On Wednesday, Nov. 5, four students from San Lorenzo Valley High School helped more than 55 homeless individuals receive identification through Homeless Connect in Watsonville.
Homeless Connect is a project to aid people suffering from homelessness in Santa Cruz County. This one-day event at the Veterans Memorial building in Watsonville assisted those in need of services, housing, and hospitality.
Spanish students from SLVHS volunteered as translators, assisted in regulating traffic and filling out applications for homeless people in need of IDs.
Jim Young of Ben Lomond has co-organized the DMV table for four years, with the goal of providing individuals with the necessary identification to begin taking the first steps out of homelessness.
“Our job was to make sure that there was order out of chaos,” he said. “The whole goal of Homeless Connect, is not just to satisfy the short-term, but to help people get services and things they need to begin to think about, and step out of homelessness.”
To his surprise, the student volunteers took over the entire process and went way beyond their designated roles as translators.
“It was amazing, and I was very proud of them, and they should be very proud of themselves and how they took that over,” Young said of the students. “All I was expecting them to do was just kind of translate when we had issues, but they ended up rolling up their sleeves and getting to work and making that whole table happen.”
Young worked closely with the four students — Gregory McLain, Jacqueline Serna, Alex Zetina, and Eric Palau — as they took on the duties of regulating traffic and the stressful process of filling out the applications for the necessary identification. They were calm and professional as they stove toward greater efficiency.
Gregory McLain, a Boulder Creek resident and senior at SLVHS, said that he was able to see many people smile as a result of their applying for a DMV-issued ID.
“I learned how something that doesn’t seem like its worth a lot, like a California ID, can actually be a very big impact on someone’s life,” McLain said.
Many homeless people are at risk of losing their personal property, having it stolen, or confiscated by authorities, Young said.
Those who don’t have a permanent address are able to receive an ID by providing an address of a local shelter.
“It’s like we are giving back a piece of them that they may have lost, because these people come from a lack of support from community, family, or friends,” McLain explained, “and I just saw this as a big helping hand, a big connect project,”.
Next year’s Homeless connect project is tentatively scheduled for spring at the Kaiser Permanente Arena in Santa Cruz.
“Overall it was a really cool experience, there were a lot of people there, and I would like to do it again,” McLain said. “When I do go next time, I would like to see a lot more people.”
