We welcome Jessica Bocángel to her new position as the Faith-Based Mentoring Program Coordinator for the Compassion Coalition. The City of Knoxville published this press release yesterday, and the Sentinel covered her story today.
The Ten-Year Plan is beginning its third year in Knoxville and Knox County. Knoxville’s faith community has been serving people who are homeless for much longer than that. The Plan acknowledges their crucial role:
Faith-based agencies generate and utilize a wide range of volunteers who seek to help homeless persons find needed food, clothing, shelter, and hope for a better life. The ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness recognizes the importance of partnerships with faith-based organizations and the task force considers them to be one of the critical components in the plan to develop permanent solutions to homelessness.
Stabilization & Reintegration
The program that Mrs. Bocángel leads, Support Circles, is a key part of the Ten-Year Plan’s effort to help people get off the streets and reintegrated with healthy community.
A chronically homeless person’s first step out of a lifestyle of homelessness is stabilization in permanent supportive housing, the cornerstone of the Ten-Year Plan. But it’s not enough just to help people get off the streets and into a home.
Homeless people live in a separate culture that operates within and parallel to the one in which most of us live. That parallel culture is harmful in many ways. To help people who are leaving chronic homelessness avoid returning to the familiar culture of homelessness, we must help them achieve reintegration into our larger and healthier culture. That’s what Support Circles is all about.
Support Circles is a collaboration between the Ten-Year Plan and the Compassion Coalition. In her capacity as Faith-Based Mentoring Coordinator, Mrs. Bocángel will help develop a mentoring program for members of local faith communities to assist people who have been chronically homeless, to encourage them as they are placed into permanent housing, and to help achieve success in their new environments.
Her new job responsibilities will include recruiting teams from local faith communities, training those teams on the objectives and operations of the mentoring program, and coordinating with case managers to pair the mentor teams with people who are recently housed. Once mentoring teams are established, Mrs. Bocángel will follow up to assure that training and case coordination work as smoothly as possible, with the goals of maintaining residents in their new housing, and reintegrating them into the mainstream of the community to the greatest extent possible.
Mrs. Bocángel has worked with the homeless here in Knoxville, as well as in an international context, since 2004. She is a trained Stephen’s Minister, and she operates with a personal philosophy of servant leadership. She is thrilled to have the opportunity to work in such a hands-on capacity to help meet the needs of the chronically homeless community here in Knoxville.
If you’d like more information about Support Circles, please contact Jessica Bocángel at the Compassion Coalition: (865) 251-1591 x8.