Note: Bill McNeil spoke at Greater Worcester Friends of the Homeless at QCC on November 9.
With the winter season quickly approaching, many of us look forward to warm food, clothing, and a home to retire to at night. With housing costs in Worcester rising 25 percent in the past year, 50 percent of the population in Worcester is unable to afford a two-bedroom apartment within the city. This is forcing many of the residents out onto the street. Right now, homeless shelters in the Worcester area are overflowing at 122 percent of their capacity, which is causing a large increase in the number of people living on the street within the city. As the current price of rents continue to increase, people are being forced out onto the street because of their inability to keep up with their bills, and there are some who are unable to properly feed and clothe their families.
“Ten percent of the population is the ‘chronic homeless’ — the people who, whatever you do for them, will stay homeless,” Mr. McNeil explains. “However, they still need to be provided with the necessary services to survive.”
Bill McNeil, owner of Bill’s Place (a diner) on Grafton Street, is taking great strides in offering a new solution to the growing homeless problem through Greater Worcester Friends of the Homeless, a non-profit organization serving the ever-growing homeless population in Worcester.
The fight to end homelessness is a personal one for Mr. McNeil. The diner he operates is located across the street from where Worcester lost six firefighters on the night of the Cold Storage Warehouse fire. He holds this close to him because he was aware at the time that there were homeless people inside the building, and he knew one of them personally. After the Worcester fire, the homeless population continued to grow. One Saturday afternoon while cleaning up around his diner, he noticed a few homeless people in a dumpster across the street behind the Kenmore Diner. He invited them in and offered to cook them a meal. Since that day, he has spent every day feeding the homeless.
Mr. McNeil’s mission is clear-cut: to facilitate housing and economic opportunities for individual citizens who may be homeless, hungry, and in need of an opportunity to gain rehabilitation and re-entry into the community. In addition, he wants to advocate and provide better community awareness of homeless issues, restore self-esteem and pride to individuals seeking their services, and create self-empowered, self-directed individuals through job training.
Mr. McNeil’s goal is to raise $1.5 million over the next 24 months. He, along with his Vice President and partner Hermice Yanis, wants to build a dry shelter, in which all people who come for services are drug tested and given a Breathalyzer test. “Not all people who are homeless became that way due to drug or alcohol addictions,” Mr. Yanis points out. “Many of them are just suffering financial problems due to low-paying jobs and increased housing prices.” McNeil and Yanis want to provide this expanding population with G.E.D. testing and job training at the shelter so that they can be fully prepared to re-enter the community.
“My goal over the first two or three years after the opening of this shelter is to drop the homeless population from 6,000 people to only a few hundred,” Mr. McNeil said. He also runs a soup kitchen every day at Saint John’s Church, in addition to serving a full meal at his diner on Saturday nights from 5:00 until 6:30 pm. Due to the lack of support by the City of Worcester for the homeless in emergency situations, he opens up his diner as an emergency shelter on nights that the temperature is expected to drop below 29 degrees.
For more information regarding the Greater Worcester Friends of the Homeless, contact Bill McNeil at (xxx) 253-0400.