Homeless Coach takes to the road on awareness tour

By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

A high-tech charity was back in Pflugerville on Sunday to launch the latest leg of its campaign to aid Austin-area’s homeless through social networking.

The Homeless Coach kicked off its unveiling and awareness tour entitled Celebrate Community at Princess Craft RV at 102 N. 1st St. The charity is renovating an RV equipped with streaming media capabilities that will introduce Central Texas to its homeless residents by streaming shared meals and building them a social network of support.

“It’s all about thanking the community, volunteers and our sponsors – in this case Princess Craft RV – for all the contributions to this date,” said Homeless Coach founder Tom Baum. “And also engaging additional community members. We’re trying to get them signed up and engaged in helping to finish it out, because it’s not quite finished, but also to participate in this kind of a photograph and be part of the outside of the vehicle.”

A crane lifted photographer David Safely high above the event’s crowd to snap pictures of volunteers who yelled “ssensselemoh!” (“homelessness” spelled backward), a cheer that summarizes the charity’s commitment to reversing homelessness.

The Homeless Coach, the brainchild of Baum, a bus driver, will hold Celebrate Community events at each of the key sponsors’ sites.

Princess Craft helped get the Homeless Coach RV gutted and repurposed as social gathering space complete with a kitchen, cabinets, TVs, monitors and cameras to stream and show the meals shared inside and out.

The dining space is still under construction, but will slowly take shape as the Coach drives from sponsor to sponsor during its Celebrate Community Tour.

The event was streamed live online while viewers chimed in through a chat room and Tweeted messages to the attendees there.

One online viewer was Dennis Morris, who is a coach in the program. Morris is a former homeless veteran who is now enrolled in college and helps key new Homeless Coach enrollees into the aid programs available to them.

One of Morris’ mentees is Lawrence Berry, who the Pflag profiled in August. Berry, known as “Lawrence the Artist” to the Homeless Coach community, used to live on the streets of Austin. He has been living in the Homeless Coach over past months while he sells his artwork and looks for opportunities to find more permanent housing.

At the event Lawrence auctioned off pieces of artwork to help pay his rent at his trailer park until he moves into his new home in February. Then the same crane used to snap the photo that will wrap around the outside of the RV was used to literally and metaphorically lift Berry off the street at the event.

Morris recently found an Austin-area resource called Green Doors that is now working to move Berry into subsidized housing for the disabled by February of 2011.

“[Green Doors] will give [Berry] two years of shelter in a facility that is made to serve the disabled. It’s rent-free, and so he’ll then have an opportunity to sell his artwork without having to pay rent and build a savings, then buy himself a mobile home or that type of thing,” Baum said. “[Morris], though his travels found that Green Doors had this opportunity, so that’s kind of how it works – people come and share meals and talk about what they know, the resources that are available – and that’s how things happen.”