Today we’d like to introduce you to Truong Lam.
Truong, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
On one of the usual days I was traveling with my mom to the usual grocery store, my mom pulled up to the usual street corner where there would be a “beggar”. My mom would proceed to give him change and water per usual. But what was not usual this particular time was when she shook her head, turned to me and spoke the words that have stuck with me to this day, “We may be helping him today, but we are not solving the problem.”
My name is Truong Lam and I am the executive director and co-founder of The Village Connect 501c3. My story with finding ways to tackle the problem of homelessness at its roots really starts with the early influence my mom had on me as we encountered homeless individuals. She never hesitated to give food, money, water, or whatever she had to make life a little bit easier for them. But she always felt like it was never enough. I attended school at the University of Texas at Austin where I had my first run-ins with organizing community efforts. I was behind a number of student organizations, all of which had a similar objective of mobilizing awareness about some issue affecting us all. Through my work with these organizations, I started realizing gaps in services which created barriers to people accessing the help they really needed.
All along, I kept close to my heart the words my mom had planted in me early on. These words became my mantra and drove me to start a student-led case management group for the homeless in 2013 at Rice University. We were called OwlsHelp Consulting, a project under the Rice Coalition on Hunger and Homelessness (RCOHH). From 2013 – 2015, I coordinated efforts with groups of 5-7 students at a time to have a roundtable discussion and gameplan on how to meet the needs of the homeless. Through these experiences we came to realize the realities of what these individuals were facing, unbeknownst to the general public. Most times, I was the one making site visits, driving different families and individuals to Houston Housing Authority, DPS, Bureau of Vital Statistics, just to make sure they had the most basic documents that gave them a sense of identity and normalcy. During this time, I did whatever it took to help these individuals get back on their feet. Oftentimes I would buy basic provisions, pay for a weeklong stay at a motel/inn, call countless shelters and homeless service providers, and even appear in court to fight for their cases. But despite my best efforts, I realized that this was not sustainable and did little to affect the trajectory for these folks. It did no one any good to help the homeless by becoming homeless myself. That’s when I decided it was time to launch an initiative to affect the paradigm of homeless services on a community level.
The concept of The Village Connect originated from the approach that was developed during my days with OwlsHelp Consulting. The idea was to surround an individual with a team of consultants who could help deconstruct the myriad of issues they were encountering day-to-day. What we recognized early on was that providing a single service was merely a band-aid for a singular problem. Following OwlsHelp Consulting, I recruited four other individuals who represent our board to this day. The idea was to connect individuals to not only service providers but to connect service providers to individuals and to each other as well, with a team of our consultants working with all parties involved.
In Spring of 2016, with the 5 of us fully on board, we became The Village Connect 501c3. Since then, we have pitched our model to leading homeless service providers in the city as well as the mayor’s office We continued to work with a few cases here and there, constantly going back to the drawing board and re-working our approach and model. Today, we are on the verge of partnering with a few homeless service providers who have agreed to work with us and employ our approach in conjunction with their existing services.
To say the least, the journey from notion of helping the homeless to where we are today as a nonprofit has been a surreal and humbling experience. For me, it has been a tumultuous adventure of blood, sweat, and tears. From every conversation I’ve had with every man, woman, boy, or girl about their situation, I’ve come to appreciate and truly embrace that we are all really members of one kind striving to succeed and make something of ourselves. I cannot say that I am any better at fixing poverty than anyone else is. But I can undoubtedly say that my experiences with the homeless has given me the resolve, determination, and conviction that, together, we can all work towards a better tomorrow.
Has it been a smooth road?
Definitely not always. There have been limitations with what we can do with the current resources that are available (money, personnel, lack of office space). There have been disagreements regarding the direction of the organization. Other homeless service providers have challenged our existence suggesting that we were just doing something that is already being done. The road to where we are today has been replete with its bumps and bruises.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
The Village Connect was founded in 2016 by five young professionals working to address gaps in services for the homeless of Houston on the principles of kindness, dedication, diversity, and care. I am the executive director and one of the five co-founders. The founding team realized that despite the abundance of resources available to the homeless, an individual’s journey towards stability was challenging and difficult to navigate. With the combined ten years of work in homelessness, the team set out to develop an approach that would deconstruct the multiple issues a homeless individual faces so that the road towards stability was less challenging, while also complementing and strengthening the current homeless service landscape. The novelty of our approach is a paradigm shift in the traditional case management model. Whereas one caseworker is normally assigned to 20+ cases, we are surrounding an individual/family with 3-4 consultants who each specialize in a specific area of need.
Although we are relatively new, what I am most proud of for The Village Connect is our ability to connect with longstanding, established homeless service providers on their issues and shortcomings in the existing service landscape. This makes me hopeful for partnerships with community leaders in homeless services, such as The Coalition, Mayor’s office on homeless initiatives, and SEARCH who’ve all expressed interest in working on future projects with us.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I think any large, urban city is a good place for a nonprofit focused on helping the homeless. Homelessness and poverty are usually regular bedfellows of larger cities. However, Houston is a city particularly favorable for this work at this moment because of the adjustments at the city level that have paved the way for drastic improvements in reducing the total number of Houston’s homeless. Since 2011/2012, a city-wide initiative called The Way Home led by The Coalition has taken dramatic measures to coordinate an effort which has since then more than halved Houston’s homeless population. Houston has positioned itself as a model city willing to work with agencies, organizations, businesses at all levels to provide the best chance for our underserved. Because of this, I think Houston is at a place and time particularly fertile for new ideas to bring more comprehensive and complete assistance to Houston’s underserved.
The only thing I would add to help with furthering goals for social equity and justice in our city would be to make available more discussion forums and hubs to the greater community. Although there are some opportunities for discussion, these discussions are often esoteric and exclusive to particular groups. If these could be more widely publicized and commonplace, I think the community would have a larger role in affecting decisions which affect their daily lives.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thevillageconnect.org
- Phone: 7132984415
- Email: thevillageconnect2016@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_village_connect/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thevillageconnect/
Image Credit:
Truong Lam
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