Weldon Haywood lived on the streets for a decade and had been arrested for public intoxication multiple times.

So, when an Anaheim police officer stopped him at the back of a liquor store a little more than a year ago, he expected to be arrested again. But instead, the officer offered him a lifeline – a connection to a homeless shelter and a substance use program.

Now, Haywood is celebrating a year of sobriety, is looking for an apartment and he is working as a site attendant at Illumination Foundation, a homeless shelter and recuperative care center in Fullerton. And, he is using his personal experience being homeless to connect and empathize with the people the center serves.

The job is thanks to a partnership between CalOptima Health and Chrysalis, a nonprofit that helps people find employment. The partnership’s goal is to give houseless folks the tools and confidence to exit homelessness, remedy staffing issues in shelters and end the cycle of poverty that can keep some people living on the streets. Since late last summer, Chrysalis has placed 22 formerly unhoused people to work in different shelters throughout Orange County.

Chrysalis has been operating in Anaheim since 2018, helping homeless people and those re-entering society from the criminal justice system get back to work.

“We’ve got transitional businesses that many of our participants utilize to transition from homelessness to self-sufficiency,” Trevor Kale, vice president at Chrysalis, said. “So they’re using transitional jobs with us to work for a period of time while they’re gaining the skills and stability to move from a period of homelessness to a period of self-sufficiency.”

Those temporary jobs with Chrysalis include road and freeway maintenance, as well as janitorial and customer service roles.

Chrysalis, with funding support of about $1.1 million per year from CalOptima, takes people from those existing staffing programs and gets them employed in shelters like those managed by the Illumination Foundation. By doing this, the organizations find that they can get more people working in short-staffed shelters and help their formerly unhoused clients continue to move forward toward financial independence.

After completing rehab, Haywood was referred to Chrysalis and started working for its roads program, cleaning up freeways while also attending job-readiness training classes. Chrysalis staff identified Haywood as a good candidate for the shelter position, and he was more than excited to work at showing others a way out of homelessness.

“Immediately I was like, damn, what are the odds of me being homeless, and now I’m going to be working in a homeless shelter?” Haywood said. “I enjoy it because I can tell people, ‘Hey man, you need to get your stuff together while you’re here. Don’t just waste time. If you’re going to be here, just do what I did. If they tell you to do something, just do it. Take your resources and move up.’”

Haywood’s ability to use his personal experience to uplift other people in the shelter is exactly why CalOptima and Chrysalis joined together, officials said.

“We were consistently hearing the same message from providers,” said Kelly Bruno-Nelson, executive director of Medi-Cal/CalAIM for CalOptima Health. “And that message was, ‘Listen CalOptima Health, we would love to expand services and help more folks, but we simply don’t have the workforce. There is a shortage of individuals that can work in our shelters.’ And equally, we have a partner like Chrysalis saying, ‘We have lots of individuals with lived experience that would like to exit homelessness and be self-sufficient, but they cannot find a job.’

“It just made logical sense to bring the two together,” she said.

Chrysalis designed a training program specifically for those working in homeless shelters that covered topics such as trauma-informed care and harm reduction. CalOptima Health pays for the first three months of employment once a person is placed at a shelter. Each staffer is paid $18 an hour. The goal, Bruno-Nelson said, is that these folks wind up getting hired full-time.

Haywood is on track to become a full-time staff member.

Being a site attendant, Haywood said, is a very hands-on job. He’s responsible for cleaning, getting clients hygiene products, picking up their medicine and more. He said the most stressful part of the job can be seeing clients not live up to their full potential.

“It’s like when you see a person who spends so much energy on something that doesn’t mean anything. And you know that if they spend that much energy on something positive, that can actually get them somewhere,” Haywood said. “I just focus on what I’m there to do, and focus on the people that do because some of them really are tired, some of them really want to get out of there.”

Once a person is employed, Chrysalis keeps up with them through case management and supportive programming.

“Oftentimes we’ve got good relationships with the shelter sites and we’ll speak with them if there’s an issue on the job to try and make sure that we get through that bump or that learning opportunity,” Kale said. “In the workforce development space with this population, the data shows if you can hold down employment for six months, your life trajectory changes significantly. Our goal is to always get to that six-month mark with folks and then support them to take it from there.”

Now, sober, with a job and a roof over his head, Haywood has purchased his ticket to Florida to reunite with his two children.

His daughter is gearing up to graduate high school in a few months. Seeing her cross that stage to receive her diploma has been a driving force in his journey toward sobriety and exiting homelessness, Haywood said.

“I haven’t seen my daughter, or my son, in about 11 years,” he said. “It’s going to be one of those moments where I don’t know if I’m just going to start crying as soon as I see them. I told my daughter, I’m going to try holding it all in and she’s like, ‘No, just let it out, dad.’”

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