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Photograph by George Sakkestad
Georgia Travis has helped ease the pain of homelessness for many in the valley
Compassionate Vision
Georgia Travis developed her philosophy for life studying social work at the University of Chicago
By Sandy Sims
Georgia Travis sits in the library at the Meadows, the retirement community where she lives in Los Gatos. She's wearing a pink blouse and a soft blue suit, and feminine but sturdy shoes. Her hair is gray and curly. She's tiny. There's a warmth in her greeting that's welcoming and puts her visitor at ease and not a hint of the pain she's experienced all morning.She's 91 and chest pains (angina) plague her mornings and sometimes her entire day. "I don't like it," she says about having had to move recently into the assisted-care facilities at the Meadows. "My room is so small." But she struggles to accept it.
Travis, struggling now with the infirmities of age, has translated enough compassion to action over the years to move mountains. It's not just her own willingness to work but the way she inspires those around her that gets so much done.
In 1931, Travis became one of the first students to receive a master's degree from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. She helped grow the field of medical social work in the whole of the United States and beyond. Her work has helped bridge the gap between the clinical attitudes of the medical profession and the circumstances of its patients. Her casework interviews of patients in the mid-1930s at the University of Chicago hospital helped the medical profession see that stress was sometimes a cause for gastrointestinal disorders such as ulcers or colitis.
She set up a social services program for disabled Alaskan children who were being treated in Seattle. In the late 1930s she traveled to different regions of the United States to study the needs of disabled children for the new Crippled Children Service Department in Washington, D.C. In some of the distant, rural communities, she found disabled, poor children in need of medical care; neglected children; children who were thought to be retarded but were actually bright.
She worked with abused and neglected children of the 1930s oil boom in Oklahoma, with the transient men and poor families of the depression in Tennessee and Chicago. She received one of the first Fulbright scholarships and, as a result, helped develop a medical social work curriculum at the University of Sydney, Australia. For the state of California, she took on the painstaking job of determining at what point in each disease a person would qualify for aid to disabled.
She's spoken at the World Health Organization, received numerous prestigious awards and written important books in the field of medical social work. And these are just a few of the highlights of her career. At the age of 61, because of her troubling angina, Travis had to retire.
Or so she intended.
Not So Retiring
Since her official retirement, Travis has written the important book Chronic Illness in Children: The Impact on Child and Family, which doctors, nurses and social workers use for instruction. She's actively helping the handful of homeless people living around Los Gatos and has organized Friendly Visitors at the Meadows so residents there might pay attention to the lonely among themselves. Travis has also been a persistent force behind innovative programs for the homeless in Santa Clara County. In fact, the community chose to honor her work by naming a women's drop-in center after her.
Her work with the homeless in Santa Clara County started in 1986, when she was 78.
"I read an article that said 12 families had gained refuge in a homeless shelter and 12 other families had been turned away because of lack of space," Travis recalls. "I couldn't believe this was happening in our five-trillion-dollar economy, especially here in Silicon Valley." Most astounding was that these homeless were families. This was something new.
"I had to find out why," she recalls, "so I tossed aside my figurative rocking chair and went to find out."
She learned that homeless families had begun to surface in great numbers in 1982, although the problem had developed gradually over 15 or more years, and that the United States was losing 20,000 units of low-income housing each year, due in part to fewer low-cost units being built in favor of Section 8 housing, which depended more on the existing housing market. One study showed that there were four families for every one low-cost unit in the country, but in California there were eight families for every unit, and rents were continuing to increase.
At the same time, good-paying industrial jobs were being replaced by low-paying service jobs. People who had been earning $17 an hour were earning $5 to $7 an hour. What's more, part-time employment was replacing full-time employment.
The final blow came in the 1980s, when the federal government cut back on social programs, including a dramatic cut in housing subsidies.
The new homeless, however, found themselves regarded with about as much sympathy as that given to derelicts.
Broken Spirit
The danger, Travis learned, is that if a family is kept homeless for too long, the spirit is broken and a return to normal life becomes next to impossible.
"I just couldn't stand the idea of mothers and children being locked out in the cold." Travis says. Perhaps it was the social worker in her.
Or perhaps it was her childhood memory of the tramps knocking at her parent's door and her father's admonition to never turn them away. He told her it would be better to feed nine who aren't hungry than to make the mistake of turning one hungry one away.
She remembered the old social-work adage: Start where you are with what you have. Her friends at the American Association of University Women came to mind.
For a number of her retirement years, she had enjoyed bridge, classical music, book discussions and other activities with AAUW. Now she would go to them for help with homeless families.
Travis continued her search for information about the new homeless--this time for the AAUW.
In interviews at the homeless shelter at Agnew's, she learned more about homeless women and children.
"I discovered these women were very much individuals," Travis recalls. There was the Englishwoman with a master's degree who'd married a G.I. He couldn't find work, and their marriage was breaking up. There was the young certified nursing assistant whose husband had just gone to jail. She and her two children had been locked out of their apartment. There was the roustabout from the circus who had slept under a tarpaulin until it got unbearably cold.
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Patricia Wilson and her children Anna Wilson, 8, and Raquel Duarte, 4, enjoy the comfort of the Georgia Travis Center.
Not An Abstraction
"I couldn't characterize the homeless as some kind of abstraction or social phenomenon as a whole. They were really individuals," Travis says.
However, there are some general groupings, she says. About a third are mentally ill, released from mental hospitals in the 1980s with the idea that they would be taken care of in the community.
Vietnam veterans make up another group of homeless people. Then there's a sizable homeless group who have lost jobs or become sick and wound up with family misfortune.
Finally, there are the substance abusers, the homeless faction that give the all the homeless a bad name. "People think of all the homeless as alcoholics and drug abusers," Travis says.
"The fastest-growing homeless group," Travis adds, "is women with children." She points out that homeless women live in danger, so much so that they sometimes wear men's clothes to disguise themselves.
At the 1986 fall meeting of the Los Gatos-Saratoga chapter of AAUW, Travis put out a sign-up sheet for a committee for the homeless. That was the beginning of a fledgling committee that would eventually help thousands.
"Georgia Travis is a very dynamic person," says Jo An Lambert, one of the charter members of the committee. At that first meeting, 12 or so showed up. "Georgia got up and told us we would be educating ourselves and others, we would be contacting legislators and actually changing things for the homeless." Although several people got up and left the meeting, five stayed, and became the core group. And they have accomplished much.
They started by volunteering at Agnew's Family Living Center in the evenings, helping with things like money management, gathering clothing and diapers and getting people to the doctor. Then they began working at the San Jose Family Shelter on Las Plumas.
They set up two fundraisers a year. In the spring they have an English tea with a silent auction, and in the fall they receive the proceeds from one performance of the Saratoga Drama Group.
Dumped On Streets
Travis' compassion for homeless mothers became even more acute when she realized that mothers and children were dumped out of the shelters and on to the streets during the day, no matter what the weather. (Emergency shelters are typically closed during the day, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) Some mothers sit at bus stops with their children, hustling their little broods from stop to stop during the day and changing their babies in restrooms. If they have money, they buy a sandwich. Most shelters offer dinner in the evenings. One woman stood at a bus stop with her 6-year-old son who couldn't go to school because he was vomiting. The mother was afraid she was getting pneumonia, and they wanted to get to Valley Medical Center.
Travis went to her committee and said, "We're going to have to start a drop-in center for mothers during the day."
Nancy Anderson recalls the committee saying, "Yeah, right. That's impossible."
So they thought.
To their own amazement, with Travis behind them, they did just that. It evolved over time.
Using the adage they learned from Travis, Start where you are with what you have, they wanted to find a way to keep mothers in the shelter as long as possible. With no money and only themselves as volunteers, in 1990 they started a mother's club at San Jose Family Shelter. "We decided it would meet during the coldest three hours of the day and during the coldest three months of the year," Travis recalls. So the club meets from 9 a.m. to noon during the months of January through March. They provided life-skills classes and the YWCA provided child care.
A volunteer public-health nurse taught about dealing with parasites (lice, worms) and birth control. Travis taught about the use of public transportation. Someone taught sewing. Others taught English as a second language. A man from the city zoning office did something on landlord-tenant relationships. The mother's club grew and, after a year, the YWCA took over the whole program. The AAUW committee continues to volunteer and teach and give money and supplies to the shelter.
The idea of a drop-in center began to crystallize.
"We set aside one-third of our money for a future drop-in center," Los Gatan Penny Sink says. The committee members began speaking in their churches, at other AAUW branches, at the county Board of Supervisors and on television, and they wrote articles. They checked out drop-in centers in other counties and became active in the Help House the Homeless (HHH), a subcommittee of the Human Relations Commission. Travis convinced Stanford to do a major study on what was happening to homeless children. And after one year's concentrated effort down at City Hall, they got discount passes for the women who were looking for jobs and transporting their children to school every day.
When the time was right, serendipity stepped in and gave them a boost.
At an HHH meeting, Travis sat next to the head of InnVision (a nonprofit organization that has a network of services for the homeless). The conversation that day between Travis from the AAUW, the head of InnVision and the Junior League president was the intertwining of organizations that eventually launched the Georgia Travis Center, a day center for at-risk women that is administered by InnVision. "I was embarrassed that they named it after me," Travis recalls.
Georgia Travis Center
Women arrive at the center stunned and depressed that they have become homeless. Volunteers help with their children, and the mothers are relieved that they and their children are safe. The women take showers, have breakfast and lunch, receive counseling, and when they've recovered from the shock and depression of being homeless, they make a plan with the caseworker.
Small children attend a child-development center there while mothers take classes in computers, goal-setting, parenting and more. There's medical care. They can make phone calls, receive phone calls and mail and voicemail for prospective jobs. They can buy discount bus passes and take their children to school.
Some who come live in their cars or under bridges. Most, however, sleep at InnVision's Commercial Street shelter, not too far away, but they must make plans because emergency shelters are available for a limited period only. Last year, the Agnew's shelter closed and left many women and children without a place to stay.
Some of these women will get jobs and move into InnVision's beautiful new transition center. They can stay there for one to two years while they improve their job skills and situation and build enough money for first and last month's rent.
Close-Knit Group
"Our committee is a close group," Jo An Lambert, of the AAVW Homeless Committee, says. Everyone is dedicated and willing to work. Lambert's home is the drop-off place in Saratoga for donations. "Sometimes my whole front porch is covered with bags of clothes and I can't get into the door," she says. She stores donated furniture in her garage. Bette Pestka's home is the drop-off point in Los Gatos.
Just because Travis is living in the assisted-care facility at the Meadows doesn't mean she's stopped her work for the homeless. Now she works from her bed, calling Lambert, Pestka and a host of others regularly.
Last winter, when the rains got heavy, Travis got on the phone and before she was finished, Los Gatos' homeless had 20 new sleeping bags and rain ponchos.
That's the type of thing that's earned Travis a reputation as the Eleanor Roosevelt of Los Gatos and San Jose.
Nancy Burbank, an AAUW and Los Gatos Interfaith Outreach member sums it up: "When [Travis] develops an idea that follows her humanitarian principles, she gets right down to specifics and acts."
The Saratoga Drama Group's benefit performance of My Fair Lady takes place on Oct. 7 at 8 p.m. at the Saratoga Civic Theater. For tickets call 867-0902 or 867-0108.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
