SoDo Residents Address a Panel of Homeless Service Providers & Select Commissioners

This meeting was originally created to serve as our own Stop SoDo Shelter town hall, but luckily the City withdrew their plan to convert the Orange County Work Release building into an Open Access Low-Barrier homeless shelter 4 days before this event, so we pivoted the purpose of this meeting to solutions our community would support. Each City Commitioner was invited to attend, yet only District 2 Commissioner Tony Ortiz choose to attend. Orange County Commissioner Myra Uribe showed up like she has for each of our scheduled meetings. The rest of our panel consisted of local social worker and theropist Faith Elizabeth Sills, Orlando's United Against Poverty executive director Anjali Vaya, Homeless Service Network of Central Florida COO Brian Postlewait, and I tapped Christian Service Executive Director Eric Grey to come up from the audience. With protest against the SoDo Shelter bing so fresh on the audiences minds, little discussion was centered on solutions, yet a lot of insight and needed discussion was had. Approxamitly 70 SoDo residents attended. Some of the more helpful takeaways included

• There are no best practices on how to conduct a feasibility study on how a homeless shelter will affect surrounding communities.

• Multiple options and solutions are needed to address the many different ways individuals and families experience homelessness.

• Each municipality should fund homeless services for their area.

• The Baker Act can be used to help homeless people that are found in the streets unable to take care of themselves.

• Many of the homeless people on the streets with severe schizophrenia should be on civil commitment but they aren't because DCF isn't funded enough so DCF rightfully spend their money first helping children.

• Both homeless service providers & commissioners ask the public to reach out to their congress representatives to advocate for more homeless related funding

• You can not keep hundreds of homeless mentally ill, sex offenders, people who have experienced human trafficing, and people with violent crime records people under one roof because it turns into an infestation. You have to treat and categorize homeless people based on their history and meet them where they are.