Echo Gill, who’s spent most of her life in Reno, has gone from being unhoused living in a shelter, to now shaping policy with local leadership.
She achieves this by serving as a member of what’s called the Lived Experience Advisory Board, which she’s been with since the day it was founded in July 2023, to “provide guidance on homeless services from those who have used them,” according to Washoe County.
Currently, they’re in the process of setting up their latest big project- a Workforce Initiative Project- in collaboration with Two Hearts Community Development and the University of Nevada, Reno.
Before the project was conceived, Gill’s group reviewed the policies and procedures of the “Northern Nevada Continuum of Care,” which has as its mission “to ensure homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring.”
After making some suggestions and giving advice, Gill said the county took action.
“The services aren’t really tied to each other,” Gill said when asked of the main challenges for the unhoused community. “It’s really difficult for people to find what services are out there because our county has a surplus of services. It’s just that the majority of them are unknown.”
Taking advantage of these services was key for Gill and her two kids to get rehoused when she was in the shelter, except it wasn’t as seamless as it could’ve been.
“It took longer than it should have. We actually received our voucher after we had been in the shelter for six months, but Section 8 had to update all their computers, so it ended up taking about three months for that to happen, then about three more for us to find somebody that would accept the voucher.”
The Housing Choice Voucher program, formerly known as Section 8, “provides assistance to eligible low- and moderate- income families to rent housing in the private market.” Though Gill says those struggling with homelessness do know about these particular programs, it’s the other side of the equation, the landlords, which has been problematic.
“Right now on average, about 50 percent of the housing vouchers go unused, and it’s because they can’t find landlords that are willing to work with [them],” Gill said.
This is despite the Nevada Housing Authority offering a landlord incentive program, which includes “rent payment stability, regular inspections to protect their property, direct payment into their bank accounts, and other protections beyond the day of move-out.”
Gill believes the landlords don’t want the formerly unhoused as tenants due to the stigmas and negative stereotypes associated with them, such as being destructive and underemployed. Contrary to this, Gill knows many unhoused who actually “have full time jobs”, and says that these stigmas are a dangerous common misunderstanding of their reality.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions about homelessness, especially right now… It takes one missed check and now you’re living in your car with your whole family. It’s not necessarily gambling or addiction issues anymore, it’s more of cost of living issues,” Gill said.
“It’s the disconnect between the homeless people, the homeless services, and the landlords,” she said, that is causing real issues.
She wishes people understood more of the “why” in how it happens, especially with those chronically homeless. A lot of times Gill says there are mental health issues that go untreated, and if we were to come together as a community, then it would make a big difference.
“Treating everybody like a human all the time,” Gill said, when asked how people could better support the unhoused. In her own experience, she carried the guilt of being unhoused while being a parent. This really got to her mentally, she says, and she avoided saying she was unhoused or at the shelter while looking for jobs and in casual conversations.
“You don’t want them to know you live in a shelter because now they’re going to look at you different… it was like a dirty secret,” she said.
Gill had moved from Reno to Arizona, and was renting a house with her kids and late husband there. When that lease expired and her landlord at the time didn’t want to renew, she desperately tried to remain housed, but despite working overtime, she couldn’t raise enough money to find a new place.
“I was working like 60 hours a week and it just didn't matter. I could not… could not make it work,” she said.
Gill ended up coming back to Reno, where she spent a year at the RISE-run Our Place shelter. There she said they were “really great” and she ended up “lucky,” not having to struggle to find services because she had a really great caseworker. Besides the support from the voucher and caseworker, Gill shared it was relying on her personal community that got her through that trying time.
However, though it worked for Gill, the system can still be improved. Gill thinks there is a “secretiveness” in services available due to people competing for funding. She thinks we need to step away from that.
“We need to start sharing with each other more and communicating more. And I think it would turn out to help the people that are experiencing homelessness a lot,” she said.
Our Town Reporting by Daniel Mariani
