On a Saturday afternoon in the time abyss known as COVID-19, one of the homeless guests at the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center went into labor and was transported to a San Francisco hospital to give birth to her new baby. The next day, a long-time couple stepped out in the courtyard between the two gray bunker dormitories at the waterfront center to say: “I do now.” They tied the knot to the cheers of a handful of (socially distanced) guests. In the two weeks that have followed, the staff at Bayshore Navigation center and at the city’s temporary hotel quarters for the homeless have raced to the rescue of two different guests who were overdosing outside on the street. Administering CPR and Narcan, they reversed the overdoses, giving both patients more time for paramedics to get them to the hospital. They saved their lives.
At a time when a terrorist called COVID-19 has stopped the world in its tracks, the staff at The Embarcadero and Bayshore Navigation centers and other SF CBO city partners are answering the call to care for the community of unsheltered homeless.
Currently, Five Keys Navigation Center staff have been deployed to four additional shelters across San Francisco. As of June 8, 50 more employees will be added to man shelters at three hotels and the Moscone Center, in addition to the Bayshore and Embarcadero shelters. Of Five Keys’ 600-plus employees, 200 of them now serve people experiencing homelessness.
The silver lining: the glimpses of light that shine through in moments big and small — a new life in the birth of a baby, love in a time of coronavirus, and the saving of two lives.
“Our navigation team and our fellow CBOs are not just staffing these emergency shelters, they are literally saving lives,” said Steve Good, executive director of Five Keys, which has became a SWAT team tapped to work alongside San Francisco’s public health supervisors and homeless advocates to dramatically reduce density in crowded shelters.
Call them homeless first responders. “When we talk about heroes, our navigation team and the city’s workers helping the homeless are full of them.”
Good called Five Keys‘ navigation center employees and others manning the homeless shelters in San Francisco “the unsung heroes of the pandemic.”
In the best of times, providing food, shelter, and safety to San Francisco’s homeless population is a challenge. But as the COVID-19 outbreak continues, efforts have become more extreme.
But through San Francisco’s safety efforts, more than 900 homeless people have been moved into hotel rooms and a pop-up shelter at Moscone West, as the city struggles to keep the pandemic from racing through its 8,000-strong unhoused population. Specifically, Five Keys was named by San Francisco city leaders to supervise operations at Site 10, a 450-room hotel in the city’s center that is housing 360 guests that were formerly in shelters but are most vulnerable to COVID-19 because of age or preexisting medical conditions.
“Unlike many of us, our residents experiencing homelessness cannot simply close their doors to this disease, and that’s why San Francisco has ramped up efforts to de-escalate transmission of this disease within shelters, and ultimately save lives,” said Good. “Though no one is immune to COVID-19, this pandemic has all too clearly revealed the voids in our society and serves as a wake-up call on the life-and-death urgency of taking care of the most vulnerable in our population.”
Like nurses and doctors, the individuals on the front lines of San Francisco’s homeless centers and now the hotel shelters, are risking their lives, said Good. He says from the start, the can-do attitude among Five Keys employees has been: "Whatever it takes. Sign me up."
It is no surprise that Five Keys and other service providers were called in by city public health leaders to aid in the massive efforts to marshal safety and shelter for the homeless in the face of this deadly terrorist, COVID-19.
Since 2003, we have been committed to getting the lives of people on the margins of society back on track — behind the walls of 23 county jails, in economically isolated communities, at two navigation centers for the unsheltered homeless, and more than 100 sites throughout San Francisco and Southern California.
Five Keys’ navigation center directors like Meg O’Neill, who has been deployed to head operations at Site 10 hotel and the more than 100 other Five Keys employees who directly serve the homeless are true COVID-19 first responders. At the hotel and the navigation centers, they supervise teams that not only feed, shelter and provide education for guests, but respond to fights, seizures, overdoses, and episodes tied to addiction and mental illness. They de-escalate each situation and stabilize people until medical personnel arrives, when necessary.
In many ways, the Five Keys’ team’s nimbleness and ability to race toward the chaos of COVID-19 is because of the staff’s firsthand experiences in confronting trauma and the resilience and grit they have gained in their personal lives, said Good.
“Many of our staff in our navigation centers have spent serious time in prison and bring a very unique calm and ability to get through during a time of crisis like this,” said Good. “At the same time, they are putting their own lives at great risk. But they do it because they have a tremendous passion and determination to give back and serve.”
