New drop-in nonprofit office provides resources for Somerville's needy

Somerville's homeless and jobless now have access to a variety of social and financial services through a nonprofit office run by Tufts students at One Davis Square.

Staffed entirely by volunteers, the office is open throughout the week to provide free assistance with job searches, resum‚ writing, tax form filing, and food stamp applications.

"It's been absolutely amazing," volunteer Katherine Conway-Gaffney. "It's not flowery volunteer work. You're doing real live social work, and it's not the happy-go lucky campus life."

The program is run by the National Student Partnership (NSP), an organization founded by two Yale University students in 1999 to focus on combating homelessness and unemployment. The Tufts chapter is also a subgroup of the Leonard Carmichael Society (LCS), the University's umbrella service organization.

According to Cambridge NSP staff member Meg Newman, the organization helps "to link university students and the resources that they have with [people of] the local communities who might need assistance from anything to job searching to finding housing." The offices try to provide "anything they need to find personal success in their lives," she said.

Three years ago marked the start of a program assistance location in Cambridge staffed by Harvard students. Last summer, one of the Cambridge office's advisory board members voiced his opinion about the need for similar services in Somerville.

At that time, Newman approached two LCS members, current Tufts seniors Emily Rhodes and Neeraja Bhavaraju, about starting a program in Somerville through the university.

Interested Tufts students worked in the Cambridge office during the fall semester to acquaint themselves with the program's operation. Since then, the Tufts students involved with the program have contributed two hours a week at the shelter, and also organized public benefits, fundraisers and outreach events in support of the program. "It's a huge commitment," Conway-Gaffney said, citing weekly meetings, office hours as well as independent projects and time spent meeting with clients outside the office.

The Somerville office opened with an Open House on March 11, and the program was recently recognized officially by LCS. "I've been constantly amazed by the support from the Tufts administration and students," Newman said.

Volunteers have found the work in the office rewarding, but said that it is no easy task. "The hard part is sitting there and listening to someone's story. You do everything you can to get a job for them, but you can't make jobs appear," Conway-Gaffney said. "It's so hard to see them frustrated, when they can't pay their bills."

Complicated paperwork and beaurocratic regulations frustrate both students and clients. "[It's] a lot of red tape, clients need to go to many different offices to get forms and things," Sophomore Ayala Ron said, noting that often clients just miss qualifying for federal assistance or job positions.

"It's even harder when you have a client that says, I don't have a place to sleep tonight, and you feel responsible for them," Ron said. "You will read statistics in a book [about homelessness], but you usually don't meet these people and don't get to experience their lives."

There have been success stories, however. "My first client in Somerville office just got a job doing painting," Conway-Gaffney said. "He also got into a shelter which will get him off the streets. And he found an awesome culinary program next year to get a certificate for a job as a cook."

Rhodes said that the program's goals include making more connections with East Somerville, a low-income area that is rarely frequented by Tufts students. The program will also seek to make more contacts with other social service providers in the area.

"We're trying to give back to the community, which is important when you're in college," Ron said. "And also just to raise awareness for the problems that are out there, they aren't just in a book, it really happens."

Fourteen different NSP offices are linked with universities and run by students throughout the country. NSP headquarters in Washington, D.C. helps to coordinate the nationwide program.