EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Ellen Dailey
 
“When I was homeless,” says Ellen Dailey, “everyone assumed several things about me: that I had a substance abuse problem or a mental illness, or that I was just plain lazy. None of that is true.”
Ellen’s story is one that could happen to anyone. She had lived in the same home for 20 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She had a great job working with the desegregation program for the Cambridge Public Schools. Her two sons were grown and had both joined the military. Her life was stable.
But in 1993, several things went wrong all at the same time. Ellen became sick with heart problems that would end up taking years to be diagnosed correctly. She went into the hospital. Her landlady died, leaving control of the rental house to her nephew, who sold the house out from under Ellen. The grant that funded her position with the public schools was not renewed, so she had no job, and with her worsening medical condition, she did not have the energy to find other work. She had nowhere to go, and no source of income.
“I was too proud to go to my family,” Ellen says in her rich tenor voice. “When I became homeless, I got a pager and told my sons that I was having trouble with my phone line and if they would just page me, I would call them back.” It would be several years before Ellen’s family ever knew she had been homeless at all.
She had savings, so she moved into a motel. She stayed in motels for several months, burning through her entire life’s savings. Occasionally working day labor when she was healthy enough, Ellen recalls standing for twelve hours at a time selling newspapers.
When there was no money left to pay for the expensive motel rooms, Ellen was desperate. She knew nothing of shelters or homeless services, so she walked into the police station near Central Square in Cambridge and asked for help. The police sent her to Pine Street Inn, a very large shelter in Boston.
This reality of shelters was a new world for Ellen. There were lotteries for beds. Fear and uncertainty about where, if anywhere, she could find a bed for the night. She ended up at Woods-Mullin Shelter. By that time, her health had “taken a bad turn.” One day, she walked up to the nurse’s station in the shelter-based clinic. Standing there was Stefan Kertesz, a doctor with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.
“I had almost given up on medical care before that, but what other doctors had missed, Dr. Kertesz caught in three minutes,” Ellen says. She had been experiencing cardiovascular complications of thyroid disease. She needed surgery, and she needed it soon. But the shelters weren’t set up to accommodate people recovering from surgery. There was no good way to “stay on bedrest.”
Dr. Kertesz told Ellen about Barbara McInnis House, the respite program of Boston HCH. She had her thyroid removed and went to McInnis House to recover. During the course of her follow-up, Ellen also learned that she had a malignant tumor in her salivary gland. She had more surgery to remove the tumor, followed by 45 days of radiation treatment. “It would have been impossible without McInnis House for me to undergo radiation,” Ellen says. Then she adds, “If it wasn’t for Boston HCH, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be dead, and I know it.”
During her 9-month stay at McInnis House, Ellen began working with Yolanda Sterling, a case manager, to explore housing options and reapply for disability. Ellen had been turned down for disability before, but had not had the energy to fight through the appeals process — not while suffering the physical debilitation of her illness and worrying about where she was going to stay each night.
Yolanda connected Ellen with Walnut House, a subsidized housing program. Ellen moved into a studio apartment—her first stable housing in more than two years—where she has lived since 1998.
During her time at McInnis House, Ellen was also approached by Barry Bock, now Director of Clinical Operations at Boston HCH, and asked to join the fledgling Consumer Advisory Board. Barry saw in Ellen an articulate advocate, one who could speak with clarity and wisdom about the injustices of homelessness, and could help find ways to make the voices of homeless individuals heard.
Ellen accompanied Barry to Washington, D.C. to speak at the National HCH Conference on the subject of establishing Consumer Advisory Boards. She was struck by how slow the idea was to take root in many parts of the country, and she became determined to do something about it. It wasn’t long before Ellen and a handful of others had established the National HCH Consumer Advisory Board (NCAB), creating a venue for people who had experienced homelessness to guide and ground the work of Health Care for the Homeless Projects. She also served for a time on the Board of the National Coalition for the Homeless. If that weren’t enough, she also serves as the Vice President of the Board of Directors for Boston HCH.
As Ellen became involved in speaking out about homelessness more publicly, she realized that her own story might make a difference for others. She was keenly aware, though, that she had still not told her family about her experience with homelessness. “Now, everybody knows,” Ellen says. “I realized that maybe having my story out there was going to help some people, so I told my family first.”
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