A team of Code Tenderloin staff members, led by Donna Hilliard, spends their nights connecting with unhoused individuals struggling with substance abuse in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.
Donna Hilliard said she doesn’t sleep much. When the 51-year-old mother of two finishes up her wide-ranging daily tasks at San Francisco nonprofit Code Tenderloin, she joins five other colleagues in a plain white van heading to the heart of the Tenderloin. Hilliard and her co-workers spend the night walking up and down the streets until 3 a.m. with clipboards in hand, trying to make connections with unhoused residents struggling with substance abuse .
“When we first started hitting the streets, people were in these areas, and they didn’t want to talk to anyone,” she said. “We were pulling up, and then we had to get out and have to try to find people.” Since October 2023, Hilliard and Code Tenderloin’s Night Navigation team have made these nocturnal jaunts to link as many people as possible with treatment or shelter in an ongoing effort to stem the ongoing drug-overdose crisis in The City. Over time, Hilliard said, the neighborhood’s cold reception thawed. “They let us come into those blocks,” she said. “We could hang out with them. We could have real conversations with them.” Gaining trust and establishing rapport are sometimes critical in convincing people to accept care, she said. Hilliard said she and her Night Navigation peers know this from personal experience, as the majority have all struggled with substance use, homelessness, incarceration, or other issues in their lives. “We have a unique job,” she said. “I need you to have compassion and understanding.” Before becoming executive director of Code Tenderloin and the Night Navigation Team supervisor, Hilliard said, she was intermittently homeless beginning when she was 13, growing up in Colorado. She said she spent time in a juvenile-detention facility for dealing drugs and participating in a gang, using every drug she could get her hands on but not becoming hooked on one in particular
HOMELESSNESS SUBSTANCE ABUSE DRUG CRISIS SOCIAL SERVICES SAN FRANCISCO
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