From the Director Read More...

You begin to lose your grip on reality as you experience the first symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. You lose confidence in your abilities. One day you’re at the top of the classical music world…a few years later, you find yourself a homeless street musician, playing what melodies you can remember on a grimy smudged violin that’s missing two strings.

This is the story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the subject of the best-selling book and soon to be released movie, The Soloist, which tells of the friendship that develops between Ayers and Steve Lopez, a columnist for the LA Times, who comes across the musician on Skid Row. The movie, starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., opens this Friday.

As Lopez gets to know Ayers, we come to know him too, and we get a glimpse of the conditions of homelessness and mental illness on the streets of our cities. For those of us working to unravel the knots that bind people who are homeless and mentally ill, the story of how Ayers fell through the cracks of “the system” is all too familiar. And we can identify with Lopez as he comes to know this homeless man as a fellow human being and encourages him to rediscover his talent.

Working with people who are homeless and experiencing mental or physical illness can be very demanding. Our culture has difficulty at times knowing how to respond to these issues. Those of us at Peter & Paul Community Services, and colleagues at many other agencies across the country, have learned that there are solutions to these problems that plague so many of our neighbors.

There are best practices proven to help people move off the streets, address their illness, and come to lead vibrant and meaningful lives. Research has shown that affordable, supportive permanent housing can be the way out.

Supportive housing successfully breaks the downward spiral of mental illness and homelessness, and saves tax dollars by reducing the over-reliance on hospital emergency rooms, costly mental health facilities, and money spent on police, the court system and jails for what amount to petty offenses. When you add it all up, providing housing and supportive services costs less than all these crisis services, and it has the added benefit of improving the quality of life for our neighbors who are homeless.