For people like “Pine Tree” and his housemates, Karuna has given them a fresh start. And thanks to the help of Gundersen Health System, this new non-profit organization is housing some of La Crosse’s most vulnerable residents and breaking down the barriers between them and the healthcare system.
Established in 2021, Karuna – the Buddhist term for “compassion” – strives to elevate the dignity of unsheltered people in La Crosse by not only meeting their basic needs of shelter and food, but by providing a foundation on which they can turn their lives around and “build a life worth living.”
The birth of a new vision
The project is the vision of Karuna’s executive director, Julie McDermid, who formerly led La Crosse’s Collaborative to End Homelessness. As part of that work, she and others were involved with programs facilitated by La Crosse County that used hotels as shelters during the pandemic. What they noticed during that time caught their attention.
“What we were seeing was that some people really thrived (at the hotels),” McDermid says. “Some people did really well in that environment where they had private space that they could go back to, but they could also come out to the dining room and have a meal with other people around them.”
Ultimately, a proposal to the city to buy the EconoLodge – one of the hotels being used – and turn it into apartments for the unsheltered didn’t pan out, so McDermid looked for other organizations to work through to create a similar living arrangement. After finding none, her group decided it needed to incorporate as its own non-profit.
And from the beginning, Gundersen was there to help.
Gundersen a partner from the start
To establish the organization, Sandy Brekke, a senior consultant for the Office of Population Health and member of the street medicine team, helped McDermid file the appropriate paperwork, and Gundersen and others provided financial backing to get it off the ground. The dream of Karuna, Brekke says, is to get those in the community at the highest risk of morbidity off the street.
“These also tend to be the people who are very difficult to house because they come with a lot of complexities and oftentimes have been in housing multiple times and have been unsuccessful,” she says.
There are housing projects across the country that provide independent living with services on site, but something like that doesn’t exist in La Crosse, McDermid says. What does exist is a growing “chronic” unsheltered population, made up of individuals with severe mental health and substance abuse issues, as well as those who’ve been served by housing programs but have returned to homelessness.
“We saw this increasing chronically homeless population and increasing population of people who were not able to be successful in other programs, and we were seeing them thrive at the hotel,” McDermid says. “And we were like, ‘How do we scale this up?’”
A first home, a place to start
After piloting its service at the hotel and seeing success, Karuna eventually found a duplex it could rent to establish the home they were looking to create.
“This is exactly what we intended,” McDermid says.
The duplex provides a private bedroom for each of its 10 residents. However, in all other aspects, they live communally, and as those living with roommates must do, everyone has to agree to the house rules. Cooking and cleaning responsibilities are divided up. Part of the program also requires residents to volunteer in the community or work a job – something many haven’t done in decades.
“The goal would be, if they’re not volunteering and they can work, to get them to work,” Brekke says.
“For the first time, this group of people is connecting to healthcare consistently, connecting to social services,” Brekke says. “A lot of these people are people we’ve seen on the streets, so now we’re going to continue to follow them and continue to work to integrate them.”
Most of the residents at the duplex have been unsheltered for years, and while logic might contend that giving them a warm home will be the answer to all their problems, that isn’t necessarily the case.
Many times, those who are unsheltered create a support system with others surviving with them. When taken out of that environment and placed in housing, some will drift back to what they know – what feels safe. Or many times, they’ll bring friends back to their housing, which if done often enough, ends with eviction. What it comes down to, Brekke says, is that they don’t know what it means to be housed.
“They all have a bed, but many of them slept on the floor,” Brekke recalls observing on one of the first nights she was there.
Just the beginning
The facility opened in October – which was a month ahead of schedule because of the early onset of cold weather – and there’s no maximum length of stay. If the residents want to call it home forever, that’s allowable.
And it’s also just the start. McDermid is calling this first effort the pilot project, with the hopes of growing the program to include other similar housing arrangements in the area. There’s even a dream of working with Habitat of Humanity to build a home someday.
But until then, there are 10 individuals who can envision a future for themselves, who’ve found a group working to help them build their own life worth living.
“I’ve seen smiles that I haven’t seen in a really long time,” Brekke says.
If you’re interested in learning more about Karuna or supporting its mission, visit karunahousing.org. Any donations to the organization will be matched, up to $5,000, through mid January.