “I remember an incident where a woman was in crisis but she remembered my face and she allowed me to get the help she needed. She was dead set against it, she wouldn’t go to a hospital or get any help, but she did when she saw me.”

Ta’LanneMonique Lawson-Dickerson, a community organizer who serves on the community advisory board that in-part oversees COMPASS’ work, said that beyond the statistics, “this is real and we’re making real change.”

“We’ve seen other states and other cities try this before and they failed. Not here, not in New Haven. We’re not gonna let this fail. This is here to stay, and this is just the beginning.”

Jack Tebes, another director of COMPASS and a professor of psychiatry at Yale, reported that COMPASS takes on average 13 minutes to respond to publicsafety answering point calls and spends 45 minutes on scene. Read the latest report on what COMPASS accomplished over the month of December here. He said that each area of the city has received support from COMPASS, “from Fair Haven to Westville to East Rock to Newhallville, from the Hill to City Point.” stories, that opportunity will be lost.”

In November 2021, Ralph Moore Jr., a Black journalist out of Baltimore, took another tack, coordinating a letter writing campaign that called on Pope Francis to expedite the canonization of the six American Black Catholics, with more than 3,000 letters dispatched to the Vatican.

“Mr. Moore proposed that instead of focusing on miracles, the church should recognize the hardships African American Catholics have endured over the years, being expected to sit in the back of the church or receiving communion only after white Catholics had done so,” Chigwedere said. “This persistence of faith is itself a sign of grace or a miracle.”

That might describe Sister Henriette Delille, among the six; she “was not permitted to wear a nun’s habit in public,” Chigwedere said, but founded a congregation that cared for the sick, helped the poor, and took in elderly women who needed more than visitation. Or Father Augustus Tolton who studied for the priesthood in Rome when no U.S. seminary would accept him.

There’s also Mother Mary Lange who, rejected by existing women’s orders, founded an African American religious congregation whose sisters taught the children of Baltimore slaves to read despite the fact that “it was illegal to teach Blacks to read in some parts of the U.S. at that time,” Chigwedere said.

Then there is Julia Greeley, the focus of Wednesday’s discussion. (Future lectures will shift the spotlight to the lives of Sister Thea Bowman and Father Augustus Tolton.)

Freed during the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Greeley served white families across the Far West, including in Denver, Colorado. At night, she pulled a little red wagon loaded with firewood, clothes, and food, leaving them on the porches of the poor. She did it all with one eye. Her former slaveholder was beating Greeley’s mother when his fist caught her other one.

“The whole notion of holiness is not trying to achieve some elevated spirituality,” said Lisa Bilodeau, an administrative assistant at Albertus, during Wednesday’s discussion. “Look at Julia Greeley. It’s about who we are as people in the best sense of that. It’s about living out our faith as best we can.”

“I was very touched by her working at night,” said Robert Bourgeois, professor of religion at Albertus. “She wasn’t seeking to be recognized. That’s a great example of holiness.”

Bilodeau agreed. “She didn’t call attention to what she was doing, and she also considered the dignity of these people, not making them feel embarrassed that they were in need.”

“No matter what happened, no matter how she was mistreated, she did not let that turn her against folks, or from thinking she didn’t have to be kind or concerned or forgiving,” said Sheila Jewell, another attendee at Wednesday’s event. “She rose above.”

“Everyone has their own way of being holy,” said Albertus alumnus Earl McCoy, Jr., the assistant director of career and professional development at the college.

Despite the towering barriers between the six and canonization, there may be cause for hope.

There has been discussion that, Chigwedere said, “Pope Francis knows more about American politics than we think he does.”

“After the murder of George Floyd, the first Black cardinal was appointed in the U.S. in November 2020,” she said. In Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor was killed by police, the pope appointed a Black archbishop. Likewise, in South Carolina.

“So those are indicators to me that Pope Francis knows what’s going on and is trying to help the church move with love and in ways that can support the entirety of the church,” she said.

For now, Chigwedere said, “it is my hope that learning about these men and women will be helpful examples to the world of how to be good and become the best version of ourselves.”

He said that the highest-volume of self-dispatched COMPASS calls, where COMPASS workers perform independent outreach work, is concentrated on the Green downtown, along Congress Avenue, and around Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, where dozens of individuals without housing camp out.

While COMPASS will remain in pilot phase until June, Carlos Sosa-Lombardo, the city’s director of community resilience, said that the city plans to expand the program come July. That will first of all mean extending the team’s hours from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week to 8 a.m. to midnight. As a longer-term goal, the city is considering making COMPASS a 24-hour service or creating multiple, overlapping teams to meet more demand during peak call hours.

Asked how the city is working to eliminate the intermediary issue of waitlists, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal said the city must prioritize building deeply affordable housing.

He pointed to nearly $5 million in federal funding that could go towards constructing affordable housing units. Read more about that yet to be expended grant here, which has sparked debate about whether such funding should go towards a small slate of apartments or more humane infrastructure to support a growing population of individuals navigating life on the streets.