Alum Embraces Life After Homelessness

A former financial analyst and Harvard College graduate who lived on the street outside the Holyoke Gate for more than a year is currently bringing her resume up to date and preparing to return to professional life.

Nana Adwoa Tiwaah “Agatha” Okyere ’81 has received treatment for a debilitating mental condition, and is now taking a computer class and researching the job market, according to Kwadwo Frimpong, a fellow Ghanaian expatriot with whom Okyere is now living.

But some members of the Ghanaian community, which has been helping her to get back on her feet, wonder why it took more than a year for Okyere to get the care she needed to get off the street.

Okyere began living on the Cambridge streets around the time of her twentieth class reunion in June 2001, says Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) spokesperson Steven G. Catalano.

She lived for more than a year in the shade of Harvard’s halls, moving from the Science Center to the Holyoke gate with a growing collection of bags that contained her belongings.

She would sometimes spend a few days in local shelters, Catalano says, but found mobility difficult as her collection of belongings grew.

Catalano says HUPD “pulled strings” to find a shelter that would accept Okyere and her copious belongings, and in October 2002, Okyere left the street for good.

Frimpong describes her recovery over the past nine months in awed tones.

“It’s been nothing short of a miracle,” he says.

Okyere will probably avoid returning to a former life in the street, due to the degree of support she has received from the surrounding community, says one mental health expert who helped Okyere and asked that her name not be used.

But, the expert says, Okyere had to endure life in the Square too long before receiving the help she needed.

“Someone should have said, ‘Wait, this woman is not acting of healthy initiative, we must call someone to intervene,” the worker says. “And nobody did that until several months later.”

For the homeless population of Harvard Square, escaping life on the streets often requires much more than a single telephone call. Recent funding cutbacks, overcrowding of local shelters and a delicate and multifaceted intervention process can make a successful effort to help someone difficult, if not almost impossible.

For Okyere, as for hundreds of people who live homeless in the Boston area each year, escaping life on the streets means fighting against a host of mutually compounding obstacles.

Fighting Mental Illness

Okyere—who concentrated in economics and lived in Currier House while she was at the College—earned a masters degree from the University of Oxford after her graduation from Harvard and held jobs as a consultant and an analyst before succumbing to mental illness, according to Frimpong.

For more than a year in the Square, she grew thinner and weaker, all the while acquiring more and more bags of belongings.

For Okyere, as for many, poor mental health was a slippery slope to life on the streets.

“Agatha is a very highly educated woman,” says the mental health expert familiar with her case. “She’s had some traumatic exposure in the past that brought on her mental illness.”

For a homeless person living with mental illness, finding psychiatric treatment is the first step to escaping life on the streets. But for many, even receiving treatment requires luck and perseverance.

“They have to go through a lot of red tape,” says Michelle Kuo ’03, who directed the Harvard Square Shelter at University Lutheran Church (UniLu) last year, “and they need funding. They have to be on Medicare.”

But even those eligible for mental health care may have trouble getting inside a specialist’s office. Some, like Okyere, might be resistant to the idea.

Okyere initially refused help because she did not realize the severity of her own symptoms, the mental health expert familiar with her case says.

The same is true for many homeless individuals.

“They have lost the ability to make right decisions,” the expert explains.

And with no family, they can easily end up hungry, shelterless and almost invisible to the daily Square traffic that passes them each day.

Okyere finally gained the mental treatment she needed after HUPD arrested her.

“We needed to initiate the arrest in order to get her into the system,” Catalano says. “In this case, an arrest for Agatha helped.”

Homelessness and the Law

Homelessness itself is by no means a crime. And unless a mentally ill person agrees to be taken to the hospital, police can only bring the person in for treatment if they deem him or her dangerous.

“There is no law against mental illness,” says Cambridge Police Department spokesperson Frank D. Pasquerello.

Massachusetts law stipulates that a police officer may commit an individual suspected to be mentally ill to hospitalization against his or her will only in an emergency situation—if the officer suspects that the individual is a hazard to himself or herself, or to others.

As in Okyere’s case, police officers ordinarily have an opportunity to interact with the Square’s homeless population only through criminal offenses—making for an awkward relationship with the local homeless population.

“The police in general have not had the best track record in dealing with homeless issues,” Catalano says.

Police departments’ inability to intervene unless summoned is distinctly at odds with the belief that “early intervention is the best prevention,” common in recent homeless initiatives, says Cambridge City Councillor David P. Maher. Maher is familiar with many local homelessness concerns because of his day job at the Cambridge Family and Children’s Service.

Between the beginning of 2001 and the end of 2002, when data was last released, homeless individuals in Cambridge have been taken into custody 251 times, comprising 10 percent of the total number of arrests.

But according to Catalano, most significant crimes attributed to homeless locals are committed by a mere handful of individuals. The majority of the homeless population avoids encounters with law enforcement, he says.

To complicate the matter further, Harvard Square lies at the convergence of three different police jurisdictions. The Cambridge Police Department holds primary jurisdiction for the streets and most commercial and residential buildings in the area. The MBTA Police preside over the Harvard Square T stop. HUPD is responsible for Harvard Yard and all of the University’s buildings in the Square, including the Holyoke Center where Okyere used to spend much of her time.

That means a call from Au Bon Pain alerts a different agency than a call from a storefront a few feet down the block. And as a result, no centralized force exists to identify cases of homeless need and to ensure that individuals have access to the help they need.

Off the Streets

Maher notes that Cambridge, particularly Harvard and Central Squares, has a large population of homeless individuals compared to the rest of the Boston area.

But he says this does not mean that struggling individuals receive less support in Cambridge than elsewhere—although local activists agree that demand for homeless services far outweighs supply in the Boston area.

Many can only find shelter for the night under the overhang of the Coop or inside an ATM—a direct result, Maher says, of poor funding for the programs and facilities that provide alternatives.

Ameliorating the situation for local homeless individuals will require effort outside an expansion of shelter facilities, according to Maher.

“There’s typically a wait for beds,” he says, “and realistically, I don’t know that I see a lot of expansion opportunities for beds at this time.”

The UniLu Shelter, which Kuo directed, is a so-called “emergency shelter”—it cannot serve any single individual for more than two weeks.

After that period, Kuo says, people must find shelter elsewhere.

She says the staff often had to turn away more than 10 people over the course of a day.

“Every day we would turn away people in the morning and people at night, which was horrible,” she says. “It was pretty bewildering to turn people away every day....In winter you really felt you had control over whether someone would die or not, and that’s a feeling no one should have.”

Kuo says her experiences at the shelters reflect the dearth of available care in the Boston area—a condition that she attributes in part to recent cuts in state funding for shelters like the UniLu.

Combined with unusually high real estate costs in Cambridge, a “very poor social safety support network” and frequent instances of domestic violence, Kuo says, the budget cuts have left few venues available to homeless individuals.

“The homeless system has been running at 150 percent capacity for years, and now it’s on the rise,” says Irene Wachsler, development director for Solutions at Work, a local organization founded in 1989 to help homeless individuals hoping to get out of the shelter system. “A lot of homeless people have anger against the system.”

Wachsler says that, even for a homeless person who has successfully garnered a job, being able to rent an appartment—particularly in Cambridge’s bloated real estate market—is still a distant hope.

The best solution for the moment Maher says, lies with such local non-profit initiatives.

“I do think you have to look increasingly to non-profits and how non-profits affect community needs,” he says. Still, he adds, recent fundraising and grant efforts suggest that support for homeless aid in Cambridge has actually diminished recently.

“Focus shifts,” he says. “Homelessness was a very sexy issue in the past and its not as sexy today, so there’s not as much money and funding opportunities that are available.”

—Zachary Lane and Michael A. Mohammed contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu