Client Stories Page 4

A pre-pandemic memory that freshens the air of Camillus consciousness is that of The Hug—freely given by CEO Hilda Fernandez and others from our team to the homeless we serve. These happened spontaneously as the best of hugs should. There…

Authors like Andrew Solomon and R.O. Kwon tell us in this week’s columns that sharing our grief is a must. And maybe that’s why Veronica, a Camillus House resident-in-healing, is the kind of modern-day messenger we need just past…

“YP” appears on her identification badge and in a few years’ time she’ll be a young professional in a Young Professionals’ Organization but for now it’s “youth program” at the college-like Camillus campus. Born in 1997 in the Kendall…

Playwright Eve Ensler, who worked in a homeless shelter for eight years, writes last year in The Apology—excerpted throughout this article— that “there is no pain we can ever truly bury or avoid within ourselves.” After years of avoiding the…

As Dave Barry riffs in Lessons From Lucy, “This is a beautiful thing about dogs. They don’t care what they look like—they don’t even know what they look like—and they don’t care what anybody else looks like. I won’t go…

There are different loves you see if you walk slowly around the Camillus campus. There’s the kitchen cook who graduated from homelessness and greets someone newly going through it with words cheered to perfection as if to say, “I see…

Gary Allen is seen softly smiling, holding a cage with a single egg within. The egg is facing a door-less entry-way. The egg, once hatched, has every opportunity to leave, yet remains hesitant within the copper bounds of the…

“I was living with two family members and they got evicted,” Gabriel begins to tell me. We sat down at dawn at the Camillus main campus picnic tables by the elevated planter boxes adjoining the walking trail under a few…

Three things about Mr. Glenn tell me he’s an artist before he gets into his bona fides. Not unlike many of the luminaries in the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mr. Glenn methodically awakens at the same early morning hour…

Nancy Avila and Guillermo Vilchas gesture excitedly, speaking rapidly in English and Spanish as they tell visitors about their recent decorating adventures… something neither would have dreamt about a year ago. Until recently, Nancy and Guillermo called the streets of…