The New 4H Club: Hope. Home. Help. Health.
Alan Evans lived on the streets for 25 years. Now his mission is to spread hope, and end homelessness.
Earlier this month, the National Women’s Soccer League announced a list of 14 players nominated for the 2024 Lauren Holiday Impact Award, recognizing a league player for her outstanding community service and character. The Portland Thorns’ nominee is Sam Coffey, a player I know quite well, but this post is neither a push to vote for Sam (though you are certainly free to) nor a testament to her kindness and selflessness.
Rather, it is about a remarkable man named Alan Evans, the president and founder of Helping Hands Reentry Outreach Centers, a life-changing, community-based philanthropy that Sam has partnered with over the last several years. Homelessness is a terrible problem in the greater Portland area and Oregon in general, having increased by some 65 percent since 2015. There are more than 6,000 people living on the streets, a problem that is exacerbated tremendously by untreated mental illness and addiction, primarily fentanyl, a cheap and deadly synthetic opioid. The mission of Helping Hands, per its website, “is to provide a helping hand to a sustainable life through Resources, Recovery, and Reentry,” doing it with programs that it describes as “Trauma-Informed, Data-Driven, and Person-Centered.”
Alan Evans knows this territory intimately. After growing up in an abusive home and being placed in a foster home that was scarcely better, he ran away at age 13, spending the next 25 years homeless and fighting a losing battle with meth addiction. Ironically, it was getting arrested that changed his life, the officer opting not to just cuff him and haul him to jail, but to treat him without judgment, treat him like a human being, connecting him with resources that could help break the vicious, self-destructive cycle that was his life.
“It was the first time I felt seen, understood and supported, and that’s what drove me to start Helping Hands,” Evans says. “I wanted more people to experience that breakthrough, too. It’s what drives me every day.”
It was 22 years ago that Evans, newly sober and committed to making a difference, opened his first location, an eight-bed shelter in Seaside, Ore. Since then Helping Hands has grown to 11 facilities across five counties with over 600 beds, with a success rate of up to 85 percent in some of its locations.
“I’m here to tell you that there is a solution to end homelessness, and our organization is on a mission to show you how,” Evans says. “We want to be able to help anyone who comes through our doors who know we aren’t defined by what has happened to us, that we can prevail as who we truly are when we are offered the right kind of support.”
Evans says that Helping Hands has grown by 400 percent in the last year, and is eager to keep that going. If Sam were to win the Lauren Holiday Impact Award, it would be accompanied by a $30,000 grant for Helping Hands, courtesy of Nationwide Insurance.
“I think it’s easy in a city where homelessness is so normalized to look at someone on the street or look at someone who is asking for a few dollars to help their family and forget that they are someone’s mom or someone’s dad or someone’s everything . . . that they are loved and cared for and human,” Sam says.
“Until we realize that the way forward is through listening and recovery and rehabilitation and not just sticking a band-aid over a crippling problem, no progress is going to be made. I think Helping Hands is setting the best example of what that looks like, and changing lives for the better.”
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If you would like to make a donation to Helping Hands, you can do so here:
https://helpinghandsreentry.org/donate
For every new paid subscription as a result of this post, Coffey Grounds will make a matching contribution to Helping Hands.
https://app.frame.io/presentations/78c7c286-2134-4c7c-a4ba-272693fee296
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Where can I vote for the WIN-WIN!
What an accomplished man in mine and I’m sure others eyes. 👏👏👏