Written by Juno Ogle on January 30, 2024

This week, those who work with the homeless will join community volunteers in an attempt to survey those living without shelter in the Silver City area, part of the nationwide Point in Time count.

The annual count focuses on identifying people who are unsheltered on the night of Jan. 29 by finding and surveying homeless people in the following days. Data collected through the effort will be reported to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Brian Stengel, director of the New Mexico Recovery Coalition, is joining with Supporting People in Need as team leaders for the 2024 count in Silver City, he said. The effort will take place in Silver City today through Friday.

This year, Stengel and SPIN have also coordinated with The Commons: Center for Food Security and Sustainability for the count.

“What we’ve done is designate The Commons as a headquarters and staging area,” Stengel said.

Anyone wanting to help with the survey can meet at The Commons any time between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. today through Friday, where they will meet with either Stengel or Tiffany Lindsey.

For safety, the survey will be conducted by teams of at least two people during daylight hours, Stengel said.

“We’re not permitted to go out solo and count homeless and canvass because of the obvious dangers involved in that,” he said. “I don’t say homeless people are inherently dangerous, but when there’s substance abuse going on, it becomes an unpredictable situation.”

The New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, which coordinates the Point in Time effort statewide, encourages canvassers to work in groups of four, but in a rural area with small populations, it’s hard to find enough volunteers for that, Stengel said.

It has also been difficult to identify specific areas to target for the survey, he said, which will likely lead to an undercount of the actual number of people who are unsheltered that night.

“We always figure that we’re not going to be able to capture all the homeless people,” Stengel said. “Part of that has to do with not knowing where their encampments are.”

He’s been working with Silver City police and code enforcement to get information on typical encampment sites, he said, but even that is difficult.

“We have areas, like behind Albertsons and behind Walmart, general areas,” Stengel said. “We were planning on demarcating zones, but we needed that information from the police, which we haven’t gotten enough information to go forward with.”

It’s not an unexpected dilemma, though.

“It’s the nature of the beast. You don’t want to camp somewhere where the police know you camp. That’s just counterintuitive,” he said.

Some duplicate counts of unsheltered people are also possible, Stengel said. The first question on the survey asks if the unsheltered person has already been surveyed for the count, he said.

“There’s probably going to be duplications for individuals who may have forgotten they took the survey, weren’t necessarily 100 percent coherent when they took the first survey, but the coalition is going to be collating all the data and sorting through all the duplicates,” he said.

As for the rest of Grant County, Stengel said he has not been able to get information on homeless encampments in the Mining District communities, but a volunteer in Mimbres was willing to cover that area.

The Commons, which is partnering with the PIT count for the first time, will provide food for volunteers and homeless people during the count, Lindsey said.

“We’re providing a hot meal here Wednesday and Thursday at noon for the volunteers, and then any unhoused that want to come and have a hot meal,” she said.

Sack lunches, with sandwiches made by students at Aldo Leopold Charter School, will also be available for volunteers to give to the homeless as they survey, said Dave Chandler, director of The Commons.

The Commons is also a drop-off point for donations of items to help those who are not sheltered. Those items will be distributed among various groups in Grant County, Stengel said.

Items such as socks, blankets, hand warmers, hats, gloves, scarves, nonperishable lightweight food, gift cards, hygiene items and sleeping bags are being accepted at The Commons through Friday.

—JUNO OGLE

Written by Juno Ogle on November 14, 2023 

In an effort to offer help to more of the area’s unhoused population, two organizations have joined to offer homeless networking events in Grant and surrounding counties.

Supporting People in Need and the New Mexico Recovery Coalition received funding from the New Mexico Department of Health for outreach services in Grant, Luna and Hidalgo counties, according to Christina Wolford, director of SPIN, speaking at Friday’s event at Gough Park.

“It will be a little different each time. We’re looking to reach anybody who needs help,” she said.

For example, the warm drinks and hand warmers offered Friday at Gough Park in Silver City weren’t exactly needed at the Lordsburg event a couple of days earlier, when daytime temperatures reached the 90s.

Future events could include medical screenings and even psychological help, said Brian Stengel, founder and director of NMRC.

Overall, the goal is harm reduction for those who might be reluctant to go to the Department of Health, where such programs, especially for substance abuse, are typically found, he said.

“Quite frankly, nobody who uses substances is going to the DOH when there’s also probation, parole and the State Police right there. That’s counterintuitive,” Stengel said.

The philosophy behind the NMRC and the outreach events is meeting people where they’re at, he said.

“Society has gotten to realize that many of our most impacted mentally ill individuals will not go into a brick-and-mortar building for services,” Stengel said. “I want to bring the services to them out in the field, and nobody’s doing that in Silver.”

The networking events can help such people accept help a little at a time, he said.

“Nine times out of 10, we bring them so many services, they accept at least one, like free underwear, free socks, something to eat,” Stengel said. “When we’re able to engage with someone and sort of break the ice with a bag of chips or a free lunch or something, that opens the door to the discussion of who are you, what are you doing out here, where would you like to go, where would you like to be in life.”

Those discussions can build on each other and, hopefully, move the person toward accepting services and changing their life, he said. That could also lead to them volunteering to help others.

Stengel believes that, because he has been there himself. He’s now a certified peer support worker and a licensed substance abuse associate counselor, and completed his undergraduate work at Western New Mexico University.

“I had the realization that the profession I’m going to be the best at is this, because I have 30-plus years of lived experience,” he said. “I grew up on one side of the fence, now I’m working on the other side of the fence.”

The networking events will be scheduled a couple of times a month, and volunteers are always welcome, Wolford said. Those interested in helping or wanting more information can call SPIN at 575-494-1128.

—JUNO OGLE

Written by Jo Lutz on April 7, 2023 

Mental health advocate, author and recovery entrepreneur Craig Lewis survived abuse by his family and medical institutions. He now tells his story and facilitates recovery for others in workshops like the one planned for Saturday from 1-5 p.m. at Javalina.

This Saturday at Javalina Coffee House, from 1-5 p.m., New Mexico Recovery Coalition founding director Brian Stengel will be joined by certified peer counselor, global recovery entrepreneur and punk rocker Craig Lewis for a workshop on recovery from substance and mental health issues.

Both men are professionals in the field who themselves have lived experiences of recovery. Stengel graduated from Western New Mexico University in May with a degree in psychology and chemical dependency counseling. He is also a certified peer support worker and licensed substance abuse associate.

The first part of the workshop will be presented by Stengel, with a focus on practical approaches toward opiate harm reduction and recovery — including how to get life-saving naloxone doses and fentanyl test strips for free through the state Department of Health.

“One thing we know is perpetuating the addiction cycle is stigma,” Stengel said. “If your use has negatively impacted your life and become an issue, I need people to know that there are other people out there who will not judge, criticize or stigmatize.”

He stressed that harm reduction is an important part of recovery. He said that after people with substance use disorders hit rock bottom, they often experience a desire to take better care of themselves well before they are able to stop using completely.

“Harm reduction isn’t about stopping a person from using drugs,” he said. “It’s about making sure that they’re safe if they’re going to continue using.”

Drug use comes with a very real danger of overdose. Stengel repeated a saying he learned in his studies: “You can’t recover if you’re 6 feet under.”

In the second part of the workshop, Lewis will use his own dramatic journey — including the importance of punk rock in preserving his personhood and inspiring his mission — as a jumping-off point for a facilitated discussion about recovery-oriented topics.

“What people will get from the three-hour workshop is a story of a magnitude that will shock them, and will make them feel,” Lewis said. “It will open up their heart and their mind toward the discussion of radical change and healing.”

Lewis has been in recovery since 2015 — not from a substance use disorder, but from mental health struggles following an unusual and devastating form of child abuse.

Lewis’ story begins in Massachusetts, where he said he grew up with a very sick and abusive mother. According to Lewis, she manipulated her son using abuse tactics and manipulated the medical system using money, resulting in an explicitly fraudulent diagnosis of schizophrenia that allowed him to be institutionalized.

From 1988 to 2013, Lewis believed he was schizophrenic. He publicly identified himself this way, and estimates he took about 80,000 pills during this time period.

In 2013, he said, he was working for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health as a certified peer specialist. It was through this work that he got access to his own adolescent mental health records, from when he was a ward of the state he now worked for.

What he found wouldn’t change his life so much as completely restart it. He described the transformation as an effective death, after which his heart just kept beating.

Lewis said he brought the record to his psychiatrist, who was horrified and began a two-year process of weaning him off his medication.

“He told me if I didn’t stop taking psychiatric medication, I would never get better,” Lewis said.

He said many of his colleagues, friends, and family rejected his narrative, and he was professionally blacklisted for being an outspoken victim of abuse by the system he was now a part of. He eventually moved to Mexico, where he is far from Massachusetts and feels more accepted.

But another important thing happened to Lewis in 1988, when he was 14 years old. The day he was checked into an institution was the day he discovered punk rock, thanks to a girl in the waiting room who gave him Dead Kennedys cassettes to listen to in his Walkman.

He became a devotee and fixture of the scene, organizing shows and publishing zines.

“No matter how screwed up I was, punk rock allowed me to be a human being, with something to contribute,” Lewis said. “When I realized I didn’t even understand my own story, I began organizing events called Punk Rock Mental Health and Recovery. That’s how we got to today.”

Lewis now does this full-time, and his recovery talks take him from Canada to Kiev. He is the author of several books, including “You’re Crazy,” a two-volume collection of trauma and recovery stories from punk rockers from around the world, and “The Craig Lewis Guide to Surviving the Impossible.” His cover illustration is by a woman he met sleeping on a bench in a squatter house in Milan.

These books will be available at Saturday’s workshop, and are also usually available at Lewis’ website, SanityIsAFulltimeJob.org. The site is currently under construction, however, and Lewis encourages readers to avoid Amazon and get his books by emailing him at survivingtheimpossible@gmail.com.

The workshop will discuss recovery in terms of substance use, mental health and trauma. Stengel pointed out that they overlap enormously, although not entirely. Stengel, who is in recovery from what he describes as a severe heroin addiction, says he did not come from a broken or impoverished home. Although his parents didn’t give him adequate attention, he never experienced trauma on the scale of many people with disordered substance use — and certainly nowhere near Lewis’ abuse. Lewis, miraculously perhaps, did not struggle with substance abuse, outside of wrongly prescribed medications.

Separately or together, for many people punk ethics can inform recovery from trauma, substance misuse and mental health struggles.

“[Punk rock] taught me about how to do things myself, be independent, think for myself and get information I can use to make decisions,” Lewis said. “There’s nothing more punk rock than taking control of your life and turning it into something beautiful.”

—JO LUTZ