Connie Myers and Meghan Cubano

00:00 Myers on 73 years old 74 next week. Today's date is February 4th 2021. I am speaking to you from my home in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, which is on a farm.

00:25 I'm Meghan Cubano. I'm 30 years old. Today's date is February 4th 2021, and I'm speaking to you from my home in Robbinsville, New Jersey speaking with Connie Mercer today my mentor.

00:42 So Connie, can you describe the work that brought you today here today? How did you get started?

00:51 The work that I run

00:54 Program called Homefront that takes care of our communities homeless families pleases me. The most is founder On Any Given night home fronts providing shelter and support services wraparound services to about 480 people most of them kids and then we will do whatever we can to give folks the tools to become.

01:32 Self-sufficient and we help them through the horror of the homeless. In their lives.

01:42 We help them find homes. We help them learn job skills.

01:48 And we help them leave the quality of life that

01:55 Give their children a shot at the future.

01:59 And how did you get started who who motivated you to? Oh my God. It is such a Headhunter. I was executive recruiter. I had very fancy offices and one day a friend from the old days by. Dr. Chris Hansen came to me and said hey Connie, you need to come with me and see what's going on in your community and he took me out and we knocked on doors in god-forsaken motel rooms up and down the Route 1 Corridor. It was just about a mile and a half for my office.

02:43 And what I saw horrified me is in these welfare motels these godforsaken motels were families.

02:56 Who had

02:58 No other place to be there were two three four five people in a single room with a single bed. There was no place to cook. There was no way to keep a baby's bottle warm. There was no place to even

03:18 Think a private thought

03:22 And we knocked on door after door after door hundreds of doors, cuz Route 1 was just littered with these.

03:32 Horrific places and at the end of the day my friend. Dr. Hansen turned to me and said Connie.

03:41 They're hungry homeless kids in your community fix it.

03:46 William

03:50 Took up the challenge because it never occurred to me that it was.

03:57 More than a PR issue that if everybody in our very very wealthy community and

04:06 You know, we were in Central Jersey Princeton was the main Town wealthy community that if everybody in our wealthy community knew about homeless children, it would end that they would not allow it. Well 30 years later. We're still fighting the fight. So

04:29 What I did Megan was some I got together some friends to cook some food because food was the most obvious thing but these folks were missing and on Thanksgiving Day. 30 years ago a bunch of us prepared Thanksgiving meals and deliver them to the hotels. It was his

04:50 Hundreds of meals

04:53 And then we started doing regular meals. I organised various Church groups and Girl Scout groups and some businesses and

05:05 The only people you got to help and guess what people helped when people knew they wanted.

05:15 They wanted to make sure that children had food in their bellies.

05:21 So we we did that for a long time, but as you're delivering meals.

05:28 You noticed you notice stuff.

05:31 You noticed that they come out.

05:34 To the Caravan of cars that are bringing the meals in the winter and the kids don't have any winter coats and the in their moms don't have any

05:47 They wearing slippers. They don't have any decent shoes. So they start bringing people stuff. So we started collecting stuff that people needed in order to

06:01 In order to survive

06:06 Again, it was a word-of-mouth kind of thing. Our first people initially brought things to my home.

06:13 They just did and my

06:17 But first the stuff was in my garage and that took over my dining room and just kept growing and growing until we had to find a spot for it.

06:31 One of the things that I remember is that

06:37 My husband divides the word. I can't remember what the word is that it was a word for the reverse of burglarize because we would we would go out Meg. We would go out to run some errands and we would come back and there be new stuff on our front porch.

06:55 Eventually another woman took it over Carla who didn't have a husband living with her. Who is Chic took over most of her house and then it became totally absurd. We got Lawrence Township to give us a a building to put the stuff in.

07:19 But the stuff was the food in the stuff for the easy part of the job because you see so much more when you're actually bringing food to folks. You see the kids who are going to school.

07:38 So we

07:41 Because they had used to live in another community that used to live mostly in Trenton. But now that they were in Lawrence Township Lawrence Township didn't want to educate them. They said they belong to Trenton in Trenton said they don't live in Trenton anymore. So engaged pretty

08:01 Complicated political fight

08:05 Got involved at the national level to make sure that all homeless kids have the right to a free and appropriate education.

08:18 Infant infant has Inception what has been?

08:24 Well, this is probably a hard question, but the most challenging.

08:30 Reason for you just in terms of the number of people coming the challenges they're facing.

08:42 Oh my God.

08:46 The two parts to that answer one is the lack of affordable housing in our community and that is a horrific issue in our community and in and in almost every other community in the country home front of dress that by starting a separate corporation that builds affordable housing the affordable housing that homes by TLC build Aram.

09:13 Homes that have dignity homes where you can form.

09:20 A decent life will usually try to make no more than four five six homes in a place. We don't want to concentrate poverty. We want our kids to be going to school in places where kids have high aspirations and there are high expectations and when they move into the affordable housing people only have to pay a third of their income so that people who are working as cashiers and at McDonald's end in the dentist office and

09:54 Taking care of our kids in the daycare places people who are earning minimum wage or a bit above minimum wage.

10:03 Can pay a third of their income?

10:06 And only a third of their income in still have enough money for the rest of their lives so many of the client to come to us cuz we have a very robust homelessness prevention program last year we gave out just shy of a million dollars to keep people in their homes because whenever possible we try to avoid people having to go through the horror of homelessness.

10:33 But it's not always about the affordable housing.

10:41 Or even about the money. It's so often the second part of your question the hardest part of what we do Meg ism.

10:52 Let me answer this way. I used to believe that life.

10:57 My job Homefront job was to make sure that every kid in our community had a

11:06 Dignified roof over their head place to live

11:10 A place

11:12 To be safe

11:16 But then I realized that was

11:20 Not my biggest job my biggest job to really deal with the issue of homelessness is to give those families as kids a vision of a different future.

11:32 But then the tools to get there.

11:35 But it's not until the families have a vision.

11:41 That the tools are mad or so.

11:45 Homefront

11:48 How to get into the business of helping people get education is not just kids but their parents who so often did not even have a high school equivalency diploma do not have a high school diploma. We had to get into the business of teaching computer skills. So people could get jobs we had to get into the business of teaching people how to get jobs and keep jobs.

12:11 And we had to develop so many other basic programs to teach life skills.

12:21 And you don't have to I mean look too far to realize that you need to turn on the news and you see these lines at food banks and how has the pandemic affect the families that you serve at home front?

12:39 What are the lasting impact?

12:46 Just worsened.

12:48 The situation that was going on in our community. One of the good things about the pandemic is that I think it has made the larger Community more aware of the true divisions in our community. I think people who have been a blessed and who are successful or more aware of their obligation to get involved. We had a huge outpouring from the community of folks who want to help with the pain.

13:19 In April are Food Lions were three times the length of the what they had been the previous year.

13:30 And we'd already been stretched to capacity the previous year in our food lines. We were see seeing people. We never ever seen before people who the year before had been donors or who helped out with our Christmas drives or who would make sure the kids had back to school things because those are all things we do. I should probably jump back from it Megan. Just explain that going from the are Roots at the motels.

14:06 Homefront is now an agency with 38 different programs and services.

14:15 For people who for families who are homeless or who are on the

14:20 Living on the

14:22 That precipice of homelessness soup have inspector homelessness always at their back.

14:29 In many ways were like an old fashioned.

14:36 Settlement house

14:40 Helping helping people get there.

14:44 The feet on the ground and become successful.

14:50 I keep on talking about families and that's our primary commitment.

14:55 But I should also mention cuz it's important part of what we do is we made a commitment many years ago when the HIV crisis was.

15:09 Ravaging our community to make sure that anybody who is hiv-positive had a safe place to be in those folks were often singles. So we have quite a large program for anybody who is HIV and we have promised that they would have kept that promise in this community that we will find them housing or create housing for them if we have to

15:38 Are they responding to the needs?

15:41 Truly responding to the need it was

15:46 That's what we do. We respond to the knee. That's

15:52 For example, we have a daycare program an award-winning daycare program. But why are we in the if we're homeless agency? Why are we in the daycare business? Because for a family mostly Moms 2

16:10 Get back on track to take the courses. They need to go to the drug treatment program that will help them or two.

16:21 Learn the skills.

16:23 Or go to the job. They need child care in our communities does not have enough quality child care. So we did it initially to help the moms, but then we

16:36 Hell if we're having a daycare program better be great because these kids come to us.

16:45 So many deficits their parents have

16:49 Been living in chaos and

16:53 I've been so stretched with some of the things that every little One Needs Moms have not been able to provide so our day care program is

17:09 Superb

17:11 And

17:13 I say that in large part.

17:16 Because we have so many volunteers who come in who give kids one-on-one individual attention the attention that they get these kids are so craving.

17:30 Do you have any favorite stories too many stories?

17:43 What I'm thinking

17:46 About

17:50 Client stories probably

17:54 My favorite probably a story that makes me makes my heart glad it's we had a young girl and her name was Angel. She was in the living in the motels with a mom who was a true person multiple personality disorder and angel had been had spent the prior 3 years.

18:18 Roaming across the country that start out in, California.

18:24 She stayed with her mom and they they they lived in their car mostly.

18:29 Having various Adventures that will make when we

18:34 Met her at the motel. We knew that this was an incredibly Bright Child.

18:39 We got her enrolled in school prank that we cheated and we got her into a school district, which is not where she belongs but she needed.

18:49 Some heavy-duty remedial stuff to catch up on 3 years of education. We got her wrapped in Services the gutter all sorts of volunteers.

19:03 We got the moved out of the motels into a affordable housing unit. We called in favors to get them into that particular unit.

19:14 And end of story

19:19 Angel is now a PhD nurse she teaches people how to care for.

19:27 Sick people she has written a book.

19:31 She owns a lovely home has raised two great kids and her mom was just in touch with me last week. Maybe that's why I'm thinking about angel because her mom was seeking housing in a different community and wanted some help but

19:55 The way that our volunteers and our staff.

19:59 Stayed connected with this young lady through all those years to make sure that she would live up to her god-given potential.

20:11 Stop Google credible Story. Angel makes me happy a story. That's kind of.

20:23 Interesting Meg is Homefront Family Campus, which is a state-of-the-art facility.

20:30 Is on the grounds of a former military base, we haven't eaten a half acre campus.

20:39 And

20:42 The story of getting that building was long and involved when we knew that there was going to the facility was going to be decommissioned.

20:56 We started paying attention and we played by the rules and it took.

21:02 Over six years of going to meetings with all sorts of man saying no, you don't really want this this place because we have grand plans to create hotels and ratables on that. You don't really want it and no you can't have it and Josh we read the rags. We know what we're entitled to Sir Thurs six years of pushing back and I am old-school. I'm one of those, you know, a lot of women of my generation. They want to be liked they don't want to say that I want to make people unhappy and we did it for 6 years with the community.

21:47 Politicians at the county and at the

21:53 Township level and finally we got control of that six and a half acre piece of property. I love walking around with the key to a Navy base in my purse.

22:05 That's pretty impressive.

22:15 And then we raised 6 million dollars to transform an ugly ugly ugly old military.

22:25 Bass into a beautiful welcoming space one of the things that Delights me the most Megan and you're probably aware of this is

22:39 Their number buildings on the grounds when we took it over one of the buildings.

22:47 That was a big blue Butler Building ugly building but it is where the military used to house its tanks and it's in a Big Guns Tower tours and it's other things. We have taken that great big blue building and half of it is a diaper bank for a place where people who need diapers can come and get diapers and the other half is an art gallery because we have a very robust

23:22 Unsuccessful, I will add art program. So it I think that you know, we literally literally changed.

23:35 Swords into plowshares

23:38 Then that

23:45 Little bit about lessons. You taught me a lot of water in our 7-year relationship together. And what's the greatest lesson you learned from the work you've done?

24:01 The word you

24:03 Committed your life to hard question.

24:09 So many lessons one is that the community wants to help if they're asked and given Direction.

24:19 I so often as you would expect that we get thanked by our clients, but we probably more often get thanked by our volunteers and we have a army of volunteers.

24:33 Did you sew abele coordinate Megan?

24:39 That bring

24:43 Their skills and their caring and their stuff

24:47 To Allstate Homefront in many ways access the backup family for folks who don't have families with resources and it's our army volunteers that provides that to our client. We so often will have a client that we know can do do a job.

25:11 But they just don't have a way in.

25:14 I don't know about you, but I got my first job for my uncle, you know, I think that's how people do but our clients don't have people who have connections to do that. But our volunteers do and they make those connections available and they make those skills available. So I think the incredible caring that is out there to be harnessed is a really key lesson.

25:38 I think another key.

25:42 Lesson we talked about it before a little bit is.

25:48 People have to have a vision.

25:51 They have to dream it before they can do it. So.

25:57 If our clients can't imagine themselves in a

26:03 School setting

26:05 Then I'm going to do the work this necessary in order to get into a good school. It's one of the we have a very interesting Children's Program. It was the way we started. It was out of necessity.

26:26 It's a we use the Magic School Bus model.

26:30 We started it when the kids when we began at work at the motels, and we just knew that the kids needed to get away from those godforsaken places.

26:41 And we board our buses are Vans and we take the kids out and we'd ask people in the community. Hey, I got a bunch of kids who never seen a baseball game. Can you get us some tickets or hey our children have never ever been to a play or you know, what? I've been all these kids who never been to the ocean. Can we come to your Yacht Club? Yes our children go to a yacht club every year.

27:09 But we started it like that because at the beginning, you know, we're working out of my home working around my kitchen table. We didn't have a place so we didn't go we didn't go to the normal model of having a community center.

27:27 Will Fast Forward many years and we were asked to take over the running of a community center in Lawrence Township. The homefront now has a community center, but that's not the primary thing we do with our homeless kids are homeless kids are kids who are struggling in and Parvati. We still pick him up in the Magic School Bus we make sure that that

27:48 But there's lots of fun going on in the bus and we take them to places we go onto Princeton University's campus and we

27:59 Go into the Suburban church, and we go into the parks and we have sessions in the library.

28:10 It's harder than if we do it up just a community center, but we want our kids to have.

28:19 Vision of what the whole wide world wonderful world has to offer.

28:27 That's some.

28:33 They can't do it until I Can Dream It and envision it and we we work hard on that.

28:41 We young at the time right now.

28:47 And what about what about you with other people out there that believe they want to make a difference and I want to get out there and start something and and help other people and be like you would you

29:07 Give them any words of wisdom and advice.

29:15 You don't go into it halfway.

29:18 Give it your whole heart.

29:23 And don't say no.

29:28 I was a woman on fire 30 years ago because it was just so wrong that there were homeless kids in our community.

29:37 And I was a total pain in the butt to government officials.

29:46 And it was hard for somebody like me who grew up wanting. You know, I wanted to wanted to play nice. I want I wanted to get along with people but

29:58 They needed to know they needed to see.

30:03 And I needed to make sure that children are Community have homes. And now for the most part except for this during this pandemic time, very rarely. Will there be a homeless child in Mercer County for more than a day or two? I'm terribly terribly proud of that. I will tell people who are thinking about this kind of thing. You will never get rich you will never make money.

30:30 But you were very clear on that when you hired me the first things you said, but you also will

30:41 Never go home thinking.

30:45 Did what I do matter today cuz you know every single day what you get to do matters. I feel that the work that I it's a privilege to do the work that I do. It's a privilege to

31:01 Help people move forward on their Journey.

31:09 Both clients in Boland tears. I've got to say we've changed a lot of volunteers lies who?

31:17 Are so grateful to be able to do something that's bigger than them then themselves.

31:22 So words of wisdom to somebody wants to be Fearless.

31:30 Just do it. I love it and make it make it happen. Those are.

31:39 Those are the kinds of

31:42 And a

31:44 You know, I'm old I'm really old and I never get up thinking of damn. I got to go to work. I am still so excited each and every day for the challenge of making.

31:59 Things better

32:02 And I'm sure that seems yes. Absolutely I feel the same exact way and you may be tired and you may be burnt out and the world may be crumbling but you're still part of something that's so much bigger than you and really changing why you know, it is a true privilege to do this kind of do what we do.

32:29 And what about we don't have too much longer. But what about the future? What about the future of Homefront? What are your your big dream you built a program that started around your kitchen table 31 years ago.

32:44 And 38 programs and services 125 permanent affordable housing unit huge amazing state-of-the-art Family Campus. What are your dream?

32:59 Omega it's nice when you say all those things all together and that does make me make me feel glad but I'm just focus on the things we still have to do.

33:13 We are.

33:17 The homefront model is being adopted in a couple of other places. There's beginning to be a real understanding.

33:24 That you got to have all the services in one place and gather that clawing your way out of poverty is very very very hard and you got to make it so that clients can actually

33:41 Access the tools that they need easily. I want that to be the model that used around the country.

33:52 I'm hopeful that people start understanding the Band-Aids Aren't Enough.

33:57 2

34:00 And for Homefront for the future, we still got some building to do we need some special services.

34:13 On our campus for families with a mom suffers from retardation, but still loves her kids very much. I'd like to give her an opportunity to be involved to two parents, but they have support surround the child.

34:28 One thing that I very much would love to do before I actually retire is to make sure that we have a place where people can take their their dogs their animals it is

34:43 We've worked out some solutions at this point, but I never again want anybody to have to tell a nine-year-old boy, we can provide you and your family a place to stay but you can't have your dog with you. That's just so awful. So so we need to have a place like that. What about this?

35:12 Yes, I won't leave until we have a Civic engagement Center on our campus or Civic engagement Center. Our clients. Unfortunately don't know.

35:23 About how government works they don't think their voice matters. They don't think they matter they need to understand the role that they play the way we work hard to empower them. They do a lot of testifying they do they show up at marches they but we need for our clients to understand that that would be part that would be part of the Civic engagement Center, but the other part of the Civic engagement Center would have people from the larger community and Gage with our clients once they see that our families.

36:01 Love their children that there that they want for their children.

36:05 That our clients want for their children what the larger Community wants they

36:13 To build a constituent to build even more of a constituency for

36:19 Families struggling in poverty is what we need to do.

36:25 We'll make it happen as our leader will make it happen. We will get it done.

36:36 We've done so much and it's so much more to do. It. Isn't that exciting?

36:45 Any last words for the audience, I think we left it at a good spot.