EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Veronique Moore
  One night, when Veronique Moore went out for cigarettes, she was raped, robbed, and beaten beyond recognition. Left for dead in a garbage dumpster, she was miraculously found by some friends.
Veronique had lived on the streets and in the shelters for more than 10 years. During that time, she experienced unimaginable violence. In addition to the trauma of the attack, she also ended up in an extremely abusive relationship. “The scars were visible,” she says.
If you had asked her a few years earlier, she would have said she’d never become homeless. After all, she had a budding career in radio—and anyone who knows Veronique knows that she certainly has the voice and the charismatic energy for radio. She was young. She was invincible. “It was a culture of alcohol and drugs,” she says, “and I fell into the party scene. I always said that [addiction] wouldn’t happen to me.”
In 1984, Veronique found herself in her first treatment program, after her family confronted her about her substance use. The program went well for a while, but after 7 months, she was on the streets. Veronique describes her life during those years with brutal insight:
“I lacked a place to stay and food to eat. More importantly, I lacked self-esteem and self-respect. I’d lost both of those attributes from not being able to take a shower on a daily basis and being too ashamed and too disgusted to look in the mirror at the reality of what my life had become. I was spiritually, mentally, and physically ill.”
At one point, she attempted suicide, saying to herself, “If I have to live like this, I don’t want to live.”
In 1999, she moved from Denver, where she had been living, to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to be closer to family. She was suffering chronic withdrawal symptoms from alcohol. She had hepatitis C, a fractured shoulder, and uncontrollable shakes.
Someone at a local mission suggested that she call Health Care for the Homeless for help. She was nervous and tearful, but she picked up the phone anyway. The late Joe McClean, an outreach worker, picked Veronique up and gave her a ride to the doctor’s appointment, then to the hospital for x-rays, and finally to a detox center where she stayed for 5 days.
At HCH, she says, the staff treated her like a human being, calling her “Miss Moore.” “Being treated with dignity and respect was foreign to me,” Veronique recalls, “especially having lived on the streets and being viewed as a second-class citizen…only much lower…not much dignity and respect floating around, that’s for sure.”
Up until that time, Veronique had been kicked out of virtually every shelter she’d stayed in. Then she found herself at The Next Door in Kalamazoo, where she lived for the next 11 months. There, she says, she was forced to look at herself.
Soon Veronique discovered that she was an effective advocate and activist. She joined the governance board of the Family Health Center as well as the Consumer Advisory Board of the local HCH project. Two years ago, she was elected Co-Chair of the Health Care for the Homeless National Consumer Advisory Board. In 2003, she was given a prestigious Volvo-for-Life Award, and with it, the honor of donating $10,000 to the charity of her choice.
Veronique is no longer homeless. Just as she found her advocacy voice, she also found a way to turn around and help other homeless women. She began working at The Next Door shelter, where she had stayed as a resident. Four years ago, she became the Director of the Next Door, a position she still fills with humility and gratitude. She is also attending Western Michigan University, where she is working on her degree in social work.
“Homelessness does not dictate who you are or what you’re made of,” she says in a voice that can still measure up to any voice on radio. “What I tell the women at the shelter is that they can ‘Go Beyond.’”
“I’m grateful beyond measure for what HCH did for my life,” Veronique says during a break at the National HCH Conference in a Capital Hill hotel on an early summer day in 2005. “They not only nurtured the physical pains, but started to ‘fix’ the emotional ills as well.”
[Some of the quotations used in this piece have been excerpted, by permission, from “Another Success Story” by Veronique Moore, published in the newsletter of the National Consumer Advisory Board, 2005]
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