Multiple times a week — and always on Sundays — Kim Massey wakes up, typically dons a shirt that says “Jesus lived in a tent” and thinks of what to pack in her car that could help someone trying to survive life outside. She’ll often make sack lunches before heading to her basement and rifling through dozens of donations, from wipes to toilet paper to gloves to propane.
Before leaving her house, she reviews her texts for anything people have explicitly requested from her last outing. Then she and her husband drive their SUV around Bloomington-Normal, scouring the woods, abandoned buildings and any other place they know or suspect someone might be sleeping.
“If you ever see me, just like, randomly pull over somewhere, it's because I didn't know that person was there,” she said on a recent weekday in December while dropping off sandwiches and propane. She puts these locations on a list for next time.
Massey’s method is street outreach, a proven strategy for helping to end homelessness.
“They can't get to services because they don't have a bus pass or because it's too cold to walk,” said Massey, who formed the volunteer-based outreach program God’s Mission Ministry in March 2022. “So the only other way to check on them, essentially, is to go to them.”
But in Bloomington-Normal, Massey’s team of volunteers were the only ones using the strategy until late 2024. The city has largely resorted to breaking up encampments, as it did in October, which has proven to cause more harm than good. These sweeps scatter people from resources and, in that case, it abolished an organized operation with food, hygiene, and housing assistance services next door.
Homelessness has worsened
While Massey didn’t attribute any one factor to the rise in homelessness in Bloomington-Normal, the lack of affordable housing, which has been in short supply for years in the area, is widely accepted to be the leading cause of homelessness.
Massey has been trying to help her “street family” for years — but the situation has continued to worsen, she said.
“When we first started, nearly three years ago, we had about 30 to 40 clients, and we have about 120 right now,” she said in December.
Ending homelessness is a complicated task, but Home Sweet Home Ministries Community Outreach Director Stephen Tassio said Bloomington-Normal’s approach is inefficient.
“We're so far still behind where we want to be,” he said. “Right now, if you told [someone unhoused], ‘Hey, five years from now, you might have an apartment lined up.’ That's just not good enough.”
Home Sweet Home adopted the street outreach model in late 2024 because of the growing needs of the unhoused population. Tassio said the launch was years behind other municipalities, like in California, which started street medicine in the 1990s. Tassio said HSHM is working with other organizers on the West Coast to stay updated on effective outreach methods.
Meanwhile, more obstacles have risen even since HSHM’s effort launched.
At Bloomington-Normal’s largest encampment off of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in west Bloomington, property owners revoked drive-up access to all street outreach teams, so the groups now have to trek on foot through a manmade trail in the woods.
HSHM’s Street Outreach Specialist Lauren Wiggins called the move a “disservice” to people already withdrawn from resources.
Wiggins and her team have bought large-wheeled wagons to carry supplies through the woods, but mud and leaves clog their wheels forcing near-constant stops and prolonging reception of vital supplies. Wiggins and Tassio almost lost a wagon in November when it snagged on a branch, narrowly avoiding a fall into the lake. It may seem a small inconvenience, but one lost wagon would have prevented several people from having lunch that day.
Building relationships
The ripple effects of bureaucracy and opposition to homeless outreach have been noticeable, and coupled with unpredictable living circumstances — cold, hunger, loneliness — and the trauma associated with that environment, they can cause people to lash out. As some of the few seeking out unhoused people, street outreach professionals such as Wiggins with Home Sweet Home are often on the receiving end.
“I don’t take it personally,” Wiggins said. “I come back the next day just continuing the relationship as if that didn’t happen, because who knows? Maybe they regret what they said, and this is relationship building.”
Wiggins said connecting with people is her “number one goal” during street outreach because people need to trust the person trying to help.
After the first cold snap in November, one person told Wiggins, “Throw the food at me like a [expletive] dog,” but a few weeks later the same person said they were happy to see Wiggins and gave out hugs to several members of the outreach team, her included.
Debrief
Outreach coordinators say they try to learn from these confrontations. One day at an encampment, an unhoused community member told HSHM members she was angry and upset with the volunteers — she said they had been ignoring her.
Bobby Jovanović, a recent addition to HSHM’s street outreach team, said he felt defeated and angered to hear their work wasn’t helping as designed.
“We’re obviously not going to heal everything through sack lunches,” he told the outreach members, sitting in a circle at Home Sweet Home for a debrief the day of the confrontation. “Like, it’s a band-aid on an open wound.”
In this session, the group vowed to start being more deliberate in finding and getting in-demand supplies to people, instead of relying solely on what’s donated. One of the items HSHM’s team frequently gets asked about is propane, but grant regulations and liability concerns prevent them from providing it. The team contacted God’s Mission Ministry for more propane and continues to do so.
“When you hear things from her perspective about certain people or agencies not able to help that much, like there's a problem, right?” Jovanovic said.
These meetings also serve as venting sessions for street outreach teams. Every participant knows how much work needs to be done, including further engaging the community.
Sean Boston, a community health worker with Chestnut Health Systems who frequently provides health care connections with HSHM, said he’s been asked less and less about the unhoused in his personal and professional life since the encampment dispersed in October.
Another HSHM team member, Dennis Mierzwa, who was formerly unhoused, said he thinks people have an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude toward homelessness now that it’s not visible near downtown.
“Because then nobody has to worry about it,” he said. “It might have been an eyesore, or, you know, people may not have liked it, but that's real.”
Consistency
Massey, with God’s Mission Ministry, said outreach efforts must be consistent. Similar to Wiggins’ approach to relationship building, Massey said people need to show up for those unhoused.
“Coming back when you say you're going to come back, bringing the things you say you're going to bring, empathizing with them in the situation and saying, you know, ‘How can I help?’” Massey said.
When she comes across someone new, Massey said she takes time to sit and acknowledge them. During a November outing, Massey crossed paths with an older gentleman twice in one day. On the second pass, she said she joked about knowing where he was and made idle chit-chat. After a few minutes of light conversation, Massey said he opened up.
“He ended up… talking to me about what it is that he truly wants to do with his life and where he's from, and that he has kids, and that he had a wife,” she said. “I don't know if it was more so that I was empathizing with him, or the fact that that was the second time you see me, and I said, ‘I'll be back,’ and I really came back.”
As she goes tent to tent in encampments, she hollers “Knock, knock, God’s Mission Ministry. Anybody home?” and circles the area to ensure she hasn’t missed anyone. Wiggins does the same for Home Sweet Home. When a street friend comes out, they say “Good to see you,” and Massey said that’s “because it is.”
